Why soliciting plagiarized term papers on the Internet can be a dangerous thing: you might contact a comedy writer who’s also a blogger with academic standards …
I reached one more branch out to her, in the form of misspelling the name of the god of destruction as a liquor brand. But it wasn’t enough to get her to tell me to fuck myself, so I started making up my plan. Which was real simple: Take her money and cut and paste a paper together from the internet that was so obviously plagiarised that she’d be guaranteed to get caught. And then, if I was able to get the information out of her, I’d report her to whatever her school was, and who knows, maybe even pump her for double money in exchange for not turning her in. Either way, I’d eventually be writing the story up in this blog, and sending her the link to it.
Is this harsh? Eh, I don’t think so.
Good luck, Laura Pahl of Lewis University … you’re going to need it.
Great stuff.
The paper itself was a joy to read.
Though It looks like you misspelled her name “Pahl” not “Paul”.
I knew I should have paid that guy more to write the post for me, dagnabbit …
Perhaps I shouldn’t say this in public, since it will give away my secret. Oh, what the hell.
I catch plagiarism most often when the writing is far better than can be expected. Nate didn’t need to include jokes like “I made a doody.” in the paper. If he wrote the paper with good grammar, some moderately-rarely-used words, and some sophisticated analysis, the professor would get suspicious.
The second biggest clue for me is when things don’t fit together right. The paper is slightly off the topic I assigned, or two paragraphs don’t have the same writing style, or the grammar suggests that two grammatical sentences have been copy-cut-and-pasted together in a way that made them ungrammatical.
Plagiarists are frequently stupid. Or at any rate, the ones I catch are often stupid. There might be some smart ones out there that are laughing at me because I didn’t catch them. Perhaps that’s so, but I’m not worried about that possibility.
The best case I ever had was when someone plagiarized my own writing in a paper they turned in for my class. They took some stuff off my own web page for that very class, and reformatted it as a short paper (I often assign one-page writing assignments). How stupid do you need to me to think that your instructor will not recognize his own writing?
Isaac Asimov wrote about the time a teacher asked him to read a story by one of her students. She felt that it was too good to have been written by the kid, and thought that the Good Doctor might recognize it. It turned out to be Asimov’s story, “Galley Slave,” word for word.
I find it amusing, btw, that the Google Ads on this page include (at this moment) at least one paper mill (“100,000 English Essays!”).
The saga continues.
The saga concludes. Really.