Anorexia: The Cheating Disorder

This is the first paragraph of an essay I received from a young woman purporting to describe her own experience with anorexia nervosa. Before I had finished reading one page, I suspected it was plagiarized. I cannot easily explain my hunch. Something canned about the writing, its confessional sentiment exactly like the cases in the magazines. I ran a quick search through the Magazine Index in the library and then through recent issues of Teen, McCall's, Glamour, and Mademoiselle. In a half-hour, I had six articles: Anorexia Nearly Killed Me, Starving Oneself to Death, Starving for Attention, Two Teens, My Sister and I, and One Teen's Diet Nightmare. I did not accuse the student of plagiarism on the evidence of this search, but I decided to talk with her before I would comment on or evaluate her paper. I guessed that in our talk she would reveal that she had copied her essay or in some other way falsified it. She did. I am not inquiring here into the causes of plagiarism among students nor describing how teachers ought to respond to it. I am simply telling two stories in order to convey something of its perversity. Several years before I received the anorexia paper, a student submitted a brief analysis of James Joyce's The Dead. As I was reading it, the paper tripped some wire in my mind. It seemed both accomplished and incompetent, full of discontinuities like those in the following two sentences: