It’s a good apology! Hallelujah!
The current (Aug/Sept) print issue of BUST features an article called “Shoplifters of the World.” It turns out to have been lifted (see what I did there) from a 2016 article in Good. (FULL DISCLOSURE! Snarly has written for BUST. MORE FULL DISCLOSURE! SorryWatch learned about this incident through a reader pointing us to Jezebel’s comprehensive reporting on it. ATTRIBUTION, BUBBELEHS.)
A sophomore at the University of Chicago pitched a piece to BUST on young women who steal stuff from big stores and frame their actions in anti-capitalist, activist language. Interesting! Bust assigned her the piece. After it was published, though, a friend of writer Tasbeeh Herwees noticed its similarity to Herwees’s Good article. So much similarity! Read the Jezebel article to see how much.
And then!
BUST apologized very, very well!
Go read. Now, why this such a good apology? Let’s review:
- It uses the words “sorry” and “apologize” — not the pallid and non-ownership-taking “regret.”
- It states precisely what the apology is for. It does not make vague, hand-wavey pronouncements.
- It takes responsibility. It does not throw the plagiarist under the bus, but rather addresses the magazine’s lack of diligence in allowing plagiarized material to be published. (In fact, BUST does not even name the plagiarist. It would have been ok to name her, but not to have made it ALL HER FAULT. She screwed up, but not in a vacuum.)
- It tries to make amends. BUST apologizes to the writer of the Good piece publicly, and the statement notes that the editor-in-chief also apologized privately. And BUST offered the writer of the Good piece the fee she would have received had she written the piece for BUST.
- It explains the steps being taken to ensure that this doesn’t happen again: BUST will implement more diligent fact-checking procedures and vet prospective writers more carefully.
Well done.
The young writer, alas, has not apologized. When Jezebel reached out to her for comment, she emailed back:
The “plagiarism accusations” arose out of a failure to cite the source of some quotations properly within the story. As soon as I realized that the quotations weren’t credited properly, I reached out to the author of the piece I quoted. We’ve already discussed how we can fix the issue and she was very understanding about the mistakes.
This was the first article I’ve ever written for a print publication. I didn’t know the proper protocol for citation in this type of writing, and as a result, I failed to credit Tasbeeh properly, which I now regret terribly and am trying to fix.
“Plagiarism accusations” should not be in quotes. Failing to cite sources properly is plagiarism. It doesn’t matter if the actual author is understanding; it is still plagiarism. This takes no responsibility whatsoever. It also minimizes the offense: The idea, the sources, and the quotes all came from the Good piece; the author also paraphrased some of the Good writer’s own phrasing.
All this said, the writer is young. High schools and colleges (even good ones, like the University of Chicago!) are not always great at teaching kids what plagiarism is. We could choose to give her the benefit of the doubt and hope this becomes a teachable moment for lots of young folks.
Young folks: Here’s the University of Chicago’s page on plagiarism in the student handbook. There are some great resources, including a book published by the University of Chicago Press called Doing Honest Work in College: How to Prepare Citations, Avoid Plagiarism, and Achieve Real Academic Success. There’s also a link to the Purdue Writing Lab — it is broken, U Chicago pals! Fix it! Here is what I think you wanted to point to, because it is excellent and chattily written and offers really helpful suggestions about notetaking, managing drafts, using best practices when it comes to quotations and others’ ideas, and much more.
I am pretty confident that in my mediocre public high school, no one extensively explained plagiarism to me. And this was back in the olden days when there was no World Wide Web, which meant the odds of getting caught were way smaller. I am also pretty sure that no professor ever talked to me about plagiarism in college — not even my expository writing teacher, who admittedly looked like he’d rather be oh, ANYWHERE ELSE. And yet I did not plagiarize. So I feel many things here: Sympathy for the young writer, impatience with the young writer, annoyance at a system that does not make abundantly clear what plagiarism is, and also rue for my professor friends who have told me that they aren’t allowed to fail anybody even for egregious plagiarism. But hey, I AM HAPPY FOR BUST’S GOOD APOLOGY!
And this must suffice.
