The clock on the wall ticks, trying to reach the number 12; the sound of typing fills the quiet atmosphere as if the keyboard is going to break any second; the congested eyes of the student stick to the screen. All of these phenomena occur due to an essay due at midnight.

Writing essays is a nightmare for students, and even native speakers struggle with them. However, even though students often have a hard time turning in their essays, they still manage to figure out ways to finish their work so they won’t receive zeroes on their report cards.

Procrastinating Students

Most students appear to be honest people on the outside, but are they actually that hard-working? Of course not, and this article would just be boring and ordinary if it were only talking about good students in school.

The truth is, most students remember that they have an essay due a week before the deadline and often finish their essay at the last minute. Poor writing along with silly grammar mistakes are common, along with the lack of credible sources.

Untrustworthy Websites

Due to the laziness rooted in their minds, students get ideas from untrustworthy and easy-to-find sources such as Wikipedia, Enotes, Sparknotes, Quora, or other random blogs, all of which appear on the first option of Google’s Search Engine Results Pages, or SERPs.

This does not mean that these sites are useless (most of the information on these sites is correct and useful), but they are often written by random dudes on the internet who you should not fully trust; you never know if they know what they are talking about. Students, with a deadline only a few hours or even minutes ahead of them, naturally rely on this lazy style of research to finish their work.

Throwing-up Style Writing

Next is how these student sloths “vomit” their essays. First, students feel confident about how they want to construct their essays after listening to teachers’ advice, so they start from the intro while planning how to write the body paragraphs at the same time. Then, with this information from untrustworthy websites, they add in random new ideas in the body that they think will be effective, making the whole essay a hot mess. This mess, ultimately, is hard to clean, so when students try to conclude, they will find their essays don’t have a main point. Under intense time pressure, the only step to take is to conclude the essay with totally unrelated ideas that sound profound, hoping the teachers will give a few sympathetic points to them.

Paraphrasing

This way of writing is awful enough, but there is an even worse way: the online paraphrasing tool. The tool paraphrases online articles so that students can directly copy these articles into their own essays. This is almost completely copying another’s work with barely an attempt to not get caught, and the consequences are far more serious than receiving several zeros on a report card.

For example, my friend once tried this technique on the topic of environmental protection. He thought that the cheat would not be discovered since he found the article on a barely known website. However, his overconfidence led him to destruction: he forgot to change the author’s name. When the school found out, he was almost expelled due to plagiarism, but since he had a good attitude, the school forgave him and punished him with 30 hours of service for the school.

Proofreading

The final flaw of lazy students can be seen in the example my friend set: they never proofread after they finish writing. If today my friend had proofread before turning in his work, he would not have gotten caught in the first place. If those who write in a hurry were to proofread, they would also certainly improve their essay quality.

Honest Students

There are also honest students who go online to find credible sources before constructing their outlines. This allows them to meet the criteria on the rubric of credible sources while also absorbing new knowledge actively, producing a win-win situation. However, this kind of student only makes up a tiny portion of the student population, the members of which become the upper class of society in the future.

Solution

The only way to rectify students’ abuses of online resources is either to enact heavy punishments or to educate them correctly starting from a young stage. The former may provide instantaneous help, but the latter is definitely more long-lasting and effective. Therefore, children should go to Englist to receive the best English education possible so that they will not become one of those indolent students who plagiarize.