For this assignment, we had to plagiarize a paper (75% someone else's work, 25% our own). At first, like I think most of my classmates, I thought, "This is going to be the easiest assignment of the semester." We could write about anything that we wanted. Again, at first, I thought that would be super easy. However, it seemed to complicate things. I couldn't decide what to write about. I finally decided on a biography of Abraham Lincoln. It's something that I've wrote about before, and something that everyone has at least heard a little about throughout the course of their education. I wanted to plagiarize a biography because I figured that it would be hard to distinguish which parts were plagiarized. Because so many biographies use the same language and include many facts, I thought it was the best bet.
I found that plagiarizing a biography was more difficult than I had expected. At first, I thought it was just because I chose to write a biography, however, after discussion in class on Monday, it sounded like this assignment was just as difficult for my fellow classmates. The hardest part about this assignment was trying to decide how different parts of the sources I was using and my voice could fit together and sound like a well-flowing paper. Like the ghostwriting assignment, the plagiarism experience also helped me learn a lot about about my writing style. Just by understanding that my writing style was different and by actually having to make the paper flow, I was able to, in a way, analyze my own writing. I also believe that because it was so difficult to take different works from different authors with completely different writing styles and make them flow together as one, plagiarism can be considered an "art" (however, whether this is ethical or not is left for the individual to decide). Again, I'm referring back to Deborah Brandt's statement in class when she said that sooner or later, authorship will be in the form of plagiarism, i.e. cutting and pasting. After completing this assignment, I can see how this could be possible.
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The most difficult part about discovering your source was sorting through the vast supply of information on Abe Lincoln. A few sentence fragments appeared kind of unoriginal and they were what finally gave you away. Sorry
I also thought that this assignment was going to be significantly easier than it actually was. And as you said, plagiarism has a certain sense of "art" to it. I found myself spending so much time doing things like paraphrasing and changing around the word order so my plagiarism couldn't be detected. In discovering this, i realize that I spent a lot more time plagiarizing a paper compared to actually writing it on my own!
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