The Chicago Tribune discussing Nelms on Poshard

The Chicago Tribune began a commentary:

--"There is no firm consensus on the defining features of plagiarism."

We're quoting here from a memo by R. Gerald Nelms, an associate professor of composition and rhetoric at Southern Illinois University who was asked for an opinion on whether SIU President Glenn Poshard plagiarized parts of his 1984 doctoral thesis.

IPBiz had already criticized the limited analysis made by Nelms of the Poshard thesis, which completely ignored the problem at page 54 of the thesis.

The Trib also wrote:

The task force draft policy and Nelms' memo are both loaded with excuses for the next SIU plagiarist to employ in a lawsuit against the university. If you think plagiarism is plagiarism is plagiarism, then you don't know about "cryp-tomnesia," which is what happens when a writer internalizes someone else's ideas so completely that she forgets she didn't think them up herself. Another writer, in striving to imitate the lingo of his subject matter, might lift too much verbatim wording, but that's not plagiarism -- it's "patchwriting."

Nelms' memo -- and the work of the task force, of which he is a member -- argues that plagiarism isn't 100 percent black and white, and that zero tolerance isn't always the best policy.