update

I have nothing to update. My students still plagiarize; it's more common than ever. One of the most common instances is when they simply use last term's material as this term's homework. This is not plagiarism, really, until they use the exact same writing, and even then, it's theirs, though it may have been worked over by another teacher at some point. I am absolutely unequivocally unbending no matter what. If it's an assignment where you can use last term's material, it's a bad assignment.

One student took a native language article about an interesting topic, crunched it through a babelfish translator, and then wrote a review of it as if he were reading English. Perhaps all English looked like that to him; perhaps he crunches everything through babelfish. Which brings up an interesting question....what if the vast majority of English a person reads is crunched native language? Does this affect their minds? their view of grammar?

This blog is about copying, by whim or copy-paste, little chunks of material, or big, for any reason. Copying is not illegal, but putting your name on the paper after you did it presents some problems. My focus is to get to the bottom of it. How do you make sure people don't want or need to do it? There must be a better way.

Further down in this blog, you'll find a grisly story that, fortunately, nobody cares about much anymore. People don't really read these blogs very carefully anyway, and that is probably good for me, since I'm an uncompromising fanatic in some ways, as I'm sure you've discerned from the above. But it's possible that, to put this positively, the small community of people who actually write their own material is the very same community as those who actually read the stuff. That's certainly true for poetry. I have my poetry blog virtually to myself. But I soldier on; there may be someone checking in, eventually.

Move the other stuff on down, quick, before someone reads it.