Five-Finger Discount (Plagiarism Reflection)

Now, it's time for some thoughts regarding this Plagiarism Experience.

I had a much better time with this essay than the ghostwriting assignment, at least in terms of effort and workload. I was lucky enough while browsing the web to come across an author online who decided to showcase on his public blog some work he had typed up for a college course some two to three hours before its due date in the early morning. All I could think was, "Source found!"

This work was my sole source for the plagiarized essay handed in, but several factors seem to have worked in my favor for the sake of avoiding detection. First, the topic chosen was a much-discussed one, and therefore web searches involving the terminology simply hit too much interference from the numerous papers and blog postings online. Second, while actual instances of plagiarism are often detected long after the fact, we as a class have a few days only. Third, and I am a bit ashamed to admit this, I plagiarized with much more effort than most students would have taken. The source's own citations were removed, the related information replaced with my own thoughts drawn from common knowledge, and the tone of the article changed slightly. In addition, every sentence taken from the source was heavily paraphrased, with synonyms replacing words and the structure of the sentences changed.

However, while the effort was easy to handle, the emotional response was not. I felt rather awful after finishing a solid 3-4 page paper I never researched or wrote fully, in a third of the time it would have taken me to write a full paper on my own power. Even if I do well at this, I'm not sure I could be proud of such an "ability." I'll be sure to come clean and further explain my plagiaristic efforts (as well as release my source) for Friday's post.

EDIT ON 10/18/07:
The source for my paper on the extremes of outsourcing was an actual essay on the blog "Tinkafoo." The link is here. I essentially paraphrased much of it, then removed the data from his text sources and added what I could find from the domain of common knowledge, and finally altered the conclusion a bit to make it more of an impassioned end to the paper's dire predictions.