'Plagiarized!' 'Total Nonsense...'

Cambridge, Mass.

Alexander Cockburn's politically motivated claim that I "plagiarized" from Joan Peters is total nonsense ["Beat the Devil," Oct. 13]. Let's begin with what is undisputed: Every word written by others appears with quotation marks, is cited to their original or secondary sources and is quoted accurately. This means that they are not plagiarized. James Freedman, the former president of Dartmouth and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has concluded, after reviewing the relevant material, that what I did was "simply not plagiarism, under any reasonable definition of that word."

Cockburn's claim is that some of the quotes should not have been cited to their original sources but rather to a secondary source, where he believes I stumbled upon them. Even if he were correct that I found all these quotations in Peters's book, the preferred method of citation is to the original source, as the Chicago Manual of Style emphasizes: "With all reuse of others' materials, it is important to identify the original as the source. This...helps avoid any accusation of plagiarism...To cite a source from a secondary source ('quoted in...') is generally to be discouraged...."

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