The temptation when writing your work for assessment or for submission to an academic or other publisher is to use the proven words of others – and herein lies the problem.
Simply put, copyright is attached to the particular, distinctive way in which words are expressed, not to ideas. If you just change a word here and there so it’s not exactly the same – perhaps the tense, perhaps from active to passive or vice versa – the writing is likely to retain the distinctiveness of the original. The original writer’s words may still shine through.
The idea itself is not protected by copyright. However … a further complication is moral rights, a part of copyright law that safeguards the creator’s right to be attributed for their work. In academic writing there is a particularly strong code of conduct specifying that if you refer to an idea or concept originally put forward by someone else, you must acknowledge that person or person. So you don’t have free rein to put your own name to someone else’s idea, either.
Having worked in copyright clearance for many years I have a healthy respect for the value of other’s people’s work. I also have a healthy respect for my clients and my responsibility to help them be the best they can be!
So when from time to time I’m asked to rewrite an article, chapter or thesis that has failed to pass Turnitin, the university’s plagiarism detector, I will not do that.
Although imitation is widely acknowledged to be the sincerest form of flattery, plagiarism is not imitation; it is theft. (If you imitate someone else’s writing style or art style, that’s a different matter.) In Western scientific culture and publishing, plagiarism is considered theft, and if you manage to get it through, it’s likely to come back and bite you in the butt in a very serious way.
What I will do, however, is guide you to write in your own words. I’ll be the first to admit it’s difficult to write in English if it’s not your first language, or even, sometimes, if it is. And there can be a strong temptation for anyone – brought up in the English-speaking context or not – to use someone else’s words when they may seem to be the only way to express what you want to say.
But you have no doubt spent years studying in your field and know exactly what you are talking about, and if you are discussing your subject with a friend, perhaps explaining it to them, I’ll bet you’re using your own words, not reciting an explanation from a reference book or research article by rote. If you know your subject, you can answer their questions. You can clarify your position. And if you can get those words down on paper, an editor can help you tidy them up so that they are expressed well.
Let me help you make your words shine!
Editor on Call 