Kaavya Viswanathan Can't Stop the Plagiarizing
The Times reports today that Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan seems to have plagiarized from a third work, Sophie Kinsella's Can You Keep a Secret? Last week, Viswanathan confessed to "unintentionally" plagiarizing the work of Megan McCafferty, whose words appear in Viswanathan's How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life in more than 40 separate passages. Publisher Little, Brown has since ordered stores to pull Viswanathan's book from the shelves.
While the plagiarizing of Kinsella's work is hardly as blatant as that of McCafferty's, there are still instances of identical phrasing and passages in Opal. Most of the examples are very small, but relatively obvious:
Kinsella: "In a full-scale argument about animal rights," one character says, "The mink like being made into coats."
Viswanathan: In a "a full-fledged debate over animal rights," one character says, "The foxes want to be made into scarves."
Interestingly, all the Kinsella-copying is conveniently clustered towards the latter 1/3 of the book — that's likely the point at which Viswanathan ran out of McCafferty's steam and had to steal some new inspiration.
A Second Ripple in Plagiarism Scandal [NYT]
Earlier: Gawker's Coverage of Kaavya Viswanathan