Friday, May 21, 2010

Book Blogs =/= Homework Help

This is an issue I've been meaning to blog about for some time now. Let's face it - it's kind of cool to see what keywords people are using in search engines and such to end up at your blog.

But lately I've been noticing a very disturbing trend. For some time now, search phrases such as:

"
North of Beautiful Characters"
"
North of Beautiful themes"
"
Candor book themes"
"
What is the setting of [North of Beautiful] [Candor] [All Unquiet Things] [Bad Girls Don't Die] etc."
"What is the theme of [book title]
"

and those are simply a few examples of a huge slew of queries that somehow lead here. Themes, setting, literary devices, characters, you name it. A few book titles seem to pop up especially much - perhaps they're being used in schools?

And then last month I got these two comments - in quick succession, no less - by an anonymous commenter: "HELP!!! What is Carter's last name?????" and "PLEASE I NEED HELP!!!! WHAT IS CARTER'S LAST NAME????"

But two particular search terms yesterday - from different search engines - really take the cake. "summary on the novel bad girls don't die that i can turn in to my teacher for a book report" and "summary on the novel bad girls don't die that i can hand in to my teacher as a report". Really, people, really? This is kind of appalling. I mean, have you no shame? To go around and attempt to commit such plagiarism... wow.

Have you guys been finding such a trend lately as well? How do you feel about it?

18 comments:

Emily said...

I have it happen all the time on my blog. I just ignore it. When kids email me with homework questions I just ignore them. It is really lame.

Emily said...

The types of information out there now (like the internet) just didn't exist when I was in school - but even if they did, I know I would never have used them to plagiarize. I wonder how much of it is kids being overwhelmed by school work and how much is just plain laziness.

Creepy Query Girl said...

This hasn't happened to me. But can i just say 'wow'?

Steph Su said...

This hasn't really happened on my blog, but last year someone sent me a Goodreads message saying that he saw I had read a certain book he needed to write an essay on for class, due the next day, and so could I please provide him the answers to several questions. He then proceeded to list the questions, which were all very hard, theme-related, high school English type stuff. Good job, person. I'm not sure how some people grew up to think that this sort of thing is okay.

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