Jottings from the Granite Studio

What to do when you have a paper due on Monday and you’re still hungover on Sunday night? Why, plunk down Mom and Dad’s visa and order a custom job delivered to your computer from God knows where and written by chimps. (“At $9.95 a page, you expected poetry?” NYT 9/10/06)

“Using her own name and her personal e-mail address, an editor ordered three English literature papers from three different sites on standard, often-assigned topics: one comparing and contrasting Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Orwell’s “1984”; one discussing the nature of Ophelia’s madness in “Hamlet”; and one exploring the theme of colonialism in Conrad’s “Lord Jim.”

A small sample, perhaps, but one sufficient, upon perusal, to suggest that papers written to order are just like the ones students write for themselves, only more so — they’re poorly organized, awkwardly phrased, thin on substance, but masterly in the ancient arts of padding and stating and restating the obvious.”

One paper even uses the tried and true “I don’t know the right answer so I will argue both sides” strategy, seemingly oblivious to the idea that the assignment asks for creative analysis and is not, sadly, a true/false question.

“‘Although many similarities exist between Aldous Huxley’s ‘A Brave New World’ and George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ the works books [sic] though they deal with similar topics, are more dissimilar than alike.’ That’s certainly a relief, because we couldn’t have an essay if they weren’t.

It’s actually scary that these papers are written so poorly. The usual method of catching plagiarism is to find chunks of lucid prose amid a soup of poor grammar, creative diction, and odd syntax. The chunks, when checked, are almost invariably lifted from the textbooks (which students somehow forget that we read) or from the internet. (Students seem to think that they’re the only ones who have heard of “Google.”)

Yes, it must be society’s fault that the BA has become so devalued in the job market.