Having written hundreds of these myself and graded more than a thousand I have some tips for those of you who may be struggling with larger papers such as the 10, 15, and 20 pagers that professors often like to give. First of all let us discuss plagiarism. Everyone does it and unless you are doing your own authentic research you are going to be ripping off someone else's work. This is just a fact. Now if your like me and your given a subject, lets say the explosion of the Cane Toad population in Australia, you probably do not want to become an expert on the subject just to write a 20 page paper so what do you do? You use the work someone else has done as they have probably done the same thing to write their story but the key here is sourcing properly. Your professor has probably given you guidelines on how many sources you should use, which ones are acceptable and so on and this is correct, you should source your information but how do you do that without spending tedious days pouring over information and then wasting hours upon hours adding sources to your paper? Simple. Find an online source that has the information you require. Do a simple google search and using my example of Cane Toads you will find plenty of sources that have written about this subject. Now here are the guidelines for not getting caught doing what you are about to do. When professors check work, especially if it is a subject they have assigned, they are usually familiar with the top sources that come up during your search so never, ever pick the source you are about to copy off of the first two pages. Go back to about the fifth page of the search to find your source as this gives you more of a chance that your grader has not seen it. Never ever use academic sources such as papers written by other students or work that has been submitted for peer-review because the majority of these have been submitted into some sort of safe-assign program which all the universities share to catch people copying. Sites like Sparknotes will get you busted on your first attempt, I have caught many people doing that myself. Your source should be something written for a news source such as broadcast or cable or an article in a newspaper. String a few of them together to fit the length of your paper. Simply copy and paste the text of what you are using into your word document and you are ready for the next step. After you have the text before you your ready to start modifying it. The first thing you do is delete the first sentence from each paragraph and write your own topic sentence. If you do not know what a topic sentence is then look it up. Plagiarism checkers check on a system of levels. The first thing they do is match 3 words together then scan out to look at the paragraph so by changing the first sentence you are throwing the plagiarism checker off your scent. Scan the paragraph and look for any medium to large size words and simply use an online thesaurus to replace it, this gives you further coverage. Doing this should take you roughly an hour or so for a 20 pager paper. Once you are done "writing" your paper your ready for the final step. The final step is to find your own plagiarism checker and many are online for free. Your university may even have one as mine does. Rather ironic to use your own university to help you plagiarize but hey....its a dumb paper anyways. A word of note here.....free ones are ok but you do get what you pay for. Considering you are spending tens of thousands of dollars to attend college I would highly recommend one of the plagiarism checkers you have to pay for, they also offer more options which you will find handy. Now go to your plagiarism checker and simply enter in your document. The lower plagiarism checkers will highlight all the sentences that they have found copies of so you need to find a source for these....pain in the butt which is why you want a higher quality checker that will tell you what source your words matched. Your going to get hits regardless and this is important because you still need to source your paper! When your plagiarism checker gives you a hit simply copy the source it gives you and add it into your paper. In my experience you will get quite a few hits but by changing the topic sentence they will not all be from the source you copied from. You will see that the source you used has actually plagiarized most of their writing also. Like I said, everyone does it. Now your paper is written, you have added your sources and all that is left is a quick read through to fix your grammatical errors and your ready to turn in that A paper. Great job student!
Dude, that is counteractive. Do you not want to learn something? I sat through 4 years of having to listen to professors that didn't know their head from their butt, however I just wrote whatever they wanted to read. I had to read some very interesting books which (of course) despite the fact I found them interesting I had to write papers I extremely disagreed with to get a good grade.... If I wrote what I really thought I would have been branded and would have just made it out alive... * side note, I didn't even have to read some books because I have already read them. My mother got her degree 5-6 years before I did but she kept all her books and I just read them all (before I thought about even going to college) - so I definitely had an edge there.
Excellent analysis and advice. I look upon is as a fact of human nature. The vast majority of students are intellectually lazy and are going to cheat their way through just about anything that they have no personal interest in doing, and they are going to do this as a matter of course. Most of just about all aspects of higher education is wasted on most students, but the trickle of information they eventually digest does do them some good in their careers and helps keep the economy in movement. Have I ever mentioned that I am a cynic's cynic? True story as I was there when it happened. My wife was tutoring the son of a college professor, who was in the room with us while she ran the high school student over prep work for his upcoming finals. I was going back and forth from room to room getting various references sources for her and kicking up some things on the computer for print outs. Meanwhile the professor of history was himself working through a stack of research papers on -- I think -- the second half of U.S. History. Then about two thirds of the way through the session it happened. The professor said, "Son of a (b)-itch! This little bastard plagiarized an entire paper I wrote when I was an undergrad at (some other college)! I remember how long it took me to wade through all those sources!" Well, he looked from my wife to me in a combination of stunned anger and then we looked at one another and then at him and then suddenly it hit us how damn funny it was with all the coincidences and acts of fate falling into place and doing so with the world's unluckiest plagiarizer in the entire history of humanity meeting-up, so to speak, and . . . we . . . laughed and laughed. I mean the unlucky student was certainly going to be toast and by rights we three academicians should have been outraged over the event, but none of us were newbies at the education game, and it was just funny as hell. The only one not to get it or appreciate the innate humor of the situation was the professor's son who undoubtedly anticipated listening to his dad lecture him on the tired old subject of academic honesty all the way home. Good times. Sigh . . . good times.
What do you think about online services that claim to sell original research papers? Can they be trusted to sell something that won't get you popped? Can you recommend a reputable service? I hate research papers.
