elibats

I took an online class on Women's Literature and I didnt feel like I had anyone to critique it for me so I posted it on essayforum.com. I knew I was running th risk of someone stealing my essay from the forum, but I didn't really care too much because I wasn't all that attached to the essay. Then when I got my final grade the professor accused me of plagiarism because she searched for the title of the short story I wrote the paper on and found a link directly to my post on essayforum. Certainly never posting there again, and now I almost don't want to post here anymore, because it's just so easy for people to steal your words. Any thoughts?

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Sam Winchester

Why didn't you just tell him it was yours? Sorry, I'm not seeing the problem here.

Generally, people are much too busy with their own stuff to worrying about stealing others'.

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Perception of reality is not the same thing as reality itself.

Sam Winchester

Are you saying that someone else on essayforum - someone from your class - stole your essay and used it as their own?

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Perception of reality is not the same thing as reality itself.

elibats

No, that wasn't what I was saying. I guess I wasn't entirely clear. I wrote an essay for a class and before handing it in I posted it on an essay forum. The professor, while reading my paper, decided google "Virginia Woolf Mark on the Wall" to see what resources are out there. Instead she found my post.

And yes, I did explain it to her, but it caused a lot of extra red tape bs thatI'd rather not relive. So, no more posting schoolwork online.

Peace
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valeca

Post only in password protected areas like the Writers' Workshop. It's not foolproof, but it won't turn up on a Google search.

Sorry that happened to you. If that was the only thing that turned up, wouldn't it just be a simple matter of proving it was your post by letting them see you log into the site?

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"...make your own nature, not the advice of others, your guide in life." --Pythia, Oracle of Apollo at Delphi

I'm here.

Sam Winchester

Also, if you had a saved version of it on your computer from before you posted it on the forum, that should be more than enough proof to convince him it's yours.

I've heard that schools have this new program that can detect any passages lifted straight from the internet - say, for instance, someone else posts a thesis paper on participant observation for a Sociology class and you steal parts from it. Well, the program scans the entire web to see if your work coincides with anything else on the web. If it does, big trouble. This isn't relevant to your post, I know, but I just thought I'd bring it up to let people know.

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Perception of reality is not the same thing as reality itself.

Wintermute

I don't generally worry about people stealing the work I post online. There are better authors they can steal from. But if you do worry, you're better off just forming a private critique group with members that you trust and workshopping with them.

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"I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read." - Samuel Johnson

Wintermute

I don't generally worry about people stealing the work I post online. There are better authors they can steal from. But if you do worry, you're better off just forming a private critique group with members that you trust and workshopping with them instead.

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"I never desire to converse with a man who has written more than he has read." - Samuel Johnson

Tiamat10

On one of the sites I do freelancing for, they have a feature like that. Two separate ones actually, which compare your articles with other web content they finds. If it's too similar to an outside source, they automatically send you a message (within the site) telling you to rewrite the parts of your text that were too similar to the outside sources.

Anyways, to the OP, I also don't see why it's such an ordeal. I don't see how it's possible that you couldn't prove you wrote it. But I do understand the hesitancy of posting your work, but there are ways of avoiding it to an extent. Like Val said, you can post your stuff in the workshop. Also, it helps if you don't post the entire piece.

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