The Cleverest Plagiarists...

. . . salt what they've stolen with liberal scatterings of their own words.

This does increase the difficulty of catching their plagiarism, but it also heightens the challenge.

In my neverending quest for ways of catching plagiarists, I have attempted to master the best investigative scholarship that one can find . . . such as what one discovers among scriptural scholars.

For instance, the New Testament scholar Mark Goodacre has formulated a principle of textual analysis that he calls "editorial fatigue" and explains as follows:

"Editorial fatigue is a phenomenon that will inevitably occur when a writer is heavily dependent on another's work. In telling the same story as his predecessor, a writer makes changes in the early stages which he is unable to sustain throughout. Like continuity errors in film and television, examples of fatigue will be unconscious mistakes, small errors of detail which naturally arise in the course of constructing a narrative. They are interesting because they can betray an author's hand, most particularly in revealing to us the identity of his sources." ("Fatigue in the Synoptics," New Testament Studies 44 (1998), pp. 45-58)

Goodacre applies this principle to argue for the priority of Mark's Gospel over those two 'plagiarists' Matthew and Luke.

But it can also be applied to the works of clever, modern-day plagiarists. Or to the papers of plagiarizing students who imagine that they're being clever. Suppose that I read the following sentence in a student's paper:

"Such process could not lead to large scale duplication and therefore, access to book was confined to chiefly clergies."

My first thought focuses upon the mistakes, and I'd want to correct them:

"Such a process could not lead to large-scale duplication, and therefore, access to books was chiefly confined to the clergy."

But I have a sense -- honed by years of teaching and countering dishonest students -- that something else lurks here. So, I return to the badly written sentence and perform Google searches upon phrases within it, testing for the student's own editorial fatigue. The phrase "could not lead to large scale duplication" hits the jackpot, and I find the original:

"Such a labor intensive task could not lead to large scale duplication and hence, access to manuscripts was confined to chiefly the clerics who became custodians of the book culture."

My student has stolen from Jaishree Kak Odin's "Technologies of Writing" (1997), an article posted on the Asynchronous Learning Networks website hosted by the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

By altering some words and deleting others, my student hoped to obscure the stolen material. This trick might have worked -- if I didn't have Google to track down phrases. Even with Google as an anti-plagiarist tool, the student might have gotten away with the plagiarism by altering more words.

Inevitably, though, Goodacre's principle proves its value, for somewhere in the paper of even a clever plagiarist, editorial fatigue sets in, and the plagiarist slips, allowing a telling phrase from the original to remain. In this particular case, the phrase, as noted above, was: "could not lead to large scale duplication."

Most students simply do not realize the uniqueness of nearly every sentence -- nor of the uniqueness of relatively short phrases like "could not lead to large scale duplication," which currently occurs only once online.

Our practically endless creativity with language ensures the uniqueness of most sentences and even of many phrases, Goodacre's principle of editorial fatigue, modified for my aim of catching plagiarists, confers intellectual heft, and Google's search engine does the legwork of tracking down the obscured, rifled sources.