Lifes Bullshit

When it comes to high school, there are many things students look forward to: more freedom, more friends, and more parties. But what we think is going to be all fun and games is less about friendships and more about grade-deciding projects. Indeed, high school is very much filled with major essays and late night projects as it is under-aged drinking and teen pregnancy. So when you’ve stayed out late at that kegger with Bobby and you realize you have a six page midterm paper due the next day, what are you going to do?
Answer: Bullshit your essay.
So many times I have seen kids try their best on an essay; staying up all night and slaving away at their computer in order to make up their own book themes or original ideas. These kids are what we call heroes. And for those of us that have a social life and don’t want to spend 35 minutes searching for an underlying theme in Huckleberry Finn, we need to find a way to crank out a six page paper without actually, necessarily, working. So for those of you who hate typing and despise research, I give you my four easy tips to bullshitting an essay.

Tip #1: Never try to be creative/original.
The book Huckleberry Finn was published in 1884. That means that for over 120 years people have been analyzing and studying it; creating hundreds of thousands of themes and symbols. Use one. There is no use in trying to think up your own theme or un-thought-of symbol, because some hero probably thought of the same thing in 1930. Please, for the sake of saving yourself time and effort, use someone else’s theme. There are hundreds of them.Where do you find underlying themes and symbols already laid out and explained to you? Sparknotes.com. I have been using Sparknotes for years now, and it has never failed me yet. The website has all the major pieces of reading you will ever be assigned in school, and has a quick summary, analysis of each chapter, important quotes, themes, symbols, and character list; everything essential to writing a piece of paper without actually reading it.How do you utilize these tools without straight-up plagiarizing? In high school, it is less about not plagiarizing and more about not getting caught plagiarizing. And in order to not get caught, you have to know how teachers check for plagiarizing.

When a teacher thinks the work you handed in isn’t yours, they check it online. A teacher’s suspicious could be raised by vocabulary you don’t normally use, voice that doesn’t sound like yours, or the fact that you left the citation numbers from when you copy-and-pasted from Wikipedia. If a teacher’s red flag is raised, they will copy the distrustful sentence and paste it into Google. When a website about Malcom X comes up that reads the same verbatim as your Malcom X essay, you fail for being an idiot. To prevent triggering a teacher’s disbelief of an essay being yours, you want to paraphrase and reword whatever you are copying. Sticking with the Huck Finn book example, let’s see how you could re-word Sparknotes into your own bullshitted words.

Real Sparknote Text:
“Although Twain wrote the novel after slavery was abolished, he set it several decades earlier, when slavery was still a fact of life. But even by Twain’s time, things had not necessarily gotten much better for blacks in the South. In this light, we might read Twain’s depiction of slavery as an allegorical representation of the condition of blacks in the United States even after the abolition of slavery.”

Your Words:
“The book Huck Finn takes place when slavery was still legal, even though Mark Twain wrote it after the abolition of slavery. It was during these times that blacks still faced segregation. In writing the book, Twain seemed to depict slavery as a figurative illustration of how African-Americans suffered in America even after slavery ended.”

As you can see, the changed text below portrays the same message, only with different wording. I changed “allegorical representation” to “figurative illustration”; “blacks” to “African-Americans”; and even “the United States” to “America.” It was these simple changes that made the writing mine, and even though it—technically—still counts as plagiarizing, no one will ever find out.

Using someone else’s ideas isn’t cheating. There is recorded evidence that Martin Luther King Jr. plagiarized many of his speeches, and he led thousands to civil rights. What if teachers had checked his work on Google? Black people would still be sitting on the back of the bus.

Tip #2 Use Wikipedia as a bounce-off point.

Here’s a question: When someone asks you to do a report on John F Kennedy, where’s the first place you look? If you’re in high school your answer is most likely Wikipedia. The only problem is that all teachers forbid Wikipedia on the claim that any “Joe Somebody” can go onto it and edit the information on it. This is false on two accounts.

1. The information put on Wikipedia is analyzed by dozens of editors who check sources, follow up information, and generally prevent anything funny.
2. No dick-faced meathead would go on Wikipedia and put false information just for shits and giggles