Week 3 Blog Assignment

After reading Malcolm Gladwell's "Something Borrowed" and Chapter 2 of My Word by Susan Blum, write a blog post (about 500 words long) reflecting on either or both of the readings. For example, you could respond to the Gladwell article alone (Do you think that Byrony Lavery,the playwright, was wrong to "borrow" from Gladwell? To borrow from the real life of Dorothy Lewis, as described in Gladwell's article? Or in this type of situation, was the borrowing necessary to create something new -- Lavery's play?) Or, you can respond to Chapter 2 of My Word -- for example, what do you think of Blum's idea that the "genre of quotation" has proliferated? (Wired recently published an interesting article about Ben Huh, the founder of the Cheezburger Network. Huh and his employees basically make their living by plagiarizing/borrowing ideas from others and turning them into money-making sites like I Can Has Cheezburger and Failblog.) Or, you can compare and contrast some of the ideas in the Gladwell article and Chapter 2 -- they both, after all, deal with ideas of originality, authorship, and plagiarism.