Plagiarise and not get caught

HOW TO...

THE INTERNET, THAT most diabolical of inventions, has put the "plague" into plagiarism. Today, if you pilfer an entire sentence (let alone paragraph) from a source that is available online, you're in trouble; all it takes to be found out is a Google search with the relevant string of words.

Worse, over-zealous writers now have tools on their websites that inform them whenever anyone writes a sentence suspiciously similar to one of their own. And of course there are all those goody-two shoes "citizen journalists" "" remember that sneaky blogger-journo who ratted on his own kind by exposing the TOI film reviewer a couple of years ago?

Borges said once that there are only 200 or so basic ideas or stories that are endlessly retold in different ways. (Note: I plagiarised this information from a newspaper column "" but you see, I can get away with it because it's secondary-source info. We call it research.) The gist of the thing is, there are only so many ideas.

There are also only so many words in which to express these ideas. When a million freshly evolved monkeys bang away on a million keyboards, there will certainly be similarities in the final results.

So here are some tips if you wish to avoid a Kaavya Vishwanathan-like fate (the bad press, not the huge advance).

If you lift a sentence, make sure you don't exactly repeat any word that is of five or more letters (this being the point where words start getting more distinct and identifiable). Use a thesaurus, locate synonyms for as many of the longer words as possible.

But be careful to choose these synonyms judiciously, for it's an unfortunate fact of life that a single word can have more than one meaning. Also, the meanings of some words have changed over the years so if you're plagiarising something by, say, Shakespeare, make sure you understand the original in the sense it was meant. Otherwise you might end up with something much fresher than you ever intended.

One clever way is to quote a source, but then to end the quote-marks before the quote is actually finished. This way it will appear to the casual reader that the rest of the paragraph is your own "" and if you're found out, you can simply slap your head and blame the copy-editor/printer for putting the closing quote-mark in the wrong spot.

Steal ideas rather than exact phrases. This makes it less easy to be caught out by Google. Don't be afraid of rewriting, it can be a lot of fun!

Plagiarising from the great writers requires skill and attention. Bear in mind that it's easier to copy and rewrite when the original writing is turgid. There isn't much that can be done to modify a phrase like "To be or not to be", but the writings of, for instance, James Joyce are a different matter.

Joyce was a complex man who wrote difficult prose, as he did in the greatest novel of the 20th century, the unreadable Ulysses (the basic idea for which was plagiarised from a poem written by a blind man thousands of years ago). Take this bit from the said novel, an exchange between Mr Leopold Bloom and his cat:

"Afraid of the chook-chooks. I never saw such a stupid pussens as the pussens."
"Mrkgnao!" the cat said loudly.

The above passage can be quite easily simplified, without any significant diminishment of meaning, to:

"Afraid of the chickens? Scaredy-cat!"
"Miaow!" said the cat plaintively.

Note clever rearrangement of "the cat said" into "said the cat". Also, in this case "loudly" is not crucial to the general effect of the passage, so it can be substituted by a word that is not a synonym. "Plaintively" gives the sentence an elegance that's wholly missing from the Joyce original.

It's true that a certain amount of realism has been sacrificed "" cats do say "mrkgnao" more often than "miaow" "" but then that's the price you pay for being a copy-cat.