Anyone remember the Harvard student with the publishing deal that “borrowed” from several different books for her novel? Made the media big time. Wonderful example of how paraphrasing is still plagiarism.

1. Sarah has no idea how to do proper research.

2. Sarah has no idea how to provide a proper citation.

3. Someone who cannot string together a coherent sentence isn’t likely to be able to correctly attribute sources so an audience can differentiate between citations and original thought.

4. Sarah has no original thoughts. (One might question if she has any thoughts at all, given the strings of adverbs, adjectives, etc that seem to have no focus or point.)

I think #4 is probably the most important.

A woman who obviously slept her way to a bachelor’s degree is no matchh for Obama. Sorry, but the GOP can go ahead and put her up as their candidate. She is NO threat to Obama. And will be even less so in 2012. But they may do it anyway because she is a throw away candidate. They are sure to lose in 2012 and may not want to taint any viable candidate they may have for 2016, so they’ll need a sacrificial lamb. And she won’t even realize that’s why she’s chosen. She’ll actually believe it’s because she’s the “best” candidate. She’ll even believe she’ll win. Poor thing. I’m looking forward to the train wreck. Should be very entertaining.

Yet ANOTHER “Repub Strategist” (Cheri Jacobus) and her points, summarized, lest I be accused of plaigiarism):

SP is a self made woman!

She didn’t come from a political family, a family with money, she didn’t marry into it.

She was the VP candidate! (Again, when can we put this to rest? She is JUST a Gov now!)

If they think they are going to “nudge her aside” at the dinner tonite and she’ll walk away quietly, they are underestimating her.

They SHOULD make room for her!

They know that if she were to come into power, some of them wouldn’t have jobs (they are AFRAID of her!).

She’s a threat to Obama and folks are going to see that they are ready to get rid of the teleprompter (what IS it with these people and teleprompters? SP had a fist full of “notes” for her ill-delivered speech on Wed that she CONSANTLY was LOOKING DOWN at to read… how is that ANY different from having a teleprompter?)

It was an “introduction”, and you can find it with EVERYONE (like this makes it right). Bios are all the same, so words sounding similar are inevitable (me, paraphrasing).

This wasn’t a “bio” of Michael Reagan, idiot! It was barely an introduction. It was a SPEECH by Palin that she got almost verbatim from other printed work that was not duly recognized!

Dorian Warren (Dem Strategist):

Repubs are in disarray if they can’t make room for her … It’s akin to dissing Obama and replacing with Lieberman. I guess, in other words, he thinks that the party, also too, should have made room if she is such a “star”.

IMHO: She shouldn’t BE a star if she can’t make a simple dinner decision and stick with it. These things are planned, choreographed, timed, practiced, etc. She can’t just waffle back and forth willy nilly!

They need to get more organized and with ORIGINAL thoughts… good luck to them on that!

One of the requirements of the thesis was to provide at LEAST 50 sources, even though the requirement for length of the thesis didn’t have to be anywhere near that comprehensive. The purpose was to have a well rounded knowledge of the subject matter and on both sides of the issue.

My, and everyone else’s, thesis was LARGELY just compiling the information and cohesively constructing it all into a coherent argument. We all discussed our work at length in that class for a semester and all pretty much constructed our final papers the same way.

I went back to look at mine. It’s got to be 90% reference to other published work! The thing is crazy with footnotes of attribution to original authors, including date, publication, page numbers, quotation marks, etc.

MY work was done in consolidating the “best” and most widely accepted methods and arguments and then paraphrasing the overwhelming agreement on … you guessed it … the “best” way to market a university and its programs to graduates from HS and Undergrad programs alike.

I didn’t claim to know this stuff… I claimed that I put together information from many sources to create a thoughtful strategy for universities.

I got an A. And I didn’t have to plaigiarize to do it. And it wasn’t really all that difficult, either. I read, documented, summarized and put it together.

Why would such a thing be so difficult in the preparation of a 17 minute speech? Why can’t she just take the article, appropriately attribute her words as being gleaned from that work, and THEN give her 2-cents worth of original thought?

Different “Repub Strategist” (man, they have ALOT of those out there!) just on MSNBC says (again paraphrasing): She’s quoting a four year old piece on words uttered 30 years ago. The Repubs have to STOP looking back, STOP looking to Reagan, and start with their OWN stuff.

BTW: With those plaigiarism databases and thoughts to get a hold of her prior “work”: First, the databases didn’t exist when I was in college, but it seems that a prof would have to … what? Scan the entire document and feed it into a program?

Also, I had ALL my papers returned… the college didn’t retain any of them. The see2pee’ers keep wanting to see President Obama’s work from his university days and I wonder just how they think a university can release something I’m sure they didn’t retain. Harvard CERTAINLY doesn’t retain every piece of work from every student! They’d have to have entire buildings devoted to nothing but storage!

Besides that, the student wouldn’t have had the work returned with critique. Back in the day, “copies” weren’t made (although mine was on a disk, I still have the only hard copy produced. I feel pretty confident that my prof didn’t stand at the copier duplicating each student’s paper… he’d have been an old man before we got them back!).

I have no idea whether a charge of plagiarism would stick in a court of law in this case, but there has been no argument, even from her own attorney, about how extensively she used that article or that it was the sole source from which her speech was prepared, and there is no question that she did not identify the name of the publication, publication date, or co-author.

We would have gotten roasted (and rightly so, I believe) by our teachers if we had so extensively relied on someone’s work, particularly a single work, and for not making it clear whether we were paraphrasing or quoting as we went along. We would have been considered unethical and lazy for not doing our own homework. Illegal or not, it seems unlikely she would want to let people know the extent to which she borrowed from a single 3.5 year old article instead of coming up with her own thoughts, especially since she has been previously criticized for being an intellectual lightweight and has touted her journalism degree. I suppose anything is possible, though.

Palin not at fault here. Yes, her speech writers PERHAPS could/should have identifed the source. BUT Palin has to steal the idea and declare them as her own. Not sure we’ve got that here. Now that you all but declared her a plagarist have you given her action for libel? Hmmmm, just wondering…

I also suspect that telling people the article was recent when clearly it wasn’t might have been an attempt to make it harder to find if they did look for the original work. Actually, if she had paraphrased it all to make it less recognizable, she might have gotten away clean, and if she had said she was going to read an article by Gingrich and Shirley and done so verbatim, it would have been perfectly fine.

I bet her attorney just loves it every time she does something unethical – more fees for him. He’ll be able to retire soon at this rate.