Melania Trump's speech at the Republican National Convention on the evening of July 18 included a passage that was plagiarized nearly word for word from Michelle Obama's speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2008 (side-by-side video comparison).
This scenario is not entirely uncommon, in politics and in business (cf. military contractor Raytheon's CEO plagiarism scandal), although it rarely occurs on this big a stage. Speechwriters draft these addresses, and sometimes they cut corners under time pressure, or plug in verbiage from older speeches when constructing an outline and forget to rewrite. (In the case of Melania Trump, things are a bit more awkward because earlier in the day she told NBC's Matt Lauer "I wrote [the speech] ... with as little help as possible.")
PR pros, take heed: If your CEO or client is going to be giving a speech, you need to step in between the speechwriter (if it's not yourself) and the speaker, and vet the speech for plagiarism, not just for messaging. How? Just ask any high school English teacher: Aside from simply Googling key phrases, there are online plagiarism-checking tools that let you paste in the entire text of a speech. Turnitin.com was one of the first such tools on the scene, but today there are also several free options, such as:
- https://www.grammarly.com/plagiarism-checker
- http://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker
- https://searchenginereports.net/plagiarism-checker
You want the messages within the speech to be the story. Any slip-ups involving plagiarism transform the story into one about the speaker's laziness or untrustworthiness, and the intent behind the speech vanishes into thin air. Behold the Twitter hashtag #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes:
"It was all a dream. I used to read Word Up magazine." #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes
— Bossip (@Bossip) July 19, 2016
"Barack Obama is still the same man I fell in love with all those years ago" #FamousMelaniaTrumpQuotes
— Jordan Brown (@JBrownGatsby) July 19, 2016
It's safe to say that this is not what the Trump campaign hoped the conversation would be.
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