‘Strikingly Similar’ by Roger Kreuz review

During my first term teaching at a university, I was marking essays on Romeo and Juliet when I came across an unusually perceptive turn of phrase. The students were analysing the scene immediately after Juliet has been discovered ‘dead’ in which the Capulets’ servant asks musicians to play a happy song. A student had described it as a ‘caesura’ in the play, a metrical break, since it pauses the action just as the tragedy begins to unfold. This suggested an insight into rhetorical and dramatic structure, I wrote in my feedback, which could be built on in the future. Pleased, I moved on to the next essay – and was confronted with precisely the same phrasing. It didn’t take long to locate the source. It had come directly from the summary website SparkNotes.

Was this plagiarism? It was certainly a dereliction of academic integrity and a clear example of failing to cite one’s sources. Had the word been given in quotation marks and the website properly referenced, I would have spoken to the students about how to assess the reliability and value of their reading material, but they wouldn’t have done anything wrong. By some definitions, they didn’t: you can’t plagiarise a single word. The severity of the issue usually depends on intention. Plagiarism exists in a nebulous ethical space, covering both legal and emotional issues regarding originality, intellectual property, and the ownership of ideas. The general rule is that you should credit something if you couldn’t have done your own work without access to it. But while that’s fine in theory, it’s harder to prove in practice. After all, had I not come across that second essay immediately, I would have left the first student with some glowing praise they hadn’t earned. To be recognised, plagiarism requires someone to have knowledge of the plagiarised work – or for someone to be looking for it.

It also requires a framework, whether that be legal or ethical, in which it is understood to be a problem. Despite the suggestive subtitle of his book, Roger Kreuz mostly focuses on issues of plagiarism as they relate to cases from the 19th century onwards. He acknowledges that plagiarism is not a particularly helpful concept for understanding the work of medieval and Renaissance writers, for whom the much-theorised concept of imitatio was key. Nobody was that fussed that Shakespeare was retelling stories ripped directly from his sources as long as he was doing something interesting with them. Schoolboys learnt to write and argue by emulating the classical texts they were reading – how well you did in school was not about how novel you could be but about how well you knew your stuff. And it was by deliberately framing their work as humble responses to male authors rather than their own ideas that women such as Isabella Whitney found a way to write and be published: her 1573 work ‘A Sweet Nosegay’ was presented as a poetic representation of Sir Hugh Plat’s 1572 ‘The Floures of Philosophie’.

Some of this spirit recurs in two of the reasons suggested by Kreuz and other psychologists for modern plagiarism: a sense of genuine admiration for the work being used and a desire to be in conversation with previous thinkers. Across the book, it becomes clear that there are three major types of plagiarist. There are those who do it without knowing what plagiarism is; those who are doing it accidentally, having mixed up their notes, for example; and those who do it deliberately with full knowledge.

The most entertaining stories contained in this book circulate around the first type. (The murkier motives of those who plagiarise simply for money, out of laziness, or because they know – probably, Kreuz surmises, correctly – that they are unlikely to be caught make for grimmer reading.) There’s the Missouri schoolboy who in 1936 won a radio essay contest, for example, under the impression that it was just the challenge of sending in the best essay you could find (whether you choose to believe him is up to you). Then there are cases of ‘unconscious plagiarism’. Kreuz’ sense is that more often than not, these cases reveal something about how influence, memory, and creativity work. It is hard to believe that Kamala Harris deliberately stole an anecdote from Martin Luther King in her 2009 book Smart on Crime – and just as hard to believe, when the passages are printed side-by-side, that the two stories are not related. George Harrison found no relief that a judge believed him when he said he did not remember the harmony of the song ‘He’s So Fine’ when writing ‘My Sweet Lord’: the copyright infringement was ‘no less so even though subconsciously accomplished’ and damages were due. Reading this book has the unfortunate side-effect of embedding a slight paranoia in you not only about how well you keep your notes – poor record keeping is offered multiple times as a defence for inadvertent plagiarism – but about how imaginative you really are; can you be sure that your brilliant idea hasn’t come from a book you’ve forgotten reading?

It is hard to teach students how to reference properly. For one thing, they don’t find it very interesting. The threat of accidentally doing something wrong because you have failed to grasp the shifting borders of citation practices causes stress: the most anxious begin to doubt that there is anything they have to say that should not be cited. Until you have learnt to think of yourself as someone with unique and valuable ideas, it is difficult to understand why crediting those ideas should matter.

Kreuz makes it clear that the psychology of inspiration works in a way that strict rules and regulations will never be fully fit for, but he also makes a case for why it matters. If we stop caring about where thoughts have come from, we open the way for a jumbled world of the stolen, decontextualised, and dehistoricised. In the final chapter the author suggests that a large language model’s output is more comparable to ghost-writing than plagiarism. But the rest of the book makes it clear that an LLM’s mangling of data is not just a crime against the person whose writing has been swept into an incorrigible maw, but a strike against the notion that ideas should be traceable to people at all.

• Strikingly Similar: Plagiarism and Appropriation from Chaucer to Chatbots
  Roger Kreuz
  Cambridge University Press, 352pp, £27.50
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Alice Wickenden is a researcher at the University of Cambridge