Someone (an author (and a crappy one)) told me that actual plagiarism could be avoided by changing one word in four.

Which seems terribly unlikely ... is there a legal definition out there?

Someone (an author (and a crappy one)) told me that actual plagiarism could be avoided by changing one word in four.

Wow. I do not begin to begin to understand the mindset. I mean, if you're not enjoying the whole creative thing in the first place, why the hell are you writing?

I mean, I can see that it could be an interesting creative writing exercise, I suppose - take such and such a text and see how far you can bend it by changing every fourth word. Okay. As a one-off game-type thing, I can see that being interesting. But as a choice for your normal writing? If they don't LIKE writing, why aren't they out playing football, or crocheting something, or baking something, or otherwise using their time?

t baffled

Well, there is that thing about copying stuff and using not more than 10% of the work. . . but I'm sure that plagiarism laws cover things more abstract than actual word counts.

why the hell are you writing?

Ego gratification for getting praise, even if you stole the work. People are weird that way. I was just listening to the TAL episode the other day about fans of the musical Rent who had a close knit community and one of them faked the classic "I'm dying of a dreadful disease" sympathy bid and totally burned the cast and community. People do some freaky things to get validated.

Plagiarism, I think, is covered under fraud, isn't it? Representing another person's work as your own is fraud. When you see authors get yelled at in the newspapers for making up quotes, they get censured by the court of their peers, and sometimes their publisher goes ape, but they don't get taken to court unless they're actually -- fraudulently -- trying to make money off something whose money rightfully belongs to someone else.

Ego gratification for getting praise, even if you stole the work. People are weird that way.

Yeah. Yeah, I guess. Mad. You'd think there'd be easier ways, you know?

Someone (an author (and a crappy one)) told me that actual plagiarism could be avoided by changing one word in four.

Bullshit, but an incredibly common misconception -- when I was teaching writing and research to college students, I'd say a clear majority of them came in with ideas like this.

Which seems terribly unlikely ... is there a legal definition out there?

Not that I can recall.

I think for plagiarism you need to establish a pattern of using phrases verbatim.

So if you change every happy to glad, every he to she ... reckon you can skate by?

The only scenario I can imagine being plausible in the "I borrowed unconsciously" excuse sweepstakes is perhaps where you started out by copying out passages from the original work, meaning to change them (in a more than every-four-words manner) and then lost track about what had been changed and what hadn't, to the point that you thought that what was left was all yours.

I expect this method makes more sense to me because I really have some large prose constructions (can't call them stories, most of them are unfinished) that I've completely forgotten writing. Since I don't plagiarize, and they're in my personal files, they damn well belong to me, but reading them is not unlike reading somebody else's work, I have no idea what the author was thinking when she wrote that stuff, and if the plot is unfinished, I have only my current guesses as to what the original ending was planned to be.