An Easy Equation from the English Major: You+Plagiarism=Stupid

[rhikat]

Someone on craigslist has issued a plea for help...in the form of offering to pay $50 to anyone willing to write their humanities paper for them. I'm kind of tempted to respond to them, either with a completely crappy essay or a preachy e-mail about how plagarism is Wrong, and you should just do the damn work. Writign the bad paper wouldn't be hard

Comments

[caelbriar]

Lawl, you know you'll soon miss those 5-6 page papers compairing and contrasting the gender roles in Emily Dickenson's poetry. Soon you will crave it. Need it. Want it! MUAHAHAH!!!

(Truth: I can't wait to getting back to enjoying novels and not looking for deeper themes that only the professor sees.)

[rhikat]

I actually never had to read any of Emily Dickenson's poetry in my lit courses.

I liked looking for the deeper themes and getting to discuss pulling the novels/texts apart in my lit. courses, but I'm still thrilled that I don't have to write 5-6 (or 8-10 or 10-15)page papers about that sort of thing unless I have lots of free and am moved to do so.

[nikorusama]

I think it is stupid that you can actually plagerise yourself....i found this out a while back, how can you steal stuff from yourself? Thats just silly! I found it hard rewiring my own words inot my urm own words lol. Nic (charity) xxx

[rhikat]

The idea there is less about stealing other people's ideas and more about academic dishonesty. It's kind of taking the easy way out and passing off something that was written for another class as something new--which also means not really thinking about the subject in the context of the new class. In my experience, it's pretty rare that there'll be a time when something that was written for one class will fit perfectly with what was written for another one, even if the class topics are similar.

I have done stuff like (with permission from professors) over lap research for different classes, but I wrote different papers for them. In those cases, turning in the same paper wouldn't even had worked, since the professors had different styles they wanted you to use and the classes had different ways of looking at what I was writing about.

And if you want tips of how to make rewriting in your own different words easier, I certainly have them. ;)