news
How to Plagiarize
This article is free to read. So is every article Electric Literature publishes. No limits, no paywalls—now or ever. But we rely on your support to keep it that way.
We need to raise $35,000 by April 15 to keep the lights on, and time is running out.
Help us reach the next milestone—$15,000 by Wednesday—by donating now.
—————
Want to plagiarize a paper from Wikipedia? Too lazy to retype the article yourself? Not lazy enough to copy and paste? Strangely, there’s a service out there for you: EssayTyper lets you pick an essay topic and ghost-type the Wikipedia page verbatim. It’s like copy & paste, but with that old-time typing feel you love!
(Seriously, you have to try it to believe it.) Who’s to say what’s the use here — even the proprietors warn against using their site in service of ignoble ends — but it’s a neat trick with some surprising quirks: it automatically populates jargony titles (“Gender Norms & Racial Bias in the Study of the Modern “The Orphan Master’s Son”) and seems to be (strangely) curated (an essay on Tina Fey is right at your fingertips, but you’re out of luck if you need one on Lena Dunham).
***
–Jake Zucker is the Editorial Assistant for Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, and wears sunglasses on the net.
