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Research and Documentation

Academic Honesty and Avoiding Plagiarism:
A Self-Guided Tutorial

by Michael Fleming

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Where does the modern idea of “originality” come from?

"Originality," as we understand (and esteem) it today, meant little or nothing to writers throughout antiquity, the exception of the Roman poet Martial (Marcus Valerius Martialis) notwithstanding. In fact, for most of literary history, "originality" was a charge to be avoided. One of the challenges of modern scholarship stems from the common practice among ancient and medieval writers of attributing their work to acknowledged authorities of the past. Many ancient Greek poems, for example, were said to come from Homer; perhaps there was no better way to attract the attention and respect of an audience. (And some modern scholars believe that the revered author of the Iliad and the Odyssey wasn't even a real individual anyway, but rather a kind of pen name that ancient compilers attached to the work of an unknown number of poets.)

Even as late as Elizabethan times, William Shakespeare (1564-1616) freely stole his plots and characters from earlier sources—but it wasn't really "stealing" at all, since he was only doing what nearly all authors did at the time. Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson (c.1572-1637), however, marks the shift toward the modern conception of authorship; the Oxford English Dictionary credits Jonson's play Poetaster (1601) with the first use of the word plagiary. By the end of the seventeenth century the word plagiarism was in common use, and so we can infer that our modern conception of plagiarism—the wrongful appropriation of a writer's words—had taken root in the English-speaking world.

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