Most foolish plagiarism ever...

Michelangelo, The Last Judgement

(Sistine Chapel, 1535-1541)
Plagiarism: putting oneself in another's skin?

(Image from Wikipedia)

Yesterday, I began to correct a student paper titled:

"A Comparative Study of Structure and Theme in Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"

Oddly enough, it has the same title as a journal article by a scholar named Yang Hyun-Chul, which raised my suspicions since my student has an entirely different name.

Now, this could be coincidence. Expressions like "Comparative Study" and "Structure and Theme" can be quite common, and lots of folks must have compared Beowulf to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Still, that's quite a lengthy sequence of words for an exact match.

Let's look more closely. Here's a passage from the paper's body:

I think according to Frye's theory of nature-myth (Frye 429), that the inner structure of four parts in the Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight reflects the seasonal cycle of the year, and the organic cycle of human life. So I will describe these four parts which are referring to the myth, symbols and meaning.

This is not a perfectly constructed sentence, but it looks to be well above the level attained by most students in my classes and best fits the language level of a scholar using English as a second language (hence that superfluous definite article in "the Beowulf").

So ... I think that my student has plagiarized this article.

But I'd hate to risk making a false accusation on such a serious issue, so to be sure about my suspicions -- which I assume you share -- let's compare the sentence quoted above with the paper's thesis statement, for I require students' papers to have a thesis statement with a logical form that I've specified (A --> B b/c A --> C), thus making very likely that the student would have to compose at least this one small part of the paper. Here's what my student wrote:

The two poem's themes or motifs are combined to produce a work of impressive organic unity because two poems have heroic ideal, Christian humiliation and chastity.

This is a very poor sentence, much poorer than the one quoted earlier. Though it starts out well enough, it deteriorates toward the end. I think that my student borrowed the first half and simply appended the because-clause: "because two poems have heroic ideal, Christian humiliation and chastity." This because-clause clearly has a different style and makes far more mistakes than the sentence's first half, which only gets the apostrophe in "poem's" wrong (and which might simply be a typo). One could quibble that "produce a work" should be "produce works," but we're surely meant to understand the meaning as "produce a work in each poem."

At any rate, the because-clause would need a bit of reworking to bring it up to the stylistic level of the sentence's first half. Let's try reworking it (also correcting "poem's"):

The two poems' themes or motifs are combined to produce a work of impressive organic unity because they express the heroic ideal along with Christian values of humility and chastity.

This sounds better, but it's a very weak thesis statement since the reason provided in the because-clause is insufficient to support the claim made in the sentence's first half. Also, the because-clause is wrong about "humility" in Beowulf, which is not a poem that extols Christian humility -- or humility of any sort, for that matter.

Consequently, I have no doubt that this paper is plagiarized and that the student deserves an "F."

Hint to student: At least alter the title the next time that you plagiarize an entire article.