Another author bites the dust. The 17 year old wonder girl signs a book deal, and then plagiarizes parts of the book from two different books by the same author, and then another book by a different author. Didn’t she realize that she was living a lot of peoples’ dream?

I hate plagiarism, ever since my writing became important to me and our school watched a journalism student bet busted for making up quotes and people in his articles that ran in the school paper. He ruined his journalistic life, just like this girl ruined her writing life. No one will trust her work again. There must be something else, though, some sort of pressure that these people suffer from. Maybe she took on too much by starting a novel so young, or is a perfectionist. Even at the lowest point of a research paper all-nighter, I never thought about directly copying someone else’s words without citing them. That’s part of the joy of writing. The words belong to you and no one else, and once they are on paper they live forever. If no one trusts your words, you lose your authenticity as a writer, and somewhere in there you end up losing yourself.

Link: Young Author Faces 2nd Plagiarism Claim – Yahoo! News.