Three Monkeys Online

A Curious, Alternative Magazine

Plagiarism

Today’s Gazeta Wyborcza has an extended advertisement for an anti-plagiarism service whose name I won’t give here, since GW helpfully prints it several times in BLOCK CAPITALS. Why the irony? you ask. Why shouldn’t the newspaper print the company’s name in BLOCK CAPITALS since it is an advertisement? Because formally at least it is not an advertisement, but a news report, headlined “Tough Times Ahead for Plagiarists” and signed by ?ukasz Partyka. My eye was caught by the following statement, which, since no evidence is provided for it at all, gives the unfortunate and doubtless false impression of having been written by a PR company acting for the anti-plagiarism company whose virtues are extolled in the article/advertisement (and make no mistake: only one company is featured in this article about plagiarism). The sentence is “Academic teachers are unable to detect them [plagiarised papers] on their own.” GW says teachers can’t do their job so it must be true.

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