Plagiarism and the Preacher

I preach from brief notes. I think everyone is a bit weird and odd (in their own way) in the way they preach. I think the way you prepare will increase the unwitting likelihood of plagiarism. For example, I preach from Logos. Here is a portion of my preaching notes from this past Sunday. Almost everything I say is extemporaneous; the notes just prompt me what to say.

Excellent article

If a cliche suddenly comes to my mind while I am preaching and it fits with the point I am trying to make, but I do not know the source of that cliche, is it plagiarism? I understand that if quote something word for word from a commentary or other source, that I should tell where I got it from and I do, but what if I suddenly remember something I read or heard but cannot remember where? Can I simply share that concept or do I have to pause and say that this is not original to me and that I heard it somewhere? What if it is something that a lot of people have heard and is not intellectual material specific to one person? What if it is a quote typically attributed to Ben Franklin, and you site him, but then later find out that Ben Franklin was actually quoting a much earlier source? Did Ben plagiarize them or was he just sharing common information. With AI we can type in something that we came up with that we thought was original and find out that someone else had already said it. Was it really original or was it locked away in our subconscious because we had heard it from someone else? Further, if we search for something in AI and find out that Mr. Nonamenooneheardof said it in 1878, do we have to attribute him or do we only have to attribute him if it was someone famous? What if a famous person said it in 1901. Who do we site, the famous person or the unknown guy from 1878? I am not suggesting that we should just copy and paste other's material without attributing it, but what I am saying is that we must be careful not to use accusations of plagiarism as a gotcha moment to go after those we are looking for an excuse to be critical of. I appreciated the article for making some great points in this regard.

To me, the lines are pretty simple based on what you know when doing your prep. (or, if you improv much, during your delivery)

• If you know you got it from so and so, you attribute it to so and so
• If you know you heard/read it somewhere, you attribute it to ‘somebody once said’ (or similar)
• If you aren’t sure if it’s already somewhere else, any attribution is optional.

On that third bullet, I often do a ‘I think I read this somewhere…’ but not always. In some cases, your point is stronger if you note that you aren’t the first to say it this way. In other situations, it’s just noise and best left out.

Doesn’t hurt to generally acknowledge now and then you have benefited from the work of lots of other students of the Word over the years and that when you’ve had good teachers, their ideas and often even their wording become part of your own thinking to the degree that you don’t know where one ends and the other begins.

(There’s a parallel in music that I find interesting. I do some composing for fun, and often ideas feel more remembered than invented. Fortunately, nobody ‘owns’ chord progressions, because we use them over and over. And short musical phrases are used over and over. But if you know you pulled this bit from another composers’ work, isn’t it common sense to give them a hat tip somewhere? In music and often in film, ‘copying’ someone’s work a little is often considered homage. But the key factor there is, will people recognize that’s what you’re doing or are you claiming/implying originality?)