There's definitely software for this.
Good point! We use Turn-it-in at school. But that would make a way more boring article. NEW THREAD!
Something something plagiostomi bridgeplatica.
Does it have a trenchcoat favicon?
Why does Firefox's spellchecker have the vocabulary of an 8-year old?
Regarding the guy in the linked article, I'm going to go ahead and vote "crackpot". Maybe I just don't care enough about poetry.
There's discussion of intertextuality, and whether Lightman is too punitive on poems that are intentionally riffing on other poems.
He seems to think he has some sort of superpower that allows him to tell the difference between "influenced by" or "riffing on" and plagiarism. Maybe he does, but I'm skeptical.
I think that I shall never see,
a poem so lovely as a tree.
Poems are made by fools like thee,
But I can copy any with no worry.
I fight plagiarism in my classes in a couple of ways.
(1) By giving a very scary rant about it a couple of times a semester, telling them all the terrible things that have happened to students who have been caught, and how easily I caught those students
(2) By writing assignments that are not easily plagiarized -- like, I don't assign papers over books that have been read to death in similar classes. I look for interesting but seldom-assigned books.
(3) By requiring multi-draft papers, which they and I go over together. This part is such a pain in the ass I cannot even begin to tell you. But it catches so many badly plagiarized papers at the early stages -- we sit together in my office and I say, "I don't understand what you mean in this paragraph. Can you explain?" And they can't, because they cut and pasted from some source they didn't even read, which often has nothing to do with the text at hand. BAM! You fail, kid, get the fuck outta my class.
Last semester I had two separate students plagiarize, in back to back conferences, from the same (terrible) book review. In their defense, this book had only been reviewed by a couple of people. (It had just been published a few months before, and was one of those little known works I mentioned above.) *Both* of the students tried to claim, even when I showed them the book review in question, that they had written every word of the papers themselves.
Ai.
I have stolen
the poems
that were in
the anthology
and which
you were probably
saving
for a Pulitzer
Forgive me
it was expeditious
so fleet
and so bold
Somebody needs to publish an anthology of parodies of Williams' bloody plums. I'm sure there's a book's worth; otherwise tumblr.
9, for example, is excellent and could supply the envoi to the collection.
11 is really good. The Shelley especially.
I think he died young, but a very long time ago.
Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me,
As plurdled gabbleblotchits,
On a lurgid bee,
That mordiously hath blurted out,
Its earted jurtles, grumbling
Into a rancid festering confectious organ squealer.
But also, you shouldn't fucking copy someone else's poem. (Imagine the insecurity and panic that leads someone established to flagrantly do so.)
"It is worth remembering, that it is much more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from, hmmm?"
I have a semi-related question, how much of a syllabus can be plagiarized? I have to submit an "Intro to [my specialty]" course description for a job, and I'm wondering how original it has to be?
"...more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from, hmmm?"
When it comes to bread that you're stealing to feed your starving toddler in Revolutionary France, yeah, sure.
When it comes to writing essays for your Comp I class, this has not been my experience in the least. That is, students who have the most trouble with writing and thinking about writing are those who work the hardest. Plagiarists tend to be (I am sorry to use this word, but here we are) privileged rich kids who consider English classes a waste of their special little lives.
Having been told, often, by their parents that education is a scam and a waste of time, and they don't see any reason to spend their precious hours on my silly little class.
When it comes to writing essays for your Comp I class, this has not been my experience in the least.
I'm not even sure that the statement is true within the framework of the movie. But it is a memorable line from a great scene in a classic movie.
Sorry, Nick. I'm just having a really rough week.
"...how much of a syllabus can be plagiarized?"
I've never known the answer to that. Here at my U, Huge chunks of our syllabi are literally required to be boiler plate -- that is, our university sends the statements on ADA, and Title IX, and so on, out to us via email, and requires us to cut and paste them into every single one of our syllabi, for legal reasons.
The department also requires that we paste in the "learning objectives" for each departmental class (such as comp I and comp II), which have been written by departmental committee.
So, in a sense, those are plagiarized. I mean, there they are in my syllabus, and I sure AF didn't write them.
It's a puzzler.
"When I wrote the following syllabi, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the stacks, a three floors from any ADA compliance officer, in a carrel which I had built myself, on the edge of where all the Sanskrit books are, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. IYKWIMAITYD."
23: quite alright.
I'd also say that, when I saw the movie in college, that line seemed like a good bon mot, but as I grow older it seems less true. I think that is because the meaning of the line isn't about theft, in general, but about aging. And that it is better to be young and creatively productive (and taken advantage of) than to be old, esteemed, and creatively spent.
I don't know if that's true either, but it gives some context.
Here's an article from 2015 about the public shaming of Justine Sacco for that one tweet and the aftermath, written by Jon Ronson, adapted from his book about public shaming: So You've Been Publically Shamed
Here's the part of the article in the OP that got to me:
It seemed to me that Tranches De Vie must have been an attempt to honour the greats by producing intertextual reinterpretations of their finest moments.
Until, that is, Lightman shows me the original source of DesRuisseaux's Curieux. "It's based on a poem by Nicole Renwick," Lightman tells me. "I'd never heard of her, but that does happen."
He taps her name into his search engine. We're sitting next to each other and I lean over, squinting at the screen. Some examples of Renwick's work appear on a site called allpoetry.com. There is the original poem, Funny... But Not. DesRuisseaux had cut it down from 13 lines to nine, and added his own closer. And then there's Nicole Renwick herself. She looks barely out of her teens. Her bio reads: "Hey everyone, I'm hoping to become a writer one day, so I'd appreciate every comment I get thanks."
What kind of famous poet rips off a teenager's poem for some sort of intertextual commentary without giving her credit?
A hemorrhoidal asshole of a famous poet?
That was probably a rhetorical question, wasn't it.
Anyway, if anybody has a paper due on Walden, the set-up for the handjob joke is right there in the text.
24
Ok, I won't feel bad about plagiarizing the boilerplate bits, and then I'll lightly rewrite the course description bit once I find a syllabus I like (it's an intro to XX course, so it's not like I can think of a groundbreaking new way to describe the material.)
I haven't even read Thoreau, but I know 25 is great.
Cry, cry, quiet desperation, cry.
Cry, cry, spit out pits, cry.
Hugh MacDiarmid was fond of doing that kind of thing; he wrote one eight-line poem of which the last seven lines were a direct lift from a short story (without acknowledgement). He claimed to have done it accidentally.
When I was in school (High School to you reprobates) I for some reason got hijacked into judging a school poetry competition. One guy, who was sort of a friend, submitted something that was a verbatim lift from the English translation of a piece by Bauidelaire in the Penguin Book of French Poetry*. I was into Baudelaire at the time and recognised it immediately. I was totally shocked, because I didn't think he was that kind of person, and anyway the whole competition was just a piece of fun with nothing hanging on it.
* Penguin in the 60s published a series of anthologies of poetry in various European languages in which the poems were printed in the original and a prose translation was added at the end in the manner of a footnote.
20: Great artists steal. If it's for an academic job you want the reading lists, not the boilerplate (all the compliance stuff), but write the description yourself.
He claimed to have done it accidentally.
That's what Ted Cruz will say about liking the twitter porn.
||
Since this thread has officially drifted off topic now that "Ted Cruz" and "porn" have been mentioned in the same sentence (thanks a lot for the image Moby), I have an idle fashion question.
Are ripped jeans coming back into style? Over the last few months I've noticed a number of women (no men that I can recall) wearing jeans so torn up it looks like they belong in a late 80s hair metal band. Is this an actual trend or am I imagining things? Maybe it's just a Baltimore thing.
|>
40: yes, definitely. I've seen several these last few months and before this year I don't think I saw any.
I learned it from Barry, on a different thread.
40 I've seen them for over a year now.
Don't you live in a place where public thighs are frowned upon?
Seen not infrequently on the Roc.
When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre,
He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea;
An' what he thought 'e might require,
'E went an' took - the same as me!
The market-girls an' fishermen,
The shepherds an' the sailors, too,
They 'eard old songs turn up again,
But kep' it quiet - same as you!
They knew 'e stole; 'e knew they knowed.
They didn't tell, nor make a fuss,
But winked at 'Omer down the road,
An' 'e winked back - the same as us!
I saw some ripped jeans the other day too.
45 I do, I think I've seen them traveling in Europe and in leave in the US.
I don't pay my jeans at all, much less give them time to travel.
Are ripped jeans coming back into style? Over the last few months I've noticed a number of women (no men that I can recall) wearing jeans so torn up it looks like they belong in a late 80s hair metal band. Is this an actual trend or am I imagining things? Maybe it's just a Baltimore thing.
Depends on when you think they last went out of fashion. I'm deeply un-fashion aware and haven't heard of a particularly recent revival, but they've certainly been pretty common in Europe for the last five years or so.
This reminds me that I have only two pairs of jeans that I've had for a few years and finally both wore out at the crotch. They don't make the same jean anymore so I couldn't find replacements in NY and it's going to be a hell of a time getting a good pair here.
That we're seeing them here in Pittsburgh means they must've been in fashion for a while now. The style is a bit different from the last time around--more, often-but-not-always parallel rips, higher up the thigh. They feel different from the metal band look, partially because they're women only, and even then the knees aren't usually ripped.
It seems to be something like the early modern mercenaries that cut their outer jackets to show the fine silks beneath, except with tanned thighs.
I haven't asked any of the women I've seen wearing ripped jeans if they are mercenaries.
58: Certainly, that'd be very rude. A more polite proxy question is to ask whether they've been featured in a Warren Zevon song.
When I started college, all of my classmates were terrified of getting in trouble for plagiarizing. There was a talk on it, and I was terrified that I'd cite something wrong or express some long-held opinion without attributing it properly. my Expository writing teacher said that he had noticed a particular level of panic among his students and made a point of showing us an example in professional literature that was clearly plagiarism. We had been told that you could get expelled for plagiarism.
When I was in college, I wrote a (math) paper that expanded on a technique I had seen a few years earlier in a monograph in the stacks of the Columbia University library when I was participating in a high school summer science program there. I footnoted it as best I could (given that I didn't remember the title or author, just the general subject and appearance of the monograph), but I'm glad I didn't have to figure out what the appropriate MLA-style citation would have been for that.
This seems like a good place to complain about the fact that I'm having to kick out a graduate student from our program because of massive, massive plagiarism in his comprehensive exams. He actually plagiarized all four of his essays, but I was the only professor who noticed (maybe he was tired and careless by the last one?). It's pretty tragic for him, for complicated life reasons, but also the scale of it means there's really no other choice. Also means that I feel personally responsible even though I'm not the one actually kicking him out of the program - there's a committee for that - because once I noticed it, it was pretty clear that there was no other path.
Among other annoyances, the drama surrounding it all is totally dominating my life right now. I spent hours today producing a report that outlines all the plagiarism, and more hours in meetings with various admin people. But I can't talk about it to anyone because of super strict confidentiality warnings from the DGS, which probably no one actually cares about but I am untenured so I am definitely playing by all the rules. So far I've bitched about this to my husband, and now you.
62: That sounds miserable, and the feeling responsible for others' actions (or the noticing of them) makes life much more oppressive. I hope that the process advances to a place where you can simply say "dome" soon, and begin putting it behind you.
That definitely sounds miserable. We were unsuccessful in getting rid of a grad student (for a different reason), and the surrounding stress through off my department for the year.
About eight years ago, I had a senior English Education student turn in a plagiarized final paper for what was (then) the final class of our English program -- it was was our class in which the students proved that they had learned everything they were supposed to learn.
I was teaching the class. This exact paper -- word for word, without even any of the errors I had noted -- had been turned into me by one of my other students the semester before.
When I investigated this student's other work, I found she had plagiarized, essentially, every writing assignment she had ever turned in to every class she had taken with us. (She had taken more than a few at a neighboring community college, so who knew what went on there.)
I gather evidence and I went to our dean. I expected, and why would I not, that this student would fail my class, and be kicked out of the university.
This did not happen. Oh, no. We could not expel someone so close to graduation! Not when she had received A's in all her other classes! Think of the potential lawsuits!
My argument that she was functionally illiterate, and my proposal that we have her write an essay for the Academic Integrity Committee on any subject at all, sitting there in a room with a proctor, to demonstrate this fact, cut no ice.
I *was* allowed to fail her in my class, but she took the same class again, the following semester, with a professor who had blithely allowed her to submit plagiarized work class after class after class (three-quarters of the plagiarized work had been submitted to him) and of course she got an A.
Now she is teaching high school. Honors English, last I heard.
If it makes you feel better, I was an asshole to my high school English teacher. Not that I think she cheated in college.
67 is as amazing as it is appalling.
sorry both ellen johnson sirleaf and eleanor roosevelt; those are both really shitty situations. the outcome of the latter is infuriating.
ripped jeans have been a thing here in narnia for some time now, mostly imported from japan I think (like at uniqlo). they were quite prevalent at girl x's school in AZ but in the form of booty shorts, due to the heat and no doubt other considerations. there was nominally a dress code but it was adhered to as strictly as the rules on plagiarism at Ms. Roosevelt's institution.
I've plagiarized every single post on this blog from a different blog with funnier commenters.
I am feeling a little bad because we had a young woman try out i our department, with a pretty stellar CV -- had worked for a lot of good places -- and the trial piece she turned in, though rather essayish, was perfectly competent. However, for most of last week I was alone and so in charge of her because everyone else was on holiday, and the stuff she turned in was utter crap and had to be rewritten at speed to spare my employer embarrassment. At the same time she was desperate for approval and help. Then she did it again when the head of department reappeared. So he told her the trial period would not be renewed. ON purely professional grounds I welcomed his decision.
So, she corners me at the end of the day and asks for hints and tips about where she went wrong, a conversation I found excruciating, because I couldn't seem to find a line between brutality and lies. This troubled me. Also there were deadlines in the background. So I made my escape and woke the next morning feeling bad about the experience. I sent her an email saying that (1) this isn't about your personal worth; it's about your copy and
(2) a) it's a help to check for really egregious spelling mistakes before you pass it on
b) You don't seem able to handle any unit of information larger than a paragraph. Pieces need to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, with an argument joining them.
And she writes back to say that she didn't normally make those errors but had just broken up with her fiance and the doctor had put her on pills and maybe these were responsible for her poor performance. Which, for all I know, is true. So now I feel a bit pointlessly sorry for her, but I don't see there's anything I should, or can do about it. It's just genuine, life-altering bad luck. And it's not as if her previous work was outstanding; it just wasn't incompetent.
I had a similar experience with someone who was absent from work without warning, performed very poorly, didn't answer emails etc. When interviewed about this he said that he had been very ill because of stress involved in working with a survivors' support group for the Grnfll Twr disaster, and that had taken up a lot of his time, and basically we should cut him some slack. What he had forgotten was that he had left his Facebook settings public and we could all see the photos of his water skiing trip.
67 is definitely worse, so thanks for that!
If somebody writes a good novel based on this story, I will plagiarize it.
Just don't make it too Bonfire of the Vanities-y.
I never read the book, but the movie confused me with an atypical use of Tom Hanks.
Thanks, everyone.
I remain really annoyed about 67, though it's been years, and all the admin who were here then are gone.
The woman is still out there teaching, though, with a degree from our university.
If it makes you feel better, Duke Law has both Nixon and Tucker Max for alum.