- Joined
- Mar 4, 2015
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If someone is DEAD and you borrow a few phrases or words for something you are writing on that topic, what difference does it make.
A majority of my sources are from newspapers and legal cases of the 1800s. There are times that, in order to be surgically accurate, I have borrowed phrases describing an incident. If I rephrase it in my own words, I think I loose accuracy. I think that there are times where you can't really state something in a different way without changing the tone, meaning, attitude or whatever. And I don't want to constantly put quotes around phrases. Who the hell is going to sue me anyway if they have been dead 180 years.
Yes, it looks bad to plagiarize phrases. So what. I'm not doing this to prove my writing ability. I'm doing this to write history as accurately and precisely as possible. That means keeping things as close to what was said as possible. It doesn't mean copying every word but at times, when details are paramount, there may be no other way to get it accurate.
In my personal experience, I have discovered many history books where writers have rephrased things in their own words resulting in distorting the true history. For history, anyway, I'd rather have things plagiarized if I can get the true facts than have some horrible rephrased distortion.
A majority of my sources are from newspapers and legal cases of the 1800s. There are times that, in order to be surgically accurate, I have borrowed phrases describing an incident. If I rephrase it in my own words, I think I loose accuracy. I think that there are times where you can't really state something in a different way without changing the tone, meaning, attitude or whatever. And I don't want to constantly put quotes around phrases. Who the hell is going to sue me anyway if they have been dead 180 years.
Yes, it looks bad to plagiarize phrases. So what. I'm not doing this to prove my writing ability. I'm doing this to write history as accurately and precisely as possible. That means keeping things as close to what was said as possible. It doesn't mean copying every word but at times, when details are paramount, there may be no other way to get it accurate.
In my personal experience, I have discovered many history books where writers have rephrased things in their own words resulting in distorting the true history. For history, anyway, I'd rather have things plagiarized if I can get the true facts than have some horrible rephrased distortion.