Figured I should post something for once. Don't have much that seems appropriate for RMRK, but I found at least this "How to do better!" satire essay I wrote, which was ironically read by the English department. Just remember this is a joke, not actual instructions for how to plagiarize, and do not recommend you do so.
It is 11:49 AM. Exactly eleven minutes before your 12:00 English class officially begins, and exactly twelve minutes before your final paper is due. However, you don’t have your final paper. In fact, your paper is not even finished yet. You have only contributed a sum total so far of only one page, because you almost completely forgot about the paper until five minutes ago when one of your classmates idly mentioned being nervous about how good they did on their own paper, despite the fact that they have a perfect A and have done everything but suck the English teacher’s dick. Luckily for you, there happens to be a computer in the back of the classroom handy for you to try to finish your paper as quickly as possible.
It’s now 11:50 AM. Ten minutes remaining for you to write the perfect essay about the finer points of Shakespeare’s play Much Ado About Nothing, including a concise analysis of the plot and all of its characters. But you didn’t bother to read any of the play outside of class, and the drool marks on your book indicate that you probably slept through most of the in-class readings as well, so you have to rely on Wikipedia as usual. However, your teacher has explicitly stated that Wikipedia cannot be used as one of your sources, and that you must cite any resources that you use.
It’s 11:53 AM. Time’s beginning to run out as you ponder what to do, and you don’t have many options left unless you can miraculously type 1000 words per minute of bullshit on a subject you know little about. But even the best “informational improvisers” have their limits though on how quickly they can bullshit their way through an essay, and your bullshitting capability is rather constipated at the moment because of your panic of failing the class.
It’s 11:55 AM. Something snaps in you and a tiny voice in your mind literally says to you “Screw it, what are the chances of getting caught?”
It’s 11:56 AM, and you’re copying a giant section of Wikipedia’s story synopsis and themes, as well as SparkNotes analysis of the main characters. You’re not going to bother listing down these sites as sources. You’re just going to claim that this is your own interpretations of the story, that you were elaborate enough to not only list every factual piece of information about the characters but several paragraphs of how their personalities fitted into the larger scheme of the story and how they felt to you as an avid reader of Shakespeare’s works. The teacher is more of the carefree type who probably won’t even bother to read all of the papers anyways.
It’s 11:59 AM. Congratulations, your paper is now being printed out in the printer next to the teacher’s desk. In fact, the teacher is taking the printed pages out himself and properly organizing it into a nice stack for you. He gives the first page a brief look-over, holding the finished product of your hard work in one hand and a stapler in his other, like an old man lazily holding a remote in front of the television and getting ready to change the channel after only a few moments of watching. But wait, something’s not right. His eyebrows are burrowed as he starts to read it a little more carefully. He sets it down on his desk without stapling it, and looks up at you. He calmly calls your name out just as the students are taking their seats before the bell, and then ominously says to you “Please see me after class, I think we need to talk.”
The bell rings at 12:00 PM exactly, and class begins as normal, except for the pounding in your heart and strange guilty numbness your body feels, knowing full well what was about to happen. Then, after class ends and the other students have left, you walk up to the teacher’s desk and wait a few minutes while he organizes the clutter on his desk. After it’s relatively clean, he looks up at you for a moment but says nothing, then turns to his computer and opens up the Wikipedia page on Much Ado About Nothing. He highlights a sentence of the page and crudely tosses your paper on the desk toward you, where you can plainly see that what he’s just highlighted is the opening statement in your essay. “An explanation please?”
This is called plagiarism, cheating, academic dishonesty, and automatic failure in almost any class. At least, that’s what it’s called when you’re caught doing so, and there’s only two words to be said when that happens: “Game Over”. Well, maybe not those two words specifically, you might feel the urge to say “Oh shit…” or “I’m fucked…” instead. At any rate, getting caught plagiarizing is definitely not something you want to do. Luckily for you, there’s better ways of doing it so that you don’t get caught, and can reap the full benefits of a good paper with little to no work at all.
For the typical type of English teacher, there are usually two main ways of checking for plagiarism in a paper: manually and electronically. If your teacher checks electronically (meaning that they submit a digital copy of your essay to an internet site for checking for plagiarism, such as Turnitin.com), your chances of being able to plagiarize are much slimmer and not recommended unless have had years of practice and experience. However, most teachers only require you to hand in a hard copy of your assignment, and no one in their right mind is going to bother typing up every page of your full paper for an electronic evaluation of possible plagiarism.
Therefore, the typical English teacher is going to manually check your paper for plagiarism. How do they do this? They do so by reading through your paper and check for three things: familiarity, citing, and style.
This should be obvious, but teachers are not stupid. Well, most of them. Some are smart enough that you wonder why they’re stooping so low to help teach students when they could be out making three times the salary they do, but some are so inept have to wonder how they got hired in the first place. Most smart teachers will look up the subject of the paper online first on common sites like Wikipedia, so that they can better spot when someone has taken something close to verbatim off of it and placed it into their paper. This is a big mistake, and you should be ashamed to call yourself a cheater if you can’t even cheat well enough to at least realize that teachers have the same internet access that you do. If it takes you a short amount of time to copy what you did, it’ll take a teacher a short amount of time to find you out.
This is usually solved with simple paraphrasing and changing both words and sentence structure around. Don’t copy what you find and paste it onto the paper. Copy what you find, paste it onto a notepad, try to put it in your own words using as few of the original wording as possible. Instead of “Then, whilst Don Pedro wooed Hero for Claudio, Don John attempts revenge upon his brother Don Pedro by telling young Claudio that in truth Don Pedro seeks Hero for himself”, you would write “But while Don Pedro tries to charm Hero for Claudio, Don Pedro’s brother Don John tries to enact revenge on his brother by lying to Claudio and telling him that Don Pedro is actually after Hero for himself.” Cut out the familiarity of it as much as possible, and teacher’s will less likely be able to recognize it, and almost certainly not able to prove it.
If it is a formal English paper about something other than your personal feelings, you are likely going to be required to cite sources. Failure to do so is usually considered plagiarism in and of itself, even if you have completely made everything in your paper up off the top of your head. If the teacher sees something that doesn’t sound like something you would know firsthand, they are going to expect you to cite where you learned that information from, even if it’s just paraphrasing.
HOWEVER! The one thing teachers rarely do is check up on your sources. They might look for familiar sources, but they aren’t going to go to the library and look up exactly where you found your information. They simply don’t have enough time. This means, even if you create a source that doesn’t exist, the teacher will not even likely notice. As long as the source sounds authentic and you cite it properly within your paper, you can easily sidestep around needing sources. Just make sure that you have your information correct for wherever you DO find it, which will likely be Wikipedia or SparkNotes yet again.
Lastly, most teachers look closely at style. From the very beginning of the school year, teachers will observe the style of writing that you turn in, and will remember that style the next time that you hand in a paper. If your previous paper was very personal and had a set voice to it, teachers will be inclined to be very suspicious if your style suddenly changes, if you start using words you didn’t before or if you analyze things in a great deal more depth than usual.
It is important that you have a paper that you yourself have written in the past and try to compare it. Despite the perfection that your paper may seem since all the work has been done already for you, you should cut out details that you normally would never touch on, make your paper seem more personal and more “you”. You need to mold the style of the paper so that it’s not just you paraphrasing, but it actually looks like you yourself did write it aside from direct quotations (to which you should honestly try not to abuse). It might mean taking a hit to your grade to cut out information that seems important, but it’s better than risking being caught and taking a much greater hit to your grade. Just make sure that you read through properly after you do so, because you certainly don’t want to prematurely end a topic without some information or accidentally reference to information later in the paper that you in fact had already cut off.
When you’ve finally done a good job “encrypting” your paper so that it looks presto to you, you can go ahead to your noon class and hand your paper into the teacher as soon as the bell rings. He’ll look at it for a moment with a stapler in one hand, his eyes giving it a brief scrutiny, before stacking it up into proper organization and stapling it in the top left corner. It then gets tossed onto a stack of other papers from students who put many hours of hard work into finishing their essay on time, and you can sit back and reflect on the fun things you did while everyone else was slaving away at their computers.
Please note, I explicitly and most definitely do not advocate the suggestions given in this paper. That’s right. I do not advocate the use of Wikipedia for ANY project, no matter how desperate you are.
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