Busted: Substack Plagiarism and The Matthew Effect
On authentic writing and being.
Back in my 20s, the “best writer” in my graduate program plagiarized her writing sample. It was uncovered about a year in, when she kept begging her professors for deadline extensions and evading seminar projects. Finally, she started turning in copy-pasted garbage, and that’s when everyone got suspicious. By then, she had already snatched up a number of stipends, awards, and fellowships. The department let her keep the money, then she pretty much vanished.
Of course, what hurt even more was sitting around in writing workshops, watching professors heap praise on her for work that just wasn’t that good, except for these little moments of glory that often felt, well, out of place. Some of us even talked about it, in the quiet corners of coffeeshops.
We wondered to each other, “Is there something wrong with us?”
“Are we just jealous?”
So we judged ourselves. We scoured this plagiarist’s prose for clues about what we should be doing to earn that same praise.
We fe…