Malcolm Gladwell tries to make the case that plagiarism is No Big Deal. It’s an interesting argument (hey, he’s Malcolm Gladwell), but it just doesn’t hold water.

He makes a good point about newspapering. In daily journalism, papers constantly have to rewrite each other’s stories. One paper gets one scoop, one paper gets another — but, eventually, both papers run both stories. You’re ripping off the competition as a service to your readers (so that they get all the news). But God forbid one sentence is the same in the ripped-off story. Thus, we have wire services, to avoid (or make explicit) this ripping off as much as possible.

But literature (along with scholarship, and long-form non-fiction journalism) strikes me as a different beast. Yes, there are genre conventions. And yes there are trite phrases everyone uses. And yes taking the teen fiction of Kaavya Viswanathan seriously is, well, stupid. But, goddamnit, you get paid to write. To write what YOU have to say. Unless there’s a literary reason for your lifting of passages (say, satire), then there’s really no excuse.

Incidental phrases can find their way into one’s work. But when the theft is blatantly conscious, and it looks like the author is trying to get away with something, it’s time to hang.