“Inadvertent repetition of biographical boilerplate was not an egregious theft intentionally performed?”.

A post at the Guardian on the Bialosky matter begins:



More than 70 authors, including Pulitzer prize winners Jennifer Egan and Louise Glück, have come to the defence of the editor and poet Jill Bialosky after she was accused of plagiarism, saying that Bialosky’s “inadvertent repetition of biographical boilerplate was not an egregious theft intentionally performed”.



The problem with the word "inadvertent" is that there was a deliberate substitution of certain words to avoid explicit word-for-word plagiarism; as noted in the Guardian:




Logan provided examples of Bialosky’s writing and the passages from Wikipedia, adding that “many of Bialosky’s changes here and elsewhere – ‘barely’ for ‘seldom’, ‘verse’ for ‘poetry’, ‘unleashed’ for ‘gave rise to’, ‘total’ for ‘complete’ – are the slight, guilty revisions of the serial plagiarist”.




link: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/12/writers-defend-author-accused-plagiarism-jill-bialosky-poetry-will-save-your-life