Write Your Own Damn Article!

Plagiarism is the practice of claiming or implying original authorship of (or incorporating material from) someone else's written or creative work, in whole or in part, into one's own without adequate acknowledgement. Unlike cases of forgery, in which the authenticity of the writing, document, or some other kind of object itself is in question, plagiarism is concerned with the issue of false attribution.

In journalism, plagiarism is considered a breach of journalistic ethics, and reporters caught plagiarizing typically face disciplinary measures ranging from suspension to termination.

Plagiarism is concerned with the unearned increment to the plagiarizing author's reputation that is achieved through false claims of authorship.

I quoted the above two paragraphs directly from Wikipedia because I wanted everyone reading this article to understand exactly what plagiarism means.

I had a few ideas rolling around my head last night as I intended to post another article at Bleacher Report. I entered a generic string on Google and began perusing the pages.

Suddenly, I came across a link that looked very familiar and navigated my way to the site. I discovered that someone going by the screen name of"bamaboy550" had copied, pasted, and edited my recent article The SEC: Overrated? NEVER!! and posted it at The Sporting News claiming it to be his work.

In fact, I could tell by the way it appeared that the article was copied from Bleacher Report. He even went as far to post only the first half of the article to generate anticipation for the second half.

I’m not a naïve person, nor am I shocked this occurred. I’m shocked it happened with regard to an article I wrote because I don’t consider anything I write to be that good. I’m not going to make anyone forget Shakespeare anytime soon and there are countless writers that put me to shame every day. But I am thoroughly pissed off because the article in question took weeks to research, and nearly four hours of my free time to write.

We may be classified as bloggers and receive no compensation for the articles we write, however, the articles we write and post belong to us. And in this case specifically, it belongs to me. I can prove my work, as all writers can, by the time stamp on the document.

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