Writing | Editing | Reading
How Do You Plagiarize?
Let Me Count The Many New Ways
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.
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…
