The Easy Steal

By Emily Olson

Admit it: you’re tempted. It’s ten o’clock (or later), and you’ve just spent the last two hours Facebooking and trying to ignore the copy of The Scarlett Letter sitting by your keyboard. Your English class is tomorrow at eight, you’ve got a three-pager due, and so far all you’ve got are two measly paragraphs. A voice in your head whispers for the thousandth time, “Times like this call for one thing: Google or Wikipedia. A few sentences here, a little cut-and-paste there, and you’re good to go. No one needs to know you didn’t write it.”

Sound familiar? To most high school and college students, it does. Multiple studies in the last several years show that the number of college students who use material from the Internet without citing the source has reached nearly 70 percent, and the number of high school students doing the same thing shows a similar trend. 1 Unfortunately, we excuse this practice—otherwise known as plagiarism—too easily. Professor Donald L. McCabe, who organized a large 2003 survey of over 18,000 students, pointed out that students who grow up using the Internet “are convinced that anything you find on the Internet is public knowledge and doesn’t need to be cited.” 2 Other students, stressed out under the pressure to succeed, justify their plagiarism as a means to an end: they’ll do it just this once to make the grade.With these and other reasons, we convince ourselves that plagiarism is easy, convenient, and even guiltless. When so many students do it, whether they’re filching snippets from a few words to whole paragraphs, what’s the big deal?

Of course, your mom squashed that logic long ago with “If all your friends jumped off a bridge, would that make it safe?” As hard as we try, we can deceive ourselves only so far. Deep down, we all know that lifting a few lines without giving a nod to where we got them is wrong. Plagiarism is a sin. It’s stealing someone else’s ideas and passing them off as our own. It’s pilfering, filching, robbery, thievery. And in God’s eyes, our plagiarism is the same as if we picked up a stray iPod in the cafeteria, pocketed it, and then preened in front of our friends about our newest toy. They might be fooled, but He isn’t, not about any kind of theft.

So if you’ve plagiarized, repent. Confess your sin. And as baptized Lutherans, we can rest in the forgiveness of Christ who died for us, taking upon Himself every act of easy stealing ever committed and giving us His perfect righteousness. So when God the Father looks at us, He doesn’t see our shameful lies and pilfered words. He sees Christ in His perfection.

And in Christ’s grace we can live as His children—as His writers, if you will. Remember that He will never allow us to be tempted beyond what we can bear. First Corinthians 10:13 says,“No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and He will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation He will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it.”

In writing and using sources, there are ways of escape past plagiarism: use sources and give them their due credit. All writers can and should use sources to support their arguments; and whether you know it or not, you’ve probably already mastered the patchwork activity that good writing requires. In My Word!: Plagiarism and College Culture, Susan Blum compares how students write to how they create their iPod playlists: writing is an activity of patchwork, of pastiche, taking bits of info from other places and putting it all together. 3 This way of writing can result in a beautiful, original creation; giving credit to those writers and sources that helped you create your insight strengthens the end result.

What if you don’t know how to use or to cite sources? In everyday classrooms and even in late-night writing sessions, God provides solutions. That’s what teachers are for (and what Web sites on citation are for too). So go ahead and use Google and Wikipedia to inspire that paper you’ve been putting off. And this time as you’re writing about Arthur Dimmesdale’s guilt, you won’t have to share it.

Emily Olson is a former plagiarizer, twentysomething college comp instructor, pastor’s wife, and mother in Minnesota.You can e-mail her at esolson3@gmail.com.

1 Rosen, Christine.“It’s Not Theft, It’s Pastiche.” The Wall Street Journal 16 Apr. 2009: A13.

2 Rimer, Sarah.“A Campus Fad That’s Being Copied: Internet Plagiarism Seems on the Rise.” The New York Times 3 Sept. 2003. 17 Apr. 2009 <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/03/nyregion/a-campus-fad-thats-being-copied-internet-plagiarism-seems-on-therise.html?scp=4&sq=plagiarism+college&st=nyt>.

3 Rosen.