Plagiarism–Deadly Sin

The suspension of Sari Horwitz from the Washington Post yesterday for plagiarism had me thinking about “what’s mine” and “what’s yours.”  Horwitz admitted wrongdoing (once caught) and is taking her punishment, from what I can tell, professionally: 3 months unpaid leave, but she can return to the Post.

This got me thinking of Malcolm Gladwell’s essay “Something Borrowed.”  It’s a great story about his involvement in plagiarism, a play, and the details of a person’s life.  He argues, basically, that “boilerplate” writing might not be writing that we need to protect from plagiarism. 

Borrowing the personal story of a woman whose sister was murdered by a serial killer matters because that story has real emotional value to its owner. As Lavery put it, it touches on someone’s shattered life. Are boilerplate descriptions of physiological functions in the same league?

It just got me wondering if copying bullet points is the same thing as “boilerplate descriptions of physiological functions.”

From the Arizona Republic:

– Loughner’s parents told detectives he kept a shotgun in the trunk of his green Chevy Nova. Search-warrant returns indicate that two .12-gauge shotguns were recovered from the garage.

And the Post:

Loughner’s parents told detectives that he kept a shotgun in the trunk of his green Chevy Nova. According to the search warrant, two 12-gauge shotguns were recovered from the garage.

Despite the length of those two (and there are a few bullets in the Post story that match the Republic’s story), I actually found this line (“One scribbled note…”) from the same Post story, which was lifted from the Republic’s story (“One hand-scribbled note…”) to be more offensive. 

Something about using “scribbled”–a nice descriptive word that puts a specific image in the reader’s head–makes me get annoyed with Horwitz.  It’s the creativity that we should protect more than the words themselves (something Gladwell would agree with, I think).