Genderfucked schizoqueer autistic plural plushie eevee mystics


one of those annoying vegans your unexamined ethical system warned you about


Seer of Blood (Wyatt) and Witch of Void (fractal)


not a person, Ξ˜Ξ”, tma

this user likes the homestuck epilogues

name-color: #ff007b


🎀 psychosisposting 🎀
cohost.org/feedbackmicrophone

cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

i wrote like 3,000 words about this after getting mad in a comment thread on another post, and then i put them in a draft that i'll delete later

i made kind of a irritable reply chost a week ago telling people to stop worrying about the plagiarism thing because if you're worried, it means you have nothing to worry about. but perhaps the way i should have said it is: if you're worried about being a plagiarist, you don't need to worry, because you are incapable of it.


DecayWTF
@DecayWTF

If you are not given to plagiarism you'll know because the first time you try to steal someone else's words as your own you will feel like you've got worms writhing under your skin


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

This may sound a little harsh, but plagiarists lack a fundamental understanding of writing, language, the basic constructions of words and sentences on a basically unteachable level of base instinct, that it's kinda like how sociopaths lack a fundamental grasp of emotion and human relationships to the same degree. And similarly, their solution to fill that void with mimicry. Some who are very good at it may even get away with it for a time. Others are sloppy and the facade crumbles. Like, it feels very armchair psychologist of me to accuse plagiarists of having a dysfunction of the soul but man how else do you get that kind of person.

I thought on it more, because yeah, that wasn't a very good reply, I just tossed it out and had to come back and think about it again.

Tell me if this jibes any better: If you're expected to produce a paper on a subject, for instance, and you think that you're never going to be called on to prove that you understood what was in that specific paper, then it's a simple matter of deciding whether you're willing to cheat or not. You aren't involving yourself with the work beyond obtaining it and handing it over; it's just an object to you, you never see or think about the contents.

How often does plagiarized work have to be read aloud, or otherwise followed up on? If the answer is "quite often" then my next question is: do they know that, or is it usually a surprise when they get called on it? Or a gamble that they're hoping to win? Because if you think you'll never get put on the spot, then you can make the decision to cheat believing that you'll be done thinking about the work you stole the moment it leaves your hands. An understandable, if unfortunate decision that a perfectly normal person could come to if they're under pressure or just have an ego that exceeds their sense of ethics.

Compare this to the act of preparing a script which you intend to read, in your own voice, and then continue to be associated with indefinitely, in front of an audience of (you hope) millions, without apparently understanding anything that's in it, and then choosing to do that every week indefinitely as your primary source of income. I don't think that's a situation that just anyone could end up in, simply because of the immense toll it would take on the soul - and that's coming from someone whose cynicism registers on the richter scale.

I bet that almost everyone who's ever pasted a quote into a chost here has had the itch to 'fix' the language

The trick is to make it clear you're making changes. I picked up the practice of using square brackets to indicate a change from printed material; they typically just use it to indicate elisions and altered capitalisation, but I correct typos and other misspellings as well.