A Student-Writer Nightmare

Image courtesy of Santeri Viinamäki on Wikimedia Commons — This does not mean the photographer endorses my blog or the use of the image.

I had this horrific nightmare last night.

I dreamed I had written the perfect paper for an education course. The ideas were fresh, and the citations were perfect down to the punctuation I always mess up in APA format. I don’t know what the topic was.

I can remember being in front of the screen. I selected the checkbox that I would submit it to the tool that checks for plagiarism and clicked the submit button.

Within 48 hours, a university official was at my door. I was being served with papers that terminated me from the program for academic dishonesty and plagiarism. It seems that under my legal identity I re-explored something I had done years before under my pen name on this blog.

Is this possible? Can your legal identity plagiarize yourself under your pen name?

Worse yet, is it a kind of arrogance to cite yourself — that is, to quote your pen name with APA reference entry in a paper you write under your legal name?

I always try to keep a strict distance between my legal and pen names. However, I also recognize that I left a lot of ties in the early years. I also recognize that due to the black magic of the internet we truly have no secrecy and no privacy; somewhere there will be a soft connection.

Besides, there is nothing new under the sun. Ideas that were around thousands of years ago are still around today. Today’s artists are using the same subjects Neanderthals had in the caves. The human experience has not changed.