To the editor:

I am writing to respond to an article in the Oct. 1 Northerner, which reported that a letter to the editor published on Sept. 24 had been plagiarized. According to the article, approximately 60 percent of the student’s letter was taken verbatim from an article posted on the Internet.

In his dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson defined plagiarism with one word: “theft.”

The NKU Student Honor Code uses a few more words, defining plagiarism as “representing another’s work, in whole or in part, as one’s own…including those involving use of the Web, Internet or other electronic resources.” However many words we use, it comes down to the same offense: taking someone else’s work and making others believe that it is one’s own constitutes an act of dishonesty.

The rule of honesty is not limited to classroom assignments. It applies to all the writing we do.