Slate’s Nancy Nall Derringer [1] tells you how easy it can be to nail a plagiarist:
I spent much of last Friday being congratulated for “brilliant reporting” that consisted of a minute’s worth of typing on my laptop. That’s how long it took for me to notice what seemed to be merely a case of egregiously obscure name-dropping . . . , paste the name into Google, and discover the entire sentence . . . had been lifted from a previously published essay by Jeffrey Hart in the Dartmouth Review.
The plagiarism was in a column for a newspaper I used to work for, the News-Sentinel of Fort Wayne, Ind. The piece was a guest op-ed about the importance of a good college education written by Timothy S. Goeglein, a top aide to President Bush.
This is how easy it is to catch a plagiarist.
Happy hunting. I’ll write a glowing review of anyone else who can catch a plagiarizing political hack.
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