Kaavya Viswanathan was offered a two book deal with Alloy and a one movie deal with DreamWorks worth $500,000 and in 2006 Kaavya Viswanathan wrote and released a book titled “How Opal Mehta Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life”. A few weeks after it was released by Alloy it was discovered that she plagiarized several different authors. A few of the authors that she took portions of her work from and the books that they were from are Megan F. McCafferty “Sloppy First”, “Second Helpings”, Toni Morrison “The Bluest Eye” and Tanuja Desai Hidier “Born Confused” (Zhou, 2006) (Dave, 2006). After the plagiarism was discovered her books were taken off the shelves and she lost the contract for the movie. At the time this took place Kaavya Viswanathan was a student at Harvard University, the academic board met to go over the case and they determined that because it was not academic plagiarism that she would not be punished by the school, however she did take a leave of absence from school until all aspects of the case was settled (Dave, 2006). Plagiarism is when someone copies another’s work verbatim and puts their name on it taking full ownership of the work (iParadigms, LLC, 2013). Paraphrasing is also considered to be plagiarism if it is not cited giving credit to the original author of the work. There are a couple ways that someone could mistakenly plagiarize their work. The first is if the person does not know when or how to cite the source from where they got the words from whether it is a full sentence or just paraphrasing. The second is if they use too many of someone’s words throughout the paper they are working on even if they do cite the work. If a person uses too much of someone else’s work then the paper is not original to them. There are a couple of ways that would help not to plagiarize someone’s work. The first is to plan my paper. This I do by thinking about what and how I wish to write the paper. The second way is to take notes. This I do a lot of, I find that it helps to organize my thoughts about what I am going to be writing about. When I take notes I only make note of the key points which usually only turns out to be three or four words, which I use to write the paper in my own words. I also hand write the rough draft before I type it up, these are things that I have done since high school and I find that they work for me.
In conclusion, as shown with the incident involving the author Kaavya Viswanathan it is better to cite your work then not to. Plagiarism is a very serious offense whether it is academically or work related. If a person do academic plagiarism they run the risk of being expelled from school or the lesser punishment of academic probation. If an employee for a company had a report to do and chose to plagiarize someone else’s work then the employee would run the risk of having their employment terminated with that particular company.

References: iParadigms, LLC. (2013). Plagiarism 101. Retrieved from http://plagiarism.org/plagiarism-101/what-is-plagiarism
Zhou, D. (2006, April 23). Student’s novel faces plagiarism controversy. Retrieved from http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2006/4/23/students-novel-faces-plagiarism-controversy-beditors/
Dave, T. ( 2006). How kaavya viswanathan got ideas, got a deal and got caught. Retrieved from http://www.desiclub.com/community/culture/culture_article.cfm?id=259
Examples of unintentional plagiarism. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://myedison.tesc.edu/tescdocs/DIAL_Information/plagiarism_exx.htm