Newsflash: Something apparently isn't plagiarism if the words you use are all from the dictionary. This is according to a brilliant "journalist" named Ben Domenech who wrote for the Washington Post. He has since resigned, due to the allegations surrounding his questionably written columns.
It boggles my mind that ANYONE who writes in the public forum would try to get away with plagiarism these days, given that it takes any college professor all of five minutes to determine if some suspiciously worded paper is legit or not, simply through the wonder and beauty that is google. So how could any newspaper columnist actually think that no one would bother to check up on them from time to time?
I used to think that plagiarism at the college level was only undertaken by the rare lazy stupid lying cheat but apparently that's not the case, either. My retirement planning class has had at least three different lectures on plagiarism, yet with each subsequent assignment it continues to be an issue. I also think that this particular professor is one of the exceptional ones who actually checks (outside the English department) if their essays and assignments have been plagiarized. It just really makes me mad, that's all.
1 comment:
Kirb, I had a professor last semester who asked for hard copies and floppy disk copies of our midterm papers. He then e-mailed them to a service that runs a check on plagiarism. I think it's a sad testament to the type of people who are writing term papers that there is a business that makes its money by charging professors to check if the papers are fresh or not.
Post a Comment