With everybody and his dog piling on Harvard’s Claudine Gay lately, please allow me to share something I learned during my aborted attempt at law school. It will be very short,sweet, and imprecise, as I’m in the middle of a real paid job, my first in probably a year or more; I’m not going to go back to my notes and find the real figures.
A thesis must be some N pages long. No less than, say, .8N, and going over 1.4N is going to reduce your chance at a good grade.
At the same time, some X% of it has to be your own words. All the words from quoted passages don’t count towards your thesis’s minimum, as set by your school and/or professor.
Finally, if you go on and on in your own words, especially as a first- or second-year student, you’re going to feel like a bullshitter, because that’s probably what you’re doing. You just don’t yet have the depth of knowledge to carry it on your own.
Those 3 constraints mean that everybody, to some degree, is going to be creatively rewording the text from their sources, to avoid outright plagiarism and yet meet the word count while having the ring of authority. The first examples I saw of Gay’s work compared to her sources made me wonder how my theses passed muster. It was exactly the same kind of thing I did.
So, I dunno, maybe cut the lady some slack, at least for that. There are other things for which she may be more culpable. Hope you have a joyous Christmas and/or whatever else you may celebrate.
The word PLAGIARISM should not be put in parentheses when discussing actual plagiarism by a supposed academic whose only skill is her color.