Plagiarism

[poliphilo]

Someone just plagiarised a couple of sentences from my last post. They dressed 'em up a bit, but I know my own children.

It's a compliment, right?

I'm not cross (well, not very) and part of me is flattered. Since neither of us is making money out of this I don't regard it as any big deal. I just want the person that did it to know I know.

Dude, the convention is to put "borrowed" material in quotation marks and to give the original author credit.

Still, I'm easy. None of the stuff on this blog is copyrighted. And maybe (who knows?) there are other people out there taking credit for what I've done. I'm not a professional writer or photographer. My philosophy with this blog is that I'm putting messages in bottles and casting them out to sea. What happens next is up to wind and wave and ocean current.

Comments

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Gosh, no, it wasn't you.

It was a person way out on the badlands of my flist.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Funny! I worried, too, and hurried to check.

Whew.

I tend to pick up on people's writing rhythms, and it worries me sometimes because I do tend to "echo back" their style a bit.

In high school I used to read Dickens to get his rhythms rolling in my head before I wrote.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Of course it wasn't you.

Robert Louis Stevenson said he learned to write by playing "the sedulous ape" to a range of classic authors. I love that phrase.

The writer whose prose style I aped was G.K. Chesterton- a very bad model to choose- very distinctive, very mannered. It took me a lot of hard work to rid myself of his cadences.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

You certainly have your own cadences now.

(I knew it wasn't me, but I hicupped anyway: I leap to guilt.)