Kaavya Viswanathan, a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore, allegedly copied another author's work for her debut novel.
There are so many things wrong with this story I don't know where to start. Kaavya Viswanathan, a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard, is being accused of plagiarizing another novelist's work for her own brand new novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.…
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26 - Michael J. West
Now, be fair, Don. You mentioned felony (I suspect) specifically because job and school applications ask "Have you ever been convicted of a felony?" And even then, they want more specific information; they want to know if your conviction indicates that you will potentially be a danger in the future.
Are colleges looking at character, values, and ethics? It's hard to say. Certainly they're looking for someone that will reflect well on their university, and that may be what we're talking about in the case of rescinding admissions...it's just a question of whether admitting this student truly does reflect badly on the university.
Plagiarizing in the local paper does indeed suggest that her near-flawless academic record might be flawed. But in that case do you investigate whether it really is flawed? Or do you uninformedly withdraw the admission, just to be on the safe side?
27 - Don Baiocchi
Actually, I wasn't think about the technical difference between "felony" vs. a generic term like "crime." My point was, don't extra-curricular activities, both positive and negative, factor into a college's decision?
And is it really the college's responsibility to hunt down every single thing that student ever wrote and somehow cross-check it against every single thing that has already been written by someone else? Yes, there is some plagiarism software out there, but even most newspapers and universities don't use them and when they do they aren't completely successful, not to mention the time it would take to launch a full investigation into just one student who has already blown their credibility by proving that they can't be trusted.
28 - Steve
Interesting rant I hope you felt better because you're not as accomplished as a 19 year old girl who gets to go to Harvard.
29 - Michael J. West
Who's not as accomplished as a 19-year-old girl who gets to go to Harvard?
I come up with my own ideas about which to write. That much makes me more accomplished than this particular 19-year-old Harvard girl all by itself.
30 - Charles
steve,
going to harvard doesn't mean anything when you lie
31 - Don Baiocchi
The jealousy angle? Really, Steve? That's as unoriginal as Viswanathan's book.
32 - Dhruv
Having made some pretty pathetic attempts to write, I can safely say that sometims when you read a book a lot and you really like it, you tend to, unconciously, reproduce elements from said book. Of course, this has never happened to me without me realizing it, but when i first heard about this, I was willing to believe that Ms. Vishwanathan had done something similar.
Until, that is, I heard that photographic memory crap and read the stuff on the link.
Fantastic.
All I can say is that I'm rather taken aback that someone would steal stuff so unabashedly.
I'd expect it from a twelve year old and even a fifteen year old, but when you're nineteen, and you KNOW you're witing something thats going to be PUBLISHED and you're living in america, where everyone screams 'plagarism!' at the drop of a hat (no offence!), the stupidest thing you can do is this.
I feel embarassed for Ms. Vishwanathan. I cannot believe anyone would do this.
On an alternate angle, I seem to have missed something here. I'm not saying that even the smallest amount of plagarism is right, but it seems to me that she's being crucified for simply copying a few phrases... after all, do 500-600 copied words amount to very much in a 70,000-100,100 word story? Did I miss something?
Because if her story seems original (or as original as chick-lit can be, anyhow) then does it matter so much that she's used someone else's phrases to convey the sort of mood that she wanted? Agreed, she should have maybe written to McCafferty or something first, but I'm just saying....
33 - Don Baiocchi
Dhruv, I'm confused. You're "taken aback," this is the "stupidest thing you can do" and you "cannot believe anyone would do this." And then you say it's not a big deal because it's only a small portion of her book. Are you playing devil's advocate or do you genuinely think plagiarizing only 40 or so passages (as opposed to a whole book? Has anyone actually plagiarized an entire novel word for word anyway?) makes it less offensive?
Plus, as most people will tell you, her story is not that original. It's actually virtually identical to McCafferty's except she changed a few details (Viswanathan's heroine is Indian-American, for example). And she's not just using someone else's "phrases," it's almost all word-for-word lifting. Like others have pointed out, can't a Harvard student even use a thesaurus?
The whole point of giving someone a book deal is presumably because the author has their own story to share and their own way of sharing it. If Viswanathan needed to outright copy someone else's work to tell her own story then maybe she shouldn't have been telling that story in the first place (or at least worked harder to make sure it was her own story).
34 - Dhruv
Actually, Don, While I believe it was pretty stupid of her to do something like that, i assumed that it was only those passages that had been copied - not the plot or the tone or whatever else may have been lifted.
I'm sure that there're plenty of authors who are inpspired by others' works and consequently mimic certain styles and/or patterns of phraseology.
I wasn't playing 'devil's advocate'. i was simply wondering what the fuss was all about. I said "Because if her story seems original (...) then does it matter so much that she's used someone else's phrases to convey the sort of mood that she wanted?" I wasn't saying that she was right in doing so. I was just trying to point out that while it was certainly stupid of her to lift those phrases, it seemed to me that an awfully disproportionately large deal has been made of it.
Of course, I didn't know that there were plot similarities as well, or I wouldn't have said so.
Yes, and I do believe that plagarizing a few passages is significantly less than doing so for an entire book. Using someone else's writing style certainly isn't called plagarism (not yet, anyway) and similarly, i believe that it's alright to use someone else's style even to the extent of mimicing/copying thier phrases, BUT ONLY AS LONG AS YOU GET THEIR PERMISSION (if copying phrases is what you are indeed doing). i realize that that last sentence may have been a sort of dip-in-both-bowls-at-the-same-time, but i guess, i'm just trying to say , yes - its certainly less offensive if you copy passages/phrases rather than copying the whole book because in the former case the story is still yours and you're just using someone else's style to get your story across the way you want it. whew.
To address that last paragraph of yours: i write occasionally, and sometimes I find that certain ideas that i think of and certain stories that float around in my head bear telling only in certain, distinct ways. Dickens couldn't have written Great Expectations in, lets say, verse, because much of the charm of that book is in the style that he's written it in. Now, I'm not comparing the two here (and I understand that Dickens' writing style was original), but I'm just saying that certain stories can only be told in certain ways. If Ms. Vishwanathan wrote her book in her own stlye which, for the sake of arguement, is, lets say a John Grisham-y sort of style, the book would lose much of its charm (I haven't read the book myself, but a friend tells me it does have 'charm'). Sometimes your own way of teling a story isn't as good as someone else's, so to tell your story (because you would, presumably, believe it to be a story worth telling), you borrow someone else's style.
35 - Cass
In various articles on nyt.com, the New York Times reported that she lost her book contract with Little, Brown, and the publisher pulled the copies of "Opal Mehta" off the market. I guess she got her punishment.
36 - Monica
In a world where unethical acts, such as starring in porno movies, often pay more than many years of hard work, I find that this young woman was smart. She did what she had to do to get into Harvard and earn lots of money at a young age. Giving it back without being forced to would be stupid. She would be better off using it to invest in her future even if that means regretting all her life what she had to do to succeed. Many people feel this way and don't even have that kind of money. Besides, if she becomes rich, she can still help the poor or otherwise pay her moral debt.
37 - Nathan
Jeez...its only plagiarism...not murder.
Everyone copies...Car manufacturers, politicians, journalists, babies (yes..thats how u learn to talk). So everyone having a mental war against plagiarism is a hypocrite themselves. Only difference is Kaavya got put in the spotlight over the most minute things of all and u didnt. Come on..they are only words. Get a life
You people make it seem like murder. For the amount of publicity and notoriety received..i think one would prefer to murder than to plagiarise. Or at least rob some one else of something tangible.
All this bullshit is due to the media and the bloody legal system. Everyone fights with these intangible weapons these days.
We gotta change society