Twitter Had Some Fun with Melania Trump’s Plagiarized Speech

(Students across the country: SMH)

Melania Trump at the 2016 Republication National Convention

If you’ve taught a class in the last ten years, you know how difficult it is to keep internet-savvy students from succumbing to the allure of a quick copy-and-paste. Writers haven’t been immune to the ease of plagiarism, either; look at recent cases such as Jonah Lehrer, the author who plagarized material and published it as his own for websites such as Wired.com, or Fareed Zakaria, the man who gave the keynote speech at my college gratuation shortly before being outed as a plagiarist for CNN, among other publications. Luckily for truth-seekers, and overwhelmed teachers, there are programs that can quickly identify plagiarized material.

Looks like someone forget to tell Melania Trump, or her speech writers.

Yesterday at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, the wife of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump gave a speech which lifted phrases from Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

The internet quickly picked up on the plagiarism, and Jesse Williams, actor and first class speech-maker himself, started the hashtag #famousmelaniatrumpquotes with this tweet:

It started one of the better internet memes, with everything from works of classic literature to rap songs attributed to Melania.

Who actually did the cribbing? We may never know.

And a valuable PSA to the young:

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