Stop plagiarism (1)

The Sunday Post published on Nov. 28, 1999 an article titled Finding the funny side of things, a good reason to laugh. I highly appreciated the article by Otong S. Djuharie, a lecturer at Sunan Gunung Djati State Institute for Islamic Studies in Bandung. His article was very good. It was easy to understand and full of analyses. Besides, he viewed things from several aspects, testifying to his wide knowledge.

However, one day I came across a book titled Reader's Choice. A very good publication indeed. Page 161 has the same contents as the article mentioned above. It has the title Why We Laugh and was written by Janet Spencer and first published in Woman's Daily Journal in the U.S. in 1974.

A rechecking of Djuharie's article showed that there were similarities in more than 80 percent of the article (words, paragraphs and style).

Djuharie's latest article in The Jakarta Post, Building Professional Teachers on Jan. 25, 2000 put its readers in the same quandary. I found similarities in H. Douglas Brown's book Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy (chapter 22, pages 425 to 443).

Actually we can quote someone's opinion but we are obliged to mention the source. I would like to have clarification on whether this is a matter of plagiarism.

I hope the same problem will not recur in our beloved newspaper. It should be borne in mind that the Post's readers are very critical.

IRWAN

Bandung