Thursday, June 15, 2006

The Cheat

Also from Boing Boing today, an older post from Alex Halavais, "How to cheat good." Halavais shares some amusing insights into how instructors suspect/detect plagiarism. My personal fave? #8, Edit > Paste Special > Unformatted Text. Though he doesn't remark on my favorite small-detail tell, the sudden appearance of straight quotes (as opposed to smart-quotes) which makes me suspect the text originated online rather than in Word.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi there! I was killing time at work and pulled up MySpace, and did a search on Sanderson, and there you were. We used to be neighbors on Crestwyck (Crestwick?) Ct. in Raleigh way back when.

It's neat that you're in Chicago, and a writing instructor. I've been a tech writer for 10 years now. I'm at Motorola full-time, in Schaumberg, though I have a house in Evanston. We should grab a drink sometime and catch up. Or not; whichever. Tell Patrick I said "hello" if you think he'll remember me!

- Susan Szews