i need help with text analysis essay?

Cynthia K. Marshall

English 101

14 May 2012

Too Good to Be True:

A Textual Analysis of Dan Ariely’s “Plagiarism and Essay Mills”

Dan Ariely’s blog post “Plagiarism and Essay Mills” discusses the results of an experiment he tries to test the usefulness of term paper mills. He defines essay mills as “companies whose sole purpose is to generate essays for high school and college students” (Ariely). He pays four companies to complete for a college-level social psychology course a 12-page essay that incorporates sources using APA format. Amusingly, the topic he selects is cheating. The resulting essays Ariely received ranged in quality from merely bad to nonsensical. One of the less comprehensible excerpts he provides is this: “Cheating by healers. Healing is different. There is harmless healing, when healers-cheaters and wizards offer omens, lapels, damage to withdraw, the husband-wife back and stuff. We read in the newspaper and just smile. But these days fewer people believe in wizards.” Further, the APA format was wrong in all of them including outdated links, and many of the sources that were cited were not acceptable for an academic essay. The essays were also in part themselves plagiarized from other sources. Based on the poor quality of the four essays he purchased, Ariely concludes from this experiment that essay mills do not yet pose any significant threat to academic integrity. Ariely attempts to convey this claim through its organization, appeal to ethos, awareness of audience, diction, and examples.

Ariely’s organization is primarily chronological, which works for the purposes of his piece. He starts by indicating the genesis of this experiment, starting the school year, and takes readers through the process of procuring papers. He ends the piece with the results of his experiment and his conclusions. This time-order organization takes readers through the process as Ariely experienced it, which makes sense for a blog focusing on a question and its subsequent testing.

Ariely begins the blog with a comment about how as a teacher he has concerns about plagiarism, which appeals to ethos by establishing his credibility and stake in the topic. The biographical sketch of Ariely provided elsewhere on his blog further bolster his ethos: he is professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University and has written several books for popular audiences that detail his research, including Predictably Irrational. This information about Ariely leads readers to trust not only his experience as a teacher but also his work as a researcher, which lends credibility to his experiment. Conversely, writer Jonathan Bailey in his article “Are Essay Mills Worth Worrying About?” fails to establish his ethos. He refers to other articles he has written and even to Ariely’s blog, but he doesn’t establish his own stake in the topic. Bailey, unlike Ariely, conducted no primary research to back up his points, but instead offers unsupported opinions throughout. Although Bailey reaches the same conclusion Ariely does, Bailey fails to appeal successfully to ethos.

Ariely’s blog concludes with his account of asking the companies for a refund for the inferior papers and them refusing; one company even threatened to report the “student” to his dean. At first glance, this ending information does not necessarily seem to be an important detail. For instructors, this detail seems merely amusing. However, if the audience is students who may still be thinking of using these services this ending serves as yet another reminder that using an essay mill is a losing proposition.

The blog does a nice job of covering the results of plagiarism using essay mills. So although it might broaden the scope of what he could reasonably address in a blog post, Ariely does not address another common source of plagiarized essays: the internet. Many Web sites offer papers free to students. Perhaps he leaves this out because he assumes that most instructors can use Google effectively enough to track down a paper that was copied and pasted. He states at the start that instructors “are very concerned about essay mills in general and their impact on learning.” If his audience is other teachers, his focus on only essay mills might make sense. But if his audience is intended to be broader than that, perhaps to include students as well, he might have at least mentioned that papers can be plagiarized from a lot of different sources, not merely from essay mills or friends.

Throughout the post, Ariely uses plain and easily understood language. For example, upon receiving the four essays and noting their quality, “At this point we were rather relieved, figuring that the day is not here where students can submit papers from essay mills and get good grades for them.” His use of words like “figuring” and “good grades” rather than more formal or technical terms are conversational but professional. This level of diction is appropriate for a blog post on a site aimed at lay readers, rather than other economists. It also makes sense that Ariely in particular would use such plain speech, as his books, too are written in such language for lay audiences. The mini-bio that appears at the top of his blog states “I do research in behavioral economics and try to describe it in plain language.“ Athough the Bailey blog post also relies on plain, easily understood language, because the author failed to appeal to ethos to establish his credibility as a writer, the effect is different. Ariely is impressive for making his complex ideas and research easily understood, whereas Bailey seems to just another guy spouting his opinions online.

To reinforce his claim that these essay mill papers are darn-near worthless, Ariely relies primarily on quotes from the papers. In addition to the previous quote about wizards and so forth, he offers four additional excerpts to illustrate that the papers are, in his words, “gibberish.” He indicates that the APA format is wrong and that the sources cited are questionable at best, but he provides no specific examples of either problem. The blog post might have been stronger if he had given at least one or two illustrations for those issues, as well, particularly because format and source use are mentioned so prominently in the prompt he gave to the essay mills.

Overall, I found that Ariely’s blog post, like his books, conveys interesting research results in conversational language that appeals to a wide audience. Despite a few possible flaws and omissions, Ariely’s piece still provides a great starter for conversations about plagiarism in composition classes.

Works Cited

Ariely, Dan. “Plagiarism and Essay Mills.” Technology Review. MIT, 15 Sept. 2010. Web. 14 May 2012.

Bailey, Jonathan. “Are Essay Mills Worth Worrying About?” Plagiarism Today. Plagiarism Today, 9 Feb. 2012. Web. 14 May 2012.