Plagiarism

What I found most beneficial about the two articles on plagiarism was the fact that the two articles offered both sides of the issue. Plagiarism is something that is drilled into our minds at a very young age as being something bad that we are to avoid at all costs. If I recall correctly, when I learned about plagiarism in middle school, and even a little high school, we not only were told that plagiarism is stealing someone else's work and is bad, but we also learned that plagiarism can be unintentional. We were taught to always double check our work, make sure it's original, make sure that not even one sentence or phrase could be considered plagiarism. To this day, I still make a very conscious effort to make sure that nothing in any of my writing, that isn't attributed, could be seen as plagiarism.

This is why the whole situation is very confusing to me. I completely understand that sometimes we can all get "careless", which can, unfortunately lead to accusations of plagiarism sometimes. However, I would expect someone, like the journalist John Merrill, who has a significant amount of journalistic experience to know to attribute quotes from whatever source he got them from. This is what struck me as being most odd when I read these articles.

My initial reaction was that both sides made valid arguments, and that Merrill made a mistake and that the punishment also may have been a little harsh. However, after reading the article by Merrill I started to think a lot about it. It is true that this incident could possibly ruin his reputation as a journalist. However, he also kept saying that he had been accused of plagiarism. While, yes, this is the implication, as was mentioned in the first article, the actual term, "plagiarism" was never even used. However, if you have been doing this for as long as he had been, then it should probably be second nature to try not to be "careless" about something as simple as citing a source.