As the only native English speaker in my company I am often asked to review colleagues' abstracts and papers. I don't mind performing the extra task because I enjoy learning about their work. I also must admit that I have a need to practice proper grammar and formal language; I have concerns that I might be learning too many bad habits here. I recently heard myself asking a server, "Can I have a glass of water?" I could almost hear my father responding with, "I don't know; can you?"
I especially enjoy editing one particular colleague's papers because he writes mainly about environmental issues that interest me and he has a good command of English. His mistakes are usually easy to correct. Today he sent an eleven page paper which had me pulling at my hair. His typical succinct and meaningful style was replaced by a barely coherent ramble through several loosely related topics with no apparent thesis or conclusion. The language reminded me of a time when I tried to use Google Translate to read an archaeological paper that had been written in German. I had an uncomfortable suspicion that my colleague was not the author of the paper but who plagiarizes something that is drastically below his own level of intellect?
I once sat on a tribunal at Cornell concerning a student who was accused of plagiarizing a piece of Spanish literature. The facts were mind boggling: the student was in an intermediate level Spanish literature class despite the fact that he was a native Spanish speaker and he had previously completed the beginner level Spanish classes with obviously straight A's. He may have become too lazy considering that he probably never had to study for any of his exams. For the literature class all he needed to do was write a story or poem in Spanish but instead he submitted a story that he had copied from a Bolivian author. In most cases a professor would submit a written statement regarding a plagiarism offense but the Spanish professor was so enraged that she personally attended the tribunal. She ranted at the lack of requirements, which allowed a native speaker to enroll in elementary classes of his language and spoke scathingly of the type of student who would repeatedly enroll in the most basic of such classes. But the gravest offense was that he had plagiarized from an author who she considered to the lowest form of hack. From her description his paper was the English equivalent of submitting an excerpt of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code to a class taught by Umberto Eco. I still marvel at his gall.
I especially enjoy editing one particular colleague's papers because he writes mainly about environmental issues that interest me and he has a good command of English. His mistakes are usually easy to correct. Today he sent an eleven page paper which had me pulling at my hair. His typical succinct and meaningful style was replaced by a barely coherent ramble through several loosely related topics with no apparent thesis or conclusion. The language reminded me of a time when I tried to use Google Translate to read an archaeological paper that had been written in German. I had an uncomfortable suspicion that my colleague was not the author of the paper but who plagiarizes something that is drastically below his own level of intellect?
I once sat on a tribunal at Cornell concerning a student who was accused of plagiarizing a piece of Spanish literature. The facts were mind boggling: the student was in an intermediate level Spanish literature class despite the fact that he was a native Spanish speaker and he had previously completed the beginner level Spanish classes with obviously straight A's. He may have become too lazy considering that he probably never had to study for any of his exams. For the literature class all he needed to do was write a story or poem in Spanish but instead he submitted a story that he had copied from a Bolivian author. In most cases a professor would submit a written statement regarding a plagiarism offense but the Spanish professor was so enraged that she personally attended the tribunal. She ranted at the lack of requirements, which allowed a native speaker to enroll in elementary classes of his language and spoke scathingly of the type of student who would repeatedly enroll in the most basic of such classes. But the gravest offense was that he had plagiarized from an author who she considered to the lowest form of hack. From her description his paper was the English equivalent of submitting an excerpt of Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code to a class taught by Umberto Eco. I still marvel at his gall.
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