Plagiarize For Fun and Profit

In what may be a first, two unrelated charges of plagiarism made splashy headlines and covered about half of the front page of the Boston Globe today.

In the first, 19 year-old Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan balked at using the P-word but conceded she "may have internalized" some passages from Megan McCafferty's novel Sloppy Firsts. Viswanathan's book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, was published by Little, Brown & Co. Viswanathan is working on a $500,000 two-book contract. Doing a little internalizing of their own, the publisher released a statement saying the author promised to make the problem go away in future printings.

In the second story, Raytheon Chief Executive Office William H. Swanson admitted to lifting significant chunks of Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management from a 1944 book by W.J. King called The Unwritten Laws of Engineering. I'm no expert, but it seems to me if you want to get away with this kind of thing you might want to at least disguise the title a little better.

Swanson didn't try to internalize anything. He just told the Globe that writing "is not my profession, and I don't know how to do it."