Plagiarism Has Become a Universal Problem

A problem that is currently becoming exponentially larger each year in the area of education and research is plagiarism. Antiplagio as referred to in Italy show how Plagiarism has become a larger issue as many more students are currently using larger amounts of research in the completion of assignments. The problem has become a universal issue and is not limited to the United States. To combat this problem schools and institutions are creating various bodies to judge work for similarities and infractions related to plagiarism. For example, in the country of Italy has software tools to for students to facilitate their ability to check their work for plagiarism by employing “antiplagio” software. With the penalties for violation of plagiarism policies being enforced more harshly ranging from zero credit on the project reviewed to be expelled from the institution. At a minimum being found to be guilty of plagiarism will cause a large amount of embarrassment to the author of the paper and a loss of academic reputation. By making this tool anti-plagio.com available to students they have at least one source which is easy to use which can assist the student in checking sections of their paper or thesis by simply copying and pasting 400-word sections of their paper into the software. The software will return results next to the text box in which the section of words has been pasted which will indicate the percentage checked and indicate unique and/or plagiarized text. Since plagiarism can happen unintentionally by the author in that they may forget to reference the original source of a work it is incumbent upon a student authoring a research paper or thesis to use as many tools and methods as possible to detect any problems in their work which may possibly be labeled as plagiarism. The simple use of a free software tool such as this is a prudent way to gain security that you have not pirated a work intentionally or unintentionally.… Read More...

A Letter Written Entirely in Italian

My Italian teacher gave the class an assignment to test our Italian fluency. She told us to write a letter to a fictional pen pal entirely in Italian. We were allowed to use any words we wanted in the letter, as long as they fit correctly into each sentence on a grammatical level. The letter had to be at least two pages long, but we could write more if we wanted to do so. I thought writing more than two pages would be overkill, so I stuck to the required page length. I used the Analisi Logica grammar checker to make sure that all of my sentences were grammatically correct.

I never thought that writing to a fictional person could be so hard. While I was creating my letter, I kept getting writers block. Part of that was because I couldn’t come up with something interesting to write, and the other part was that I had a little trouble thinking of the right way to say it in Italian. A lot of the other students had similar problems while writing their letters. I talked to some of the other students about their letters after they submitted them, and some of them had similar letters to one another. The teacher probably figured this would happen, especially since we’ve all been learning the same words.

The teacher was impressed with the letter that I wrote. She liked that I included some new words that weren’t covered in the class, but she also wished that I had written more than the required two pages. My teacher wanted to know if I’m going to take Italian after the required two semesters that every student is required to take, and I told her that I wasn’t sure. While I like Italian, there are some other classes that I want to take.… Read More...

The Most Beautiful Words I’ve Ever Written

My great aunt died recently and I was given the task of coming up with something in Italian to put in her funeral program. It took a while, but I though of some really beautiful words to celebrate her memory. I wanted to make sure that the text I wrote was formatted with the correct grammar. I’ve seen quite a few websites that perform grammar checks for English text, but I needed one that would perform a grammar check for Italians. I was skeptical that one even existed, but I was able to find one after I did some searching.

After running my text through the grammar checker, I learned that my text was nearly perfect, except for one error. I haven’t written or spoken any Italian in a while, so I was surprised that I was still able to remember how to write text that was long enough. I guess all those years of living in a household where my parents would randomly start speaking Italian in the middle of an English sentence really helped. I showed the text to some of my other family members and they thought it was beautiful and that everyone at the funeral would be moved.

On the day of the funeral, I had a mix of emotions. I was sad that my great aunt died, and I was a little anxious because I was wondering how everyone would react to the words I wrote. Even though the family members who saw my text already liked it, I was thinking about the ones who hadn’t seen it yet. When the text was read aloud at the funeral, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. When everyone learned that I was the one that had written the text, they told me how beautiful it was and called me a great writer.… Read More...

Decreasing Errors and Mistakes-Increasing Quality

For both the casual writer, students and professional writer there are now quite a few ways to employ a program commonly known as a spell checker. In reality most of these programs do more than check spelling, in most cases they also check grammar and some go even further than that. Most writing applications such as Google Words and Microsoft Office have these tools built in and readily available to check a document easily by simply clicking on the checking tool. Additionally, if you are using a program for writing a document that does not have a built in spell checking tool there are many programs available for free on the internet which allow a writer to copy and paste a document into that program and check the document for spelling and more. Many of these tools in addition to checking spelling and grammar also check for additional errors such as punctuation, variations in different language dialects, and even language translation. It can be particularly handy for a writer in America using American English to be able to convert their document to British English and vice-versa. It makes the document more user friendly by picking up and suggesting changes to the document for the subtle nuances of substituting a word commonly used in that particular dialect, thus making the document more understandable to the reader. Some programs even have a feature which allows for language translation to twenty five or more different languages, giving the writer a chance to easily reach many more audiences without having to employ a human translator to convert the document to a different language.

Like any tool or program there are some that are more accurate than others and some that have more features than others. The best way to choose the program which has the features that you need is through research on the internet.

With all of the features available in these tools there is simply no reason to produce a document containing basic spelling and grammar errors. … Read More...

Help at the Last Minute

A friend of mine helped me out with a big problem last week. I forgot all about a paper that I had to turn in for my class. My friend finished her paper early and told me that I could use her paper to make mine. I told her that there was no way I would have enough time to rewrite her paper, and she told me that I could just use the Parafrasare website to rewrite the words and everything would be fine. I was hoping that she was right, because this paper was worth a large chunk of our grade in the class and I was going to be in trouble if I didn’t hand in something.

I had no idea that such a website existed, and now I’m wondering if my friend has ever used it before to write her own papers. It would explain how she is able to finish her papers so early. She could have easily either gotten information online and put it through the website, or even found whole papers that already exist and send them through the website. Either way, the paper she gave me was a pretty good paper, so if she had been sending it through the website, the website did a pretty good job. I ran the paper through the website and it created one with all of the sentences rewritten to look entirely different.

Thanks to my friend, I had a paper ready to turn into my professor without having to stay up all night to do it. I was a little worried that the professor would find out what I did, but he gave me a high grade on the paper, and my friend got a high grade as well. To celebrate, we ate dinner at Brazilian steakhouse and I paid for her meal as a thank you gift.… Read More...