Learning from a Master Without Becoming a Copy

The culture of originality demands that you sound like yourself straight away and is suspicious of imitation. But learning almost always begins with repeating someone else’s form; the problem appears when someone else’s result is passed off as your own.

A musician plays other people’s pieces. A painter studies the technique of the masters. A programmer reads other people’s code. A writer sounds for a while like the author he has just finished reading.

This is the normal way to master a form.

Plagiarism begins where someone else’s work is passed off as your own, or used without permission and without attribution.

The distinctions matter: a copy made as an exercise, a quotation with attribution, an adaptation, the use of a common method, and the appropriation of a specific result.

Following the example of a recognised master is useful but not sufficient. A copy always depends on a solution already found. To go further, you have to understand why it works, what limits it had, and what has changed since.

Nor does an idea become the personal property of the first person who said it loudly. Many ideas arise independently, and shared methods belong to the discipline.

So good faith requires not only naming the author, but also not crediting him with more than he did.

The “quick fix” of copying is especially dangerous in work where the result has to be verifiable. Someone else’s calculation, text or program may contain assumptions that do not fit the new task.

Copying the form is acceptable. Responsibility for the application stays with whoever pressed the button.

A cook who has reproduced someone else’s dish knows the sequence but not the tolerances. He is unaware that the sauce holds only at a certain cream fat content, and that the timing was given for a hob of different power. While conditions match, the copy works; at the first deviation there is nothing to fix it with, because the author understood why he did it that way and the copier only remembers what he did. The same goes for someone else’s calculation: it usually has a margin built in for conditions the calculation itself does not mention.

So there is one question to ask of any borrowing: what here can be changed. Anyone who does not know the answer has not adopted a method — he has rented the author’s luck.