The magazine Popular Mechanics, where I once worked, used to have a column called “Saturday Mechanic.” It was a guide to basic car repair for the weekend tinkerer, and its author had decades of experience both in fixing cars and writing about them. Nonetheless, for each column, he would perform the task in question, carefully documenting each step with photographs. It was a lot of work, in other words.
One day I happened upon a website offering a wide range of how-to advice, including several of the topics our Saturday Mechanic column had recently covered. It took only a minute to see that this author was simply paraphrasing our columns virtually line by line. If our article said, “Bleed the excess air out of the brake line,” the rip-off version might read, “Expel the unnecessary vapor from the brake tube.” The author, who was no doubt being paid pennies a word, probably thought her clever rewording was enough to keep her on the safe side of the plagiarism line. Of course, her awkward word choices also made it obvious that she’d never lifted a car hood in her life.
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James B. Meigs is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a City Journal contributing editor, cohost of the How Do We Fix It? podcast, and the former editor of Popular Mechanics.
Photo by Yuichiro Chino/Getty Images