after reading the syllabus about a plagiarism paper, it took me a second to let it sink in. a plagiarism paper for an English class? was our professor serious? i was a bit shocked, but i figured it would be a "first one and only" thing. as with the ghostwriting experience this proved to be much more difficult than i had anticipated.
i actually found the ghostwriting experience less challenging than the plagiarism experience. for the ghostwrite, my client was present at the writing so i was able to write accordingly, but with the plagiarism paper what i had were just a bunch of sources. plagiarizing definitely took a lot more time and thinking than did the ghostwrite or if i had not plagiarized. i believe i can attribute the extra time to going back into the paper to fix and conceal the plagiarized content. at times i couldn't decide if i should just let something slide or change it, so making the decisions also took valuable time.
as a compliment to physical difficulties, i believe that ethical and emotional issues strew in also to make the experience that much more difficult. all of our lives we have been trained to not plagiarize, so it was a struggle to go against the just. i certainly did not feel accomplished after completing this paper, and it did not feel right putting my name on it.
4 comments:
I agree with you, I did not feel a sense of accomplishment after I finished the paper. I did, however, feel a sense of relief because it was a much harder assignment than I originally thought it was going to be. I didn't really struggle with the ethics of the assignment because I kept in mind that I wouldn't do this unless it was required of me. That made it easier to keep focused.
The ethics of this particular assignment didn't really bother me. I guess I just thought of it as another assignment, not really thinking about the cheating/stealing part. But I definitely did not feel a sense of accomplishment when my paper printed...it was just weird!
I think this assignment was more difficult than the ghostwriting one also. At least in the ghostwriting experience, we only had to worry about changing ONE other voice to sound like ours. With the plagiarism assignment, like you said, we had many sources, with many different voices that we had to try to make flow and sound like our own.
I guess I didn't really have a problem with the ethics of this assignment. As Lauren pointed out, it was easier to see it as an assignment, rather than stealing. You have a good point though. I certainly did not feel the sense of accomplishment that usually comes with the completion of a paper. So I guess the ethics never really go away...
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