Werken Wel And Hastily: Plagiarizing and Research

Updated on Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 6:22PM by Otter

The research paper was a form developed when research was a real labor, a way of acquiring knowledge.  Because the tools and mechanics were slow, sluggish, and difficult, we were essentially tracing the growth of our own minds on a topic.

Now the tools are slick, rapid, and almost independent of the human researcher.  Now, the research paper is merely compiling.  No real learning has to take place: indeed, it's perfectly possible to write a research paper of which the student-writer has only read a few lines.

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Love In the Ruins: Teaching Writing In America in 2011

There's a kind of breathtaking insouciance in the student's work.  If you're going to rip off somebody's words, it should be a sentence like, "A charge of plagiarism can have severe consequences, including expulsion from a university or loss of a job, not to mention a writer's loss of credibility and professional standing."  And it should be from a site dedicated to helping you avoid plagiarism.

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Stop Teaching Good Books Until We Start Reading Them.

Reading the work is not really necessary anymore for this curriculum that was designed long ago when the only way to experience the text was to live with it. A twenty minute Google search now can give the diligent student more information about the book than the professor has. It's a different world. We have a different mind. The curriculum was established a long time ago before some enormous shifts in that mind came into being.

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Brave New Knowledge

The new knowledge represents a good thing for humanity.

But it represents a very bad thing for humans.

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