“Did you finish your homework yet?” Josh’s mother asked him.
Yeah, I’m wrapping it up. I just need to pull another snippet or two from Google and copy and paste them into my term paper,” Josh said.
“Wait, Josh,” his mother said. “You can’t just copy and paste snippets from the internet to write your paper. That’s plagiarism.”
“Semantics, Mom,” Josh said. “You call it plagiarism and I call it research and leveraging.”
“It’s not just semantics,” she said. “You’re being jejune if you think you can get away with plagiarism.”
“Jejune? What’s that mean?”
“You’re so smart, Google it,” his mother said.
Josh tapped his keyboard and looked at the screen. “Okay,” he said. “Naive, simplistic.”
Exactly, and you’re being naive if you think that copying portions of your term paper directly from articles on the internet won’t be tagged as plagiarism,” she said. “There are software programs available to your professors to catch that sort of thing. You should be grateful to me for stopping you from doing something that could get you kicked out of college.”
“Thanks, Mom, but I’m going to play the odds,” Josh said. “I don’t think they’ll bother running some plagiarism program on my paper.”
“But, Josh, have you no scruples? Don’t you want to reach the full apex of your potential?” his mother asked. “Are you really going to pass someone else’s academic work as your own? Have you no shame?”
“Oh come on, Mom, now you’re being jejune.” Josh countered. “Besides, I plan to go into politics after college and you know that politicians these days have no scruples. And no shame, either.”
Written for these daily prompts: The Daily Spur (homework), Weekly Prompt (snippet), Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (semantics), Your Daily Word Prompt (jejune), Ragtag Daily Prompt (grateful), and Word of the Day Challenge (apex).
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