Plagiarism

Description and type: circumvention of expository cloning processes (mechanistic internalization of professorial writing practices) through verbatim copying. Digressive/repressive disorder.

Symptoms and signs: produces acceptable text without demonstrating programmability requisite for graduation (vide cheating).

Etiology: an entirely admirable impulse to produce acceptable academic discourse is misdirected, through intellectual laziness or moral lassitude, into a proscribed form. In fact, in a professor this behavior only becomes unacceptable when it entails publishing colleagues' work under his/her name; it is perfectly acceptable when it entails publishing graduate students' research under his/her name. Indeed the discursive imitation generally considered desirable is so close to the original as virtually to constitute plagiarism, and differs from such only in the importance placed upon submission to academic programming.

Treatment: xeroclonodase solution (Expositron).

Prognosis: excellent. The plagiarist almost has the right idea, and fundamentally needs little more than slight redirection.

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Copyright 1992 Doug Robinson and Bill Kaul, who ripped this whole idea off from the Physician's Desk Reference