A few years ago i had an email from a teacher in Kansas. Apparently he had set his class some homework to write 300 words or so on a topic and half the class turned in almost identical reports so the teacher wrote it into the school's plagiarism software and traced it back to one of my posts.
The class had obviously stumbled across my blog and a post on whichever the subject was, i think it was a Christmas one, and pretty much copied and pasted it and turned it in.
Amusingly, the teacher said that most of the students hadn't even de-Englishfied it and it was full of English spellings and America don't seem to make use of one of five vowels so even if just one of them had done it, they would have been sprung anyway.
I was reminded of it the other day when my Blog stats showed another anti-plagiarism site traced something back to my blog, this time my 2021 post on renewable energy, It Really Shouldn't Be This Hard.
Now i have no problem with copyright, once i click the post button i send my posts out into the wild to fend for themselves and therefore available to anyone to do what they want with them if they wish, but a word of advice for students if their teacher is currently looking at bunch of homework books and wondering why it looks suspiciously like that English woman's post on renewable energy.
By all means take what i say if you want and paste it into a Word Document and claim you spent hours writing it but at least change some of the words, stick it through a Thesurus, delete some bits and add some bits to disguise it but at the very least, if you are not sat in an English classroom, de-Englishfy it.
Happy to help.
Thursday, 9 February 2023
Not Plagarism, It's Being Influenced By
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