We know Gnomies wouldn’t steal other people’s ideas, but it’s good to arm yourself with information about plagiarism as it affects many areas of our lives. Plagiarism has become a hot topic in recently years thanks to NY Times writer Jayson Blair plagiarizing. Then A Million Pieces writer James Frey who said the work was nonfiction when it was fiction. Someone accused Dan Brown of stealing ideas for The DaVinci Code. How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life by Kaavya Viswanathan has passages from two books by Megan McCafferty.

As an assistant at a major university and a writer — I’ve seen how bad the plagiarism plague has gotten. It gets scary especially when we read resource after resource. It’s possible that some resource’s words or phrases will stick in our head and we will have thought they’re ours rather than something that hid in a tiny forgotten memory box somewhere in the brain.

The cases of Blair and James Frey are obvious. But could Brown and Viswanathan have memorized facts they didn’t realize they had? Brown’s case is a tough one because he intermingles history with fiction. I’ve questioned ideas that pop into my head. Are they there because of something I experienced? Or are they there simply because my creative mind put some experiences together and created a new one?

This post provides a good reason not to plagiarize non-fiction — the story might have inaccurate facts. Also, Denny Hatch wrote a great article on plagiarism.

Here are a few plagiarism resources:

• Famous Plagiarists
• Plagiarism.org
• The Owl At Purdue: Avoiding Plagiarism

[tags]plagiarist, plagiarists, plagiarism[/tags]