Virginia Woolf

We've enlarged the Virginia Woolf section of our site by adding a couple of recently published items. Alexandra Harris had a big success last year with her extended study Romantic Moderns, and she's followed it up pretty smartly with Virginia Woolf. This combines a brief account of Woolf's life history with a very enthusiastic introduction to her major novels. Then, for a taste of the real thing, have a look at On Fiction, a collection of Woolf's essays on writing and the novel. In these she sketches out very elegantly some of the ideas she developed at greater length in later works such as A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas.

Virginia Woolf: Selected Essays

These essays are completely self-contained, and can be read for the pleasure which Virginia Woolf thought was the purpose of the essay form. But they also illuminate her larger works of fiction. They are a small proportion of her total output (which runs to five volumes) but they represent some of the most important themes which pervade her work as a whole. They are also amazingly prophetic - on women as writers, on the death of Empire, and on the speed and locomotion of modern life. She writes about the Tube, the telephone, the motor car, and aircraft, which were all recent developments. The essays are arranged in chronological order in four groups - reading and writing, biography, feminism, and contemporary culture. She had inherited the skill of writing from her father Leslie Stephen and by the time these essays were written had honed that skill into a high form of art... Read more >>

more VIRGINIA WOOLF books

Problems of Plagiarism

In academic circles the plagiarism issue has escalated in the last few years and is now like a boiling pot threatening to blow its top. The problems are as follows. First, the advent of the Internet meant that essays posted as exemplars could be downloaded and passed off as original work. Perhaps the most famous example was when the UK government issued a justification for the invasion of Iraq which was based on 'evidence' which turned out to be the PhD thesis of a student they'd grabbed off the Web. Keep that example in mind when people are getting on their high horses.

Software companies quickly retaliated by writing programs which would compare any suspicious work submitted with a huge corpus of digital work available. Work plagiarised from stuff on the Net is now detectable. End of round One.

Then along come companies such as Oxbridge Essays who say they will write coursework essays and even dissertations and theses to order - 800 quid a pop plus, depending on urgency of need. If you want it for a deadline in a few days time, the fee might be doubled.

But hang on! Isn't that unethical? Well, here's where it gets complex, and interesting. These essay farms issue a disclaimer saying that the work they produce is for illustrative purposes only, as an example of what might be expected, and must not in any circumstances be passed off as the purchaser's own efforts.

Oh - yeah. If that were true, they could just have a selection of sample essays at different levels on various subjects available for contemplation. But they wouldn't sell as many ready-mades. I don't think they would be very keen on that - especially when the page of 'sample essays' they have on their web site has only one link from a list of thirteen.

There is one argument on their side however. The academic world is much given to asking its students to produce essays, reports, and coursework of all kinds - but it is notoriously reticent about showing what this test-work ought to look like. They don't say 'Write an essay on Othello or the influence of The Origin of Species - and here's what a similar essay looks like.

So most students have not seen lots of other essays on which they are being asked to model their own - and against which they will be judged. Whereas their tutors have seen more essays than they ever want to see again.

Another recent case is that of Open University students selling their old assignments on eBay. The OU has its knickers in quite a twist on this one. Because they know that the essay is the property of the person who wrote it. Students have copyright to their own work. So the OU argues rather feebly that they own copyright to the question which was set. They could get round this problem by setting new questions for each run of a course - but they like to print the same materials and use them over and over again. And they have sometimes argued even more feebly that they might want to use the same questions when they present the course overseas. In the meantime there doesn't seem to be much they can do about Jemimah selling her sets of Sociology essays to the highest bidder.

Back to the essay farms. They say here's your custom written piece on the significance of Britain's Foreign Policy in the lead up to the Crimean War - (800 quid thank you) but we urge you to use this ethically (it's not online by the way, and so cannot be traced).

Well, here's a tip for departments and for programmers. Get the student's earlier works, and compare them stylistically with the latest piece, produced miraculously just before the deadline.

Course, lots of harassed teachers and tutors will not have the time, effort, or inclination to do any of this. They will be only too delighted to keep their own and their department's ratings high by letting it all through without demur. Yes - I know that lots of institutions take this issue seriously and spend a lot of money subscribing to software programs - but these can only compare suspicious cases with materials which are already online. The essay farms neatly sidestep this obstacle - but at a high cost for the would-be cheater.

See also ..

Plagiarism, Copyright and New Media
Self-plagiarism - how to avoid it