Writing | Editing | Reading

How Do You Plagiarize?

Let Me Count The Many New Ways

Photo by Tanja Cotoaga on Unsplash

First I’ll say U.G.H.

Now that the sour taste is out of my mouth I can continue.

Over the years I have been a full-time and part-time professor at various universities, colleges, and community colleges — in person and online.

I have read a lot of student papers over that lifetime. I have seen many plagiarized papers over that lifetime. I got good at spotting them. When you're teaching and reading you get a feel for how a student writes and that helps when you see writing that is totally out of character.

A lot of that teaching was pre-Internet and it was hard to spot plagiarized material early in a semester as you had no idea yet of anyone’s writing style. But as a semester went on, and a student’s style changed from paper to paper — well questions were raised.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Sometimes students just paid someone to write their papers or they borrowed a paper from someone who had taken a course like mine — hoping that it would never be noticed. One student even copied a paper from a student who HAD taken my…