joanna bujes wrote:
>
> A> I am also wondering why you sent this reply? Do you agree with this woman
> and find it more polite to use her words rather than your own?
>
> Joanna
No -- I agree with you. I thought your words would probably be better than mine as a reply to her.
And they were. Your reply is better than whatever I might have carved out, at least to begin with. This is another kind of plagiarism, perhaps? :-)
I simply fwd your post to the English Dept list, thus kicking up (I hope) a little storm there, since it's usually pretty quiescent, without expounding myself.
And when I got the reply I did, I thought, hey -- this will carry things forward on lbo. Now I'll fwd your reply back to the engdep list, & see if anyone else kicks in there.
I think you may have something on teaching to plagiarize intelligently. I've read some scholarship that would have been improved had the author simply stolen and incorporated into his/her work the sources she was quoting. (One could always add a two or three sentence afterword thanking, without specification, two or three of one's sources.)
And the point about Polonius's little maxim, is that it's validity or banality or absolute falsehood varies with situation. That's why it's probably worth plagiarizing rather than citing in some instances. :-)
Carrol
Carrol