How do I plagiarize thee?

let me count the ways...

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

joogling

This is a word I'm using to describe what appears to the viewer to be similar to juggling sticks that are on fire: using phrases from Google (or wherever) without knowing what they mean; putting pieces of text together without understanding them. It is similar to juggling burning sticks in several ways. First, the phrases could be unrelated to each other, and the joogler might not even know it. This is like a juggler touching the sticks, throwing the sticks, yet not actually feeling the sticks or letting the essence of the burning sticks get anywhere near him/her. Second, since he/she is playing with fire, he/she has the possibility of being burned, or being hurt by the appearance of writing jargon without meaning, being a faker, being a person who has used words without understanding them. Third, after the reader tries to make sense out of these discordant pieces of lifted material, the reader gets angry, heated up, as one would if someone were trying to pass off tripe under one's nose, as a genuine piece of writing.

One of the characteristics of this kind of writing is that serious revision of any kind is very difficult. If the writer lifted it without understanding, or with very flimsy understanding, substantial changing of it very likely will only make the situation worse, and does. I'm finding lots more sentences that are complete, grammatical, jargonish, and absolutely inappropriate for the paragraph that they're in. Sometimes I can find them verbatim by using Google; sometimes I can't. But I get angry either way. How could they make such a perfect yet jargonish sentence, and put it in entirely the wrong place? This isn't writing, it's joogling...

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