Jersey Girl wrote:Scratch,
I just feel compelled to respond to your OP. You begin with this line:
The Mopologetic front continues to crumble. As much as you may like his goofy persona, Kerry Shirts is really showing himself to be a bumbling oaf this time around:
Then you link to a post that was made approx. 3 years ago. Later you link to something that was posted 2 years ago. How does that constitute "this time around"?
Would it make you feel better if I'd said, "that time around"?
Anyway, you are off base regarding Kerry and plagiarism.
No, I'm not. Many of the "Kerry's innocent!" people on this thread seem not to understand what plagiarism actually is. Feel free to refer to the official sources I've cited elsewhere in the thread.
While I do not agree with his apologetics, he would never intentionally plagiarize anything.
Once again: This is beside the point.
Do you recall the recent case, involving a Harvard undergraduate, in which she "accidentally" reproduced verbatim text in her first novel? Her defense was that she had "absorbed" the other text, and had "forgotten" that it was written by somebody else.
Likewise, Kerry's sloppiness led to him crossing the line of citational propriety.
If you were familiar with is essays, you would see pages upon pages of end notes and citations. Kerry takes pride in citing his sources. He respects the literary works of others, is an avid reader and maintains his own personal library of hundreds of books, if not thousands by now.
As others have pointed out, he made the appropriate attribution including page numbers.
What do the page numbers refer to? Verbatim text? Paraphrased text? What?
This was a post on a message board, not an essay for publication. If you were familiar with his essays, you would see carefully cited end notes.
So what? Steven Ambrose is usually quite careful, too. But did this save him?
If you view his DVD's/ You tubes, you will see him speaking with book in hand carefully naming title/author and typically page numbers as well.
Kerry has a love of books and reading. There is no way he would intentionally plagiarize another author's work.
Fair enough, but as was pointed out in the text I excerpted from the
MLA Handbook, plagiarism can happen out of sheer sloppiness. "Intent" doesn't necessarily have anything to do with it.
You're wrong here, Scratch.
Jersey Girl
Look: I agree with others that Kerry is a nice guy. I rather like him. I also agree that posts on a messageboard, generally speaking, are informal, and that we should, in general cut people some slack. I merely found it amusing that he had engaged in such gross sloppiness and carelessness that it led to his plagiarizing of some text. (Again: one of the posters on the same thread felt the same way, and Kerry had to admit to his "gaffe.")
We can continue arguing about the relative "seriousness" of KS's plagiarism (I personally don't think it was that big of a deal), but there can be no question that he engaged in plagiarism---even if it was "accidental." And anyways, I am still waiting for somebody to comment on the actual "meat" of the OP.
