Rick wrote:
MJ Simpson wrote:
I've been without web access for more than a week so I'm only just coming to this. What I never understand in these cases is that surely the effort involved in reading other work, selecting the parts to copy and bolting them together into a coherent piece of writing is at least as much as it takes to just write something original in the first place.

This has been my thought exactly, as it was with the CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON book brouhaha.  Unless a person is utterly unable to put a sentence together-- and I assume that she actually wrote some of what she "wrote" -- it's just got to be easier to create your own stuff than to sift, copy, just-slightly-alter, and fit stolen material into the overall package.  
No, plagiarizing's easier than thinking (about what to say), especially if you don't really know a lot about the subject. (And it's easy to love something, but harder to be informed about it.)


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