I have to agree with a lot of the points that Techserving You made — it is different and I think that packaging is part of it. Information is so readily available now on everything. Kids know that they shouldn’t plagiarize from the Library’s set of encyclopedias, but their thoughts of copying something from a website, blog, messageboard are very fluid – as if they were just repeating something they heard.

Even so, back when I was in school there were certain feelings about plagiarizing, how if the library only had 3 books on the French Revolution you better make sure you reference your sources because the teacher with 25 other students in your class would know when all the reports came in looking the same. Today, I think it’s much harder work for the teacher to know when something has been plagiarized — there are computer programs that they can feed text into to see if it comes up with a hit, but it’s got to be a lot of work.

Finally, I find plagiarizing of anything — research, a non-fiction book, or a work of fiction, to be offensive. I don’t understand when people say that creative ideas can’t be stolen, it’s just as bad and I’m disappointed that this girl was not stripped of all her praise and recognition like the Harvard case in the US a few years ago.

Yes, third graders should cite their sources. I’m not saying that they should learn MLA or APA style, or that their citations should be required to be a particular format. I’m just saying that they should learn to acknowledge the sources of their information. So many times, I watch adults encouraging their kids to copy sources word for word into their report, or to just go online find images to use in their project, without even writing down from where they got the image. This creates the attitude, from an early age, that the source of information, images, etc, is not important, that all information is equal, and that the person who wrote the information or took the photo is not worthy of any acknowledgement. Is this what we want our kids to be learning?

When kids do not begin learning these concepts early, it’s no wonder that plagiarism is rampant in high school and college.

Even acknowledging sources in a novel would seem strange. Many novels are heavily researched, but they rarely have bibliographies. These scandals erupt because of word-for-word borrowings, but that’s not the limit. If a historian writes a book about the French Revolution without citing any sources, it’s plagiarized because it hasn’t attributed its sources. If a novelist writes a historically detailed but fictional story about a romance during the French Revolution without citing sources that were undoubtedly used in researching the novel, then it’s not plagiarized.

How could reading 25 books on the French Revolution and using that information to imbue your novel with detail and atmosphere be a good thing, while borrowing a page or so from another novel be a bad thing? The outrage in alleged scandals like this aren’t based on any consistent notion of plagiarism or theft, which makes them very hard to take seriously.

And you can take my thoughts here to the bank.

Even acknowledging sources in a novel would seem strange. Many novels are heavily researched, but they rarely have bibliographies. These scandals erupt because of word-for-word borrowings, but that’s not the limit. If a historian writes a book about the French Revolution without citing any sources, it’s plagiarized because it hasn’t attributed its sources. If a novelist writes a historically detailed but fictional story about a romance during the French Revolution without citing sources that were undoubtedly used in researching the novel, then it’s not plagiarized.

How could reading 25 books on the French Revolution and using that information to imbue your novel with detail and atmosphere be a good thing, while borrowing a page or so from another novel be a bad thing? The outrage in alleged scandals like this aren’t based on any consistent notion of plagiarism or theft, which makes them very hard to take seriously.

And you can take my thoughts here to the bank.

If helicopter parents had been around in 1944 and tried to do what you said, Eisenhower and Arnold would have arrested them, confiscated the helicopters, figured out really quickly how to use them, hurriedly retrained a regiment or two of glider troops on how to use them, and deployed them to some operational advantage.

In other words, though I get your drift, they didn’t have helicopters in Normandy in 1944. “helicopter parent” is an fine an idiom as any in our language, but you can’t mix it with a D-Day metaphor without some cognitively jarring anarchronism (!)

That being said, your point is relatively well-taken.