DEFINING PLAGIARISM

The word plagiarism is one that we tend to think most about when we are at college or university. There are exhortations to us from the day we enter to avoid such behaviour at all costs or suffer the academic consequences. Students, however, often have difficulty understanding just what this term really means. Indeed, it is not so clear for business people, either.

Infoplease.com defines plagiarism as ˜the unauthorized use or close imitation of the language and thoughts of another author and the representation of them as one's own original work. ^[2]

Perhaps the most important aspect of this definition is the use of the word ˜unauthorized. Clearly, by this definition, the use of the words must be unauthorized to be considered ˜plagiarism. In other words, when a public relations practitioner is hired by an individual or an organization to express that client's message, and then provides this ˜work-for-hire as part of the service, the use of the words is clearly ˜authorized , and in addition is expressing not the ideas and creations of the ghost writer but those of the person hiring the writer. This is clearly within the bounds of ethical behaviour.

The confusion often comes in because of the promulgation on academic Web sites and in university and college descriptions of plagiarism and its consequences of references simply to ˜ unacknowledged use of words or ideas of others, rather than ˜unauthorized which is clearly not the same thing. Presumably, the inference can be made here that in most cases, the ˜words of others simply illustrate their own ˜ideas. This is in contrast to the situation when we are hired to write for others. In this case, the ideas are not, in fact, those of the writer, but those of the person who puts his or her name on paper. So, the words and ideas are neither unacknowledged nor a case of unauthorized use.

Whereas this might be clear, the situation is something of a slippery slope when it comes to its ethics.

^[2] Plagiarism [accessed 18 December 2003] Infoplease online dictionary. http://www.infoplease.com/ipd/A0590972.html