Obvious plagiarism

It always startles me anew—though I have nabbed dozens of plagiarists—to realize that the student cheater is amazed at my powers of discernment, my uncanny ability to detect a difference in quality between his or her own work and, for example, Proust's.

Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members: A Novel (New York: Doubleday, 2014), p.80

Plagiarists work hard

     What's interesting to Hal Incandenza about his take on Struck, sometimes Permulis, Evan Ingersoll, et al. is that congenital plagiarists put so much more work into camouflaging their plagiarism than it would take just to write up an assignment from conceptual scratch. It usually seems like plagiarists aren't lazy so much as kind of navigationally insecure. They have trouble navigating without a detailed map's assurance that somebody has been this way before them. About this incredible painstaking care to hide and camouflage the plagiarism—whether it's dishonesty or a kind of kleptomaniacal thrill-seeking or what—Hal hasn't developed much of any sort of take.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (New York: Little, Brown & Co., Hachette Book Group, 2009) (Kindle location 24020)