slogging

When one grades too many papers, one's mind threatens to turn to mush, but generally, in ESL, plagiarism stands out like a sore thumb, for having an attitude, being smooth, being whole sentences of verbose prose that may or may not fit into the essay in question.

But lately I've encountered some interesting examples. I have students who seem to copy and paste words, and put them together without quite understanding them. They're pretty good at using Google with key words to get to some pretty decent sites. Often the sites say something related or relevant to the issue at hand. Often they copy pieces that are miniscule enough that it slips through the cracks; maybe they've changed a word or two (this is trying, ineffectively, to paraphrase). But sometimes they don't really understand the words, and then the effect is deadly- they are putting together things that make no sense, when combined as a whole.

Sometimes they run their native language through a computer translator. I'm not sure if I would know this kind of mush from another. I'm not even sure this is plagiarism. If they wrote it, and jammed it through a mush-making translator, that's actually quite original.

Sometimes they look through their stock of old papers, that they've written for me or someone else, looking for a sentence that they've gotten away with before. Just say anything that works, and hope the teacher makes the meaning connections and considers it English. But, being poor readers, they are not necessarily even able to read their own old papers. They sometimes give sentences that make no sense (see post below). The mismatch between the sentence and the essay it's in is not only a grammatical mismatch (the plagiarized sentence is far more grammatical) but also a meaning mismatch - how could they put a sentence like this in a paragraph like that?

At this point, it's already too late. They should have learned how to read, when they had the chance. But that's easier said than done, and goes against all their training, in some cases. To unravel their system, one might have to start at the beginning.

I'd like to give specific examples of what happens. Maybe another time. Right now my mind is mush.