excuse me, she internalized it?
I let out a little chick-lit related gasp when I read this in USA Today.
A Harvard sophomore accused of plagiarizing parts of another novelist's work apologized on Monday and said her book would be revised for future printings to eliminate "inappropriate" but "unintentional" similarities between them.
Kaavya Viswanathan, 19, received mostly positive reviews (including one in USA TODAY) for her April chick-lit title, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.
But Viswanathan's book, about an Indian-American teenager who sets her sights on Harvard, includes passages that are strikingly similar — and sometimes the same — as passages in two novels by Megan McCafferty: Sloppy Firsts, published in 2001, and Second Helpings, published in 2003.
Check the article out. This is not a case of a young writer magically internalizing prose, as she claims. That is not the way it works. She held the book open and copied. If you covet another writer's sentences, you know exactly where they are on the page in the book on the shelf in the room and you never ever ever go there.