WWYD - friend passing off someone else's work as hers

[disappointedinfriend]

NC for this, but regular.

I am an academic editor. My friend is an academic. She is married to another academic. I have worked writing from both of them quite extensively.

She normally sends me her papers to look through. I have been reading one of them through several iterations and helping her with it.

The first iterations of this paper were worse than useless. However, she has sent me a new version of it and it is brilliant. So brilliant, in fact, that I immediately recognise that her DH has taken her paper and rewritten it completely for her. I know his quirks of style and I can hear his voice all the way though it. I love her to bits, but I know that she is incapable of writing something as good as this essay.

She has presented it to me as her own work, and will do so to the public too. She is looking for promotion at the end of the year.

I feel a bit sick that she would stoop to this. I would never expose her publicly, but I don't know how to react to her. Should I appear like I am taken in by it? WWYD?

i would be returning it and say 'i'm sorry i can't work on this.' she won't have the bollocks to ask why, but if she does i'd say 'because i don't believe it's your work'.

you have to stand up to her, you know that. it's hard, but she is a user. just because she throws you the odd bone, it doesn't change the reality.

meandjulio no! wasn't me- was the OP. I do not write chick lit. I meant I can write serious documents (i.e. academic type texts) when I said upthread that I can write.

Doesn't this type of thing all just go through software now? All the universities say they use anti-plagiarism software so surely these two would know that?

Plus she would have to have a reasonably good degree, and a sympathetic tutor wouldn't be enough to get you through a variety of modules and exams. Universities have checks and balances and stringent quality control and audit of their qualifications.

Just seems a bit odd that someone who can barely string a sentence together could have not only dodged all the anti-plagiarism methods but also got a decent first degree.

am surprised at how very bad I feel about this. It is like finding out that a friend who is an accountant is embezzling, or something. I actually felt sick in my disappointment at her.

More like you feel sick at being put in a position where you finally feel you must quit the game. You said you are aware she has been very dependent on her advisors, previous boyfriends, and even your editing assistance in the past, because she is actually not a good enough writer for the career she has chosen. I can understand that you hoped she would finally get into the swing of things when you helped her before. But she didnt, she is past the stage of having advisors, or boyfriends to crib off of. even you would eventually have had to give up supporting her career via free editing. Which leaves her DH as her only crutch.

Many of us suffer fraud syndrome, when we fear we will be unmasked as not really capable, even though we are. She really is a fraud though, and you have unwittingly helped her into this position. At this point, either you commit to being her ghost writer for life, at whatever that costs you, or you drop this back in her lap letting her know you can see he wrote it, and others will too, and you walk away from them as friends or employers. That may result in her somehow finally getting her skills sorted, or in his being her ghost writer as long as they can carry that off. Which could be not past this paper, or for a while if they convince themselves and others that they both help and support each other so much that it shows in both their writing. His peers might not care as he has proven himself already. Hers might not either because, as you said, it is a weak field.

I would e-mail (and keep the e-mail) to say that it sound like her DH and you feel others will think the same. For this reason you feel you can not be involved.

Then if the shit hits the fan (think that is the academic term) you have a paper trail to show you advised against it

Can I just point out, for a supposedly feminist website, there seems to be an awful lot of assuming women get places by fucking people going on....

"Doesn't this type of thing all just go through software now? All the universities say they use anti-plagiarism software so surely these two would know that?"

But surely that would only pick up someone plagiarising something already published, which wouldn't apply in this case.

Doesn't this type of thing all just go through software now? All the universities say they use anti-plagiarism software so surely these two would know that?

Undergraduate work is run through the software. But my husband spots stuff the software misses, and the software has found stuff he missed. It's just software, it can only know what it is programmed to know. If she was getting assistance from boyfriends who have not written on the topic themselves, who are in other programs, none of their writing would be in the database.

Plus, that sort of check is for students, and she has managed to get herself helped past that level.

Plus she would have to have a reasonably good degree, and a sympathetic tutor wouldn't be enough to get you through a variety of modules and exams. Universities have checks and balances and stringent quality control and audit of their qualifications.

You would be surprised, really, at what can be managed in a weak field, in a badly run department or at a University with a need to say they reached expectations on numbers of graduates. a department can fall from respectable to crap very quickly,and the crapness not be known for a few years. Meanwhile, they are still graduating students who have been poorly chosen and then poorly trained because the intake and graduation system keeps rolling until their reputation actually drops. And even then, students still apply, and graduate from departments with crap reputations.

Just seems a bit odd that someone who can barely string a sentence together could have not only dodged all the anti-plagiarism methods but also got a decent first degree.

i have met more than a few people with undergraduate degrees who depended very heavily on their un-degreed staff members writing and analytical skills. I don't find it odd that sometimes, someone like that fumbles and slides their way through graduate school.

But her husband has already been published. The OP is claiming that he is an academic and so will have had stuff published. As I understand it anti-plagiarism software doesn't just pick up on direct quotes, but also styles and ideas.

Also, it doesn't just compare work to other authors, it compares the students style of work to itself. So if a student suddenly submits an essay which is written in a wildly different style to their previous essays it gets picked up.

Plagiarism isn't just from other published works, it can be paying someone to write a new essay for you via the net. Equally if your husband/various partners have all been doing your work for you your entire academic career then it will have been flagged at some point. Uni's are shit hot on plagiarism.

So I'm not really sure why the OP isn't using these resources to check. Unless she is, as someone said earlier more of a copy/subeditor and is overstepping the mark by deciding she has a say on this.

By all means, take it to her department if there's a suspicion. But just be aware that they probably have much more sophisticated means of picking up plagiarism than listening to a subbies idle gossip about the nature of her mate's romantic history.

I know that the software needs human input, but as I said above, it's not simply run against a database, it's run against students previous exams and essays to show if they have made a dramatic stylistic departure from their own work.

In this situation that would presumably be the first port of call, checking it like that. And there would be no need to ever reveal the OP picked it u as an issue in the first place?

Thank you Aermingers for explaining that the software is much more sophisticated than I guessed.

Aerminger: the software doesnt compare it to everything ever published anywhere. It compares it to whatever it is told is relevent. So, for an undergraduate class, it is comparing against classmates and previous students, the writings listed in the syllabus and some of the writings referenced by those and other expected references, perhaps those used in a lower level class. The human readers should be able to spot other current writing, or at least have their memory jogged enough to do a search. DH took mere seconds to spot a student had used entire paragraphs of DHs published work in a paper submitted to Dh. Clever he is, my DH! (the student's mother, a lawyer, argued this was not plagiarism and such cutting and pasting was perfectly reasonable, she did it all the time! )

If the professor sets completely different assignments each term, even getting a previous student's assistance will be less likely to trigger the software. It might send up a minor warning, but not enough to be clearly plagiarism.

The OP says that her friend's DH works "in a much more heavyweight, but very closely related field - but different department." so maybe the software wouldn't pick up the plagiarism given the info in Momagain1's post. Still, the OP's friend sounds so incompetent and lazy, that she really doesn't deserve promotion and how would she cope if she were to be promoted?

That's not really the point momagain. I'm not saying that everything in the whole world is in the database, but almost everything that student will have written will have gone through the database. And it will pick up if someone else has written for them. The words used, the syntax, the sentence length the grammar. You can hand in an essay nobody has ever seen beyond yourself and the real writer and it can still be picked up.

It sounds like the OP is beyond this stage and is doing the mechanics of editing and it's probably not part of her remit. She can take it and ask it to be checked, but they'll take her allegations with a huge pinch of salt and it will rest solely on the text rather than a vague allegation of fucking through a degree and PhD.

I think the line between 'helpful advice' and 'rewriting' is really interesting.

My tutor trashed rejected my first draft as historical description. So my second draft was wildly different, but wholly my own work. She was pleased with my response to her feedback and at my tutorial, sat with me and pointed out a few areas where my wording was verbose and lacking authority, suggesting alternative phrasing. I would argue it is still wholly my work because while she's given me examples, I have to implement that stylistic shift throughout my essay.

My tutor would ask me questions to encourage me to think and improve my essay. She would tell me that something is missing that she would expect to see (e.g. discussion on principles of biomedical ethics in relation to my topic), but she would not suggest the content of that missing element or the conclusion I should draw from it.

I think the problem here is that editing has gone from tightening up phrasing and weeding out grammatical errors, to wholesale content adjustment. It's no longer her own work and it will be very hard to pick out what is her idea and what is her DHs,unless they've used track changes on the document as it has been edited.

aermingers

1. The woman in question is not a student and it is not normal practice to put professional academic work through Turnitin

1. Turnitin does not pick up on ideas, syntax, grammar. And it's not run against an individual's previous work in my experience.

I'd love to see plagiarism software detecting hubris. That would be, literally (!), epic!

This woman is not an academic.

I'm sorry but if you work in a field where papers stand or fall on the strength of the writing and ideas, and she can't write and has shit ideas, then she needs to reconsider her career choice, not whine and impose on people too kind or weedy to tell her to shove off.

Why doesn't she just go and do something else for a living, something she can actually do?

How are your new balls of steel feeling?

Have you approached it yet?

Minor point, but why call this plagiarism? Unless husband has written those words before, I don't think it's plagiarism.

But fraud yes, representing someone else's work as your own. There's no software package for detecting fraud.

As for WWID: I think I'd return it to my friend saying that I thought her husband should be on the manuscript as coauthor. Maybe she'll say she's learnt to emulate his writing style. How do you disprove that?

Whether she needs to be sole author for promotion or whatever is very much Not OP's Problem.

Hmm, the only thing you can say with absolute certainty here is that there are stylistic traits that remind you of her husband's writing. That's all.

And yes, you probably should share that feedback with her.

However, you're on much shakier ground with everything else. As others have said up thread, there's a fine line between stylistic influence and plagiarism. If your friend & her husband are happy she's on the right side of that line, then what are you hoping to achieve? It makes sense that she'd be influenced by her husband's writing style as she will have plenty of exposure to it.

And I don't think you're in a position to judge 'what she is capable of', sorry. People grow/develop intellectually. Sometimes people need the right sparring partner to help bring out their best ideas. It's unfair of you to suggest that this is her husband's work when I presume you don't know much about the process she went through to produce this paper.

As a bit of an academic groupie, this thread is fascinating...like others, I would quite like some suggestions of areas in which I could gain a PhD. I'm broke, so I'd need to do it quickly, you see...

Was it Yeats who suggested gender/queer/wymmyns studies...?

I'm really glad this thread has inspired some people with the idea that they CAN write and they CAN do postgraduate research.

I have sent what I hope is a kindly-worded email to her, suggesting that the style sounds a little too much like her DH, that this is possibly accidental, but that it may raise unwelcome questions and that she might want to reconsider the style and approach. Waiting for her to go completely mental now.

I am going to raise this with her DH but face-to-face when we next see them. Academia can be a really horrible place. It occurred to me in the middle of the night, when I was thinking about this, that there are already rumours in the field about the way that she has put her name as first author on papers that were 95% written by second authors, some of whom feel aggrieved by this. (I sat through an agonising coffee with one of them, who was complaining strongly about it, and I was trying to move the conversation on). So they both need to take care.

ragged hits the nail on the head. It's not plagiarism, but fraud. He has written the paper for her, but it's new work.

And yes, I do have a PhD of my own in a very different field . And no, I am definitely not in any way in love with her husband. Quite happy with my own DH, who is an academic and has even better ideas!

It seems unlikely that the friend would suddenly develop a writing style so similar to her husband's though, laurie. Also, the friend and her husband don't sound especially objective and critical of her writing judging from this thread, so their assessment is frankly suspect.

I think you need to make a straightforward comment to test the water op.

"Hey friend, I just wanted to check - should I add your DH as a co-author?"
"Why?"
"Well, it reads REALLY like him......"
or "Haha yes, I talked about it a lot with him but it's all my work."

It could go either way but I do think you need to say something.

that there are already rumours in the field about the way that she has put her name as first author on papers that were 95% written by second authors, some of whom feel aggrieved by this. (I sat through an agonising coffee with one of them, who was complaining strongly about it, and I was trying to move the conversation on). So they both need to take care.