If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then I should be highly flattered at this moment. Unfortunately, I can’t help but feel a bit peeved, irritated, and ripped-off. My blog recently picked up a ping-back from another blog post – they had linked something on their blog to mine. I was curious and a little excited to see how my blog has spread. Imagine my surprise when I saw they had nearly plagiarized my most recent blog post, The Lemon Crepe & Coffee Co. This blogger completely stole my post! They used the same ideas, the same sentence structures, and the same flow. They seemed to think they could get away with it by changing up a few adjectives and sentence fragments to make it “unique.” I’ll be quite frank here, but the more I read, the more I wanted to punch this person in the face. I could feel my blood pressure rising as I realized my hard-written review was splattered on someone else’s blog.
Now, they might argue that at the end they included a convenient, “See Original Post,” with a link to my blog. Doing this does not make stealing someone else’s work okay. Changing key words and phrases, but essentially using the same article is also not okay, either. It is one thing to write your own stuff and then quote others properly to support your point; it is entirely another when you lazily take from someone else. As an aspiring writer using this blog space as my portfolio, I was not happy when I discovered this thief. Do your own work!
The only solace I find in this situation is that their reinterpretation of my article is terrible. In their attempt to make their article sound different, it just seems disjointed and unresearched. They don’t even sound like they’ve ever even been to Dublin (and I have to point out that their picture included is of the South William Street location, which is not seconds from the Trinity College campus, as they claim). And I guess another positive in my situation is that when you Google “The Lemon Crepe & Coffee Co.” my blog comes up as the number one site.
I won’t give this blog the satisfaction of even mentioning their name, because then my trusty readers would be tempted to visit their site, thus giving them more viewership. If they do read this, I want them to know that taking my work is not okay, and if they are interested in becoming writers themselves, they’re in for a long road – unoriginal and uninspired work makes for poor writing, plain and simple.
Oh, and plagiarism is illegal…
