Academic & Professional Dishonesty

Spin THIS!

Your plagiarized writing may earn you a C on your term paper, or a few pennies on Medium, but respect, once lost, is nearly impossible to regain.

Photo by Aswin on Unsplash

I read a student essay, a couple of years ago, that I would swear was written by someone for whom English was a second (or distant third) language. The conspicuous overuse of a thesaurus was one red flag. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that it was written on Fiverr and spun through an article spinner so as to pass muster with Turnitin, which it did. Grammarly, too — although Grammarly had a number of other nits to pick with it, including its lack of full sentences. I had almost convinced myself that it was just a case of poor writing, despite my nagging sense that it sounded like something Ivan Mor Smirnoff would try to pass off as original content — until I read Jonathan Bailey’s article: “A Brief History of Article Spinning.” In it, Bailey notes:

The rise of plagiarism detection services such as Turnitin have caused many students to try and find ways to fool them. Some of them have turned to article spinning as a way to quickly “rewrite” a piece and escape detection.

Purveyors of article spinning technology have been all-too-happy…