So I was reading a comment thread on a blog, and one of the commenters dropped in a reference to Pap Finn. With no explanation except a somewhat pissy comment that anyone who didn't understand what he meant should go reread Huckleberry Finn. First of all, congratulations for remembering your middle school reading list better than I do; aren't you special. But, I did kind of want to know what the guy was talking about so I googled "pap finn."
The first result turned out to be an essay excerpt from a "buy a paper" site. I had never actually seen a purchased paper before. Since I went to college back in the dawn of prehistory (cough...wheeze) there weren't websites for ... well actually there weren't any websites at all, as far as I know. (the Internet existed though I hadn't yet heard of it, and I think the Web did not yet exist.) For sure there weren't websites where you could buy term papers. At the time I had heard rumors of "places" where one could buy finished papers on every topic imaginable, but had no idea how such a purchase would be made, nor any desire to find out. As far as I knew at the time, this rumor had about as much truth, and as much value, as CHUDs living in the tunnels under West Campus.
Anyway. This was my first look at a term paper for purchase and I have to say, I'm kind of appalled at how bad it is. Not just lacking in insight, but totally ungrammatical. The strange thing is that it starts out okay, and gradually devolves until the end of the excerpt is almost nonsensical. Examples: "He catch me a couple of times and thrashed me but I went to school just the same, and dodged him or outrun, but reckoned he'd go now to spite Pap," explained Huck when he had noticed that his father's actions had shows when Pap was envying of Huck being more educated than he is. Or: When alcohol entered into Pap body made him acts in a disapprobation manner.
I don't feel a whole lot of pity for students who buy papers, but still, anyone who paid for that got robbed. I've heard teachers say that they always know when a student turns in a paper they bought. Is this why, because the papers are so bad? It reads like it was run through a gibberifying machine. Maybe it was: maybe the excerpts are so bad to prevent people from copying them and using them for free. Maybe when you pay you get a clean, grammatical version of the paper. Their FAQ page doesn't say so, but it could be.
2 Comments
I'm not 100% sure the term "internet" had even been coined when you graduated--it seems to date to 1989. Tim Berners-Lee's first hypertext language was in 1980, but HTML wasn't until 1991. The CHUDs under West Campus weren't installed until 1993.
I graduated in 1990, but I think I didn't get net access until a year or so later. I can't honestly remember how I first heard of the internet. Maybe through Charles who had gotten an employee account at Duke. I remember I got my first account by pretending to work for him. I used to dial in to Duke and then telnet to whatever I wanted to do. MUSHing mostly. I definitely missed the CHUDs.