Essay Help from Essay Bots

There are now essay bots that will help you write an essay on a particular topic if you enter search terms related to that topic. The website will provide you with passages that relate to this topic and invite you to paste them into your developing essay. In addition, it may offer to reword the passage for you, claiming that this will clear you of plagiarism.

• This is cheating because you are not doing your own work, and you are using the work of others without your instructor’s knowledge.
• It is plagiarism because you are unable to cite the source from which the passage comes; this information is not provided, so you are using someone else’s ideas without proper attribution.
• Using the provided rewording is also plagiarism because the rewording is merely "patchwriting," which means that synonyms are found for selected words in the passage, but the rest of the sentence structure remains intact.
• These sites may reassure students that their resulting essays will be free of plagiarism, but often, the writing style of the pulled passages is so different from the student’s that the plagiarism will be easy for the instructor to recognize. In addition, the passage may cite sources that were not used in the class that the student can’t track down because insufficient source information is provided.