Sunday, May 27, 2012

No More IMM for me...

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I've been a fan of a certain blogger for a while now. Not a huge fan. I didn't read every single post, but I ensured that I watched all of her youtube videos and put a link in at the 'In My Mailbox' meme. In every youtube video she smiled, looked us all straight in the eye and showed us all the books that she had been given to review. She was really quite successful with her blog. Until recently...

I don't get time to read all the posts I see pop up on my blogger dashboard. I don't. I am subscribed to over 200 blogs on here. I try to read my favourite blogs as often as I can and occasionally I will scroll down the list and decide to read a post that interests me. While I was a fan of this blog, other blogs often took priority and so I missed the big revelation. The big post admitting to plagiarism.

It wasn't until today that I got sick of reading vague introductions to "book hauls" mentioning that particular blogger and "controversy" that I decided to finally find out what had happened. Plagiarism! It is just so wrong. It really bothers me that people who receive plenty of free review books and have hundreds of followers take advantage of the blogosphere like that. When there are people like me out there who feel lucky to have 48 followers. People like me who spend time trying to get everything just right. People like me who worry that their reviews sound too vague or lack good vocabulary.

In her post the blogger mentioned the difficulty in articulating. I think we all know that it is sometimes quite difficult to get our thoughts to words. That is no excuse for plagiarism though. If you don't know what to say or how you want to say it jot down some notes and take a break. Give it some time. Use a thesaurus, do some more research on the book and yes find out what other people thought. Finding out what other people think is definitely helpful to bloggers. You want to know where the book stands with the reading community, what the major negatives were and the positives. What other people think and whether or not you agree is a great topic for discussion in your review. Don't copy what other people think and post it as your own thought.

And, what about all those review books? Was that an excuse too? Is she drowning under all of them? If the stress is too much. If you didn't even have time to read them all then learn to say no to more review copies. Yes, they might look pretty on your shelf, but book blogging is about more than book hauls.

Also, a few small problems with the revelation:
-It was quite obvious that she only admitted to plagiarism because she had been called on it. Would she have done it on her own terms? Doubtful.
-She mentioned that the reviews she copied were ones that she thought sounded like they could have been written by her. Not true. If they had been written by her, then she wouldn't have needed to copy them.
-Where was sorry?
-Where did she mention the people she copied?

I'm un-following. I'm not doing the meme ever again.

And, If someone ever copies my blog posts (Not that they are really smart enough to get copied) I will jump through your computer screen like a ninja and shoot you in the face. Well, I wish. Just imagine it anyway.

Your Favourite Blogger,
Natalie

2 comments:

Anna said...

my thoughts have always been if you're going to plagerise why bother doing it?
i will look at other reviews if i'm struggling to relate what i mean, like having trouble explain what it was that wasn't quite right, but i could never copy them, i'd feel so guilty!

on the plus side no one would ever copy my reviews because i have a very odd, review style. more commonly called rambling :)

Natalie_vintage_girl said...

Yes I would feel guilty too.