My undergraduate student just sent me the abstract (or the first 100 words of it) for her project. I really liked the first three sentances, they were very professional. Very familiar, though. PubMed thought so too. The third sentance in particular was familiar - because I wrote it! It was taken out of the introduction of my paper. The first two sentances were taken from the introduction to another of our papers, for which I was an author and edited the manuscript a great deal. This is not the best of first drafts, all things considered. I have politely reminded her not to plagiarize from our previous papers (no matter how much my PI likes to do it).
If you're going to send stolen text to your editor, it's probably not wise for the stolen text to be from that editor..
P.S. I really enjoyed the ride to work today. I rode up to the Seawall and all the way down it, and then back. In the morning, it's so clean and breezy.
