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Date: | Wed, 14 Mar 2001 22:29:19 -0500 |
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Student plagiarism is not always recognizable by a very high quality of
prose writing. (This presupposes that the source stolen from is itself
well-written--not always a good bet in academic publishing.)
The best student plagiarists carefully revise the prose they steal in order
to make it sound *less* polished. I once had a student plagiarize a complex
Lacanian discussion of Hitchcock--by removing all references to Lacan or
psychoanalysis. Amazingly enough, it still worked as an analysis of the
film--which only makes one wonder why the references to psychoanalysis
needed to be there in the first place.
In that case I knew the source. However I've also had luck by taking
distinctive, unusual words and searching for them in a web search engine,
rather than an article database. At this point, lots of flap copy taken
from books is on-line, and so it's quite possible to find a source even when
the whole source isn't online.
Sincerely,
Edward R. O'Neill
Bryn Mawr College
----
Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the
University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu
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