I don’t often get annoyed when I read the newspaper these days –- well, not more than once per page anyway – but an article a few years ago with a headline aloing the lines of “Half of university students also prepared to submit essays bought off internet, according to research” (I’ve seen many similar articles in the context of AI), really wound me up. This for several reasons.
plagiarist, by Terry Freedman
Firstly, the research was carried out by a researcher with the results to be presented at a conference called The Plagiarism Conference sponsored by, amongst others, a company which supplies plagiarism-detecting software. Now come on: how likely is it that they would sponsor a conference in which someone comes along and say “Hey! Our research shows that you really don’t need to be buying plagiarism-busting aplications!”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that the research was fabricated or misreported, or that anyone has said or done anything which is underhand. The fact is that there is a tendency for research results to reflect the views or principles of the researcher or organisation involved. It happens in every field. In economics, for example, research by Keynesian organisations always discover that unemplyment is caused by a lack of demand, while monetarists always find that unemployment is caused by wages being too high as a result of too much money being printed, in effect, by the government. As I put it some years ago:
“The same sort of thing was discovered many years ago in the field of Economics, in which it was found that the (to all intents and purposes objective) research of left-wing think tanks tended to reveal things like, for example, the official rate of unemployment was an understatement of the true figure, whilst their right-wing counterparts’ research demonstrated errors in the opposite direction. There was no suggestion that anyone was being economical with the truth.”
— Terry Freedman
I first heard about this phenomenon when I was studying Psychology at uni. It was an option I took in my first year, and in one of our experiments we looked at something called the Experimenter Effect. It was fascinating really. Paired off, we students were given the role of either experimenter or subject, and then each experimenter was given an instruction sheet to read to our subject, explaining the nature of the task he or she would be doing. The sheet included the directive to read out the instructions exactly as they were set out, apart from the last paragraph. That final paragraph told me that the task was impossible. What I didn’t know at the time was that other experimenters’ final paragraph said the precise opposite, that the task was as easy as falling off a log.
Despite, as we all thought, carrying out our instructions to the letter, and reading the sheet out exactly as it was written, ie with no diversion from the text or even giving our words a particular nuance, those of us who were told the task was impossible witnessed our subjects flailing and failing abysmally, whilst our more optimistic colleagues saw their subjects succeed with glee.
It seems to me, therefore, that the results of research are coloured by hidden influences such as expectations, underlying methodology, the type of questions asked, and so on. I don’t think truly objective research is possible, and I would even apply that “law” to my own humble efforts. For example, it is hardly surprising that when I set out to find out how teachers were using Web 2.0 applications in their classrooms, and what the outcomes were for students, I discovered that teachers who use blogging and so on in their lessons universally report that it had a profoundly positive effect on their students’ learning.
Bottom line: I tend to take all research results, especially the ones I read about in newspapers, with a pinch of salt. And I say "especially" because I find it very depressing that stories like the one alluded to here seem always to be reported without any critical faculty whatsoever being exercised. Like those stories that pop up every so often in which someone starts ranting that kids don't know how to use apostrophes these days, a clear indication if ever there was one of the wholesale failure of teachers, schools and society in general -- and it is mentioned, almost in passing, that the ranter has just published "Apostrophes for Dummies" or some such title. I know journalists are busy people, with deadlines and stuff, but surely they could at least raise an eyebrow?
Secondly, I refuse to believe that 50% of university students are cheats or potential cheats.
Thirdly, what exactly has changed over the last however many years apart from, perhaps, the ease with which one can buy essays? I recall a “student” I was put in contact with through a private tuition agency offering to pay me three times the hourly rate to write an essay he could copy and pass off as his own. I refused, and he was so upset and angry that he complained to the agency about me, telling them that I had made the offer to him! That was 40 years ago (and I still feel bloody annoyed and outraged about it!). As far as I can see, the difference is that now he would go to a website and anonymously purchase an essay written anonymously by someone who has basically abandoned all pretence of being professional or ethical. Or, better still (from his point of view) because costless in terms of both time and money, just prompt ChatGPT with the essay title and it will not only “write” the esay for yoiu it will also provide a whole load of false references.
Fourthly, how come their tutors need software to tell them if their students are cheating? If you read your students’ essays over the year, and listen to them debating in seminars, how could you fail to notice if their writing suddenly used different language, different sentence structures or just seemed different?
Well, maybe university tutors deal with hundreds of (to them) faceless students these days. But schools? I mean, why should any school need a computer to tell that their kids are “cheating”?
And are they even cheating? There’s an old maxim that if you steal from one writer it’s called plagiarism, but if you steal from lots of writers it’s called research. Do youngsters actually know the difference between plagiarism and research unless they’re taught?
This is nothing new either. In my very first teaching job, when I taught Economics, I set an essay to answer the question, “What are the causes of unemployment?”. When I had marked the essays I gave the class feedback as follows:
“That essay you did for me was tackled really well. The only thing I would say, though, to save us all a lot of a bother next time, is that instead of copying several pages straight out of a textbook, just hand me in a sheet of paper with your name on, together with the title of the textbook you’d like to copy from, and the relevant page numbers, and I’ll mark the book instead.”
— Terry Freedman
So how did I know thay’d copied large swathes of textbooks? First of all, I possessed all the main textbooks and knew them quite well. I knew the way their authors expressed things. But more importantly, I knew my students, so when the lad who would usually come out with such gems as “My granddad wouldn’t of got any work if he hadn’t gone out looking for it” handed in an essay which was full of sentences like “Indeed, we can surmise from observation of the effects of tax incentives on industry in regional development areas …”, something told me that he may not have written it all by himself.
You don’t need technology to detect plagiarism, cheating, copying or whatever you wish to call it. What you need is teachers who know their students, and common sense – and time by the powers-that-be for teachers to get to know their students, and freedom to trust and rely on their own professional judgement (because that, when it becomes subconscious, is actually “common sense”).
Moreover, if students really are cheating, we need to ask ourselves some questions, such as:
Are they really cheating, or have they simply not understood that that isn’t real research, or don’t have the literary skills to summarise or reword passages they read in articles and books?
If it turns out that they are cheating, is that because we seem to be living in a society in which it increasingly appears to be the case that the end is regarded as justifying the means?
If there is any truth in that latter suggestion, perhaps we would agree with Cassius in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
I wrote the artticle below twelve years ago. As the UK government is planning to ban social media for under-sixteen year-olds I thought this might be relevant in an oblique sort of way. I’ve made a couple of corrections to website links, that’s all. I could have updfated the technology references too, but I wanted to preserve the original as far as possible.
Whatever you think of the current debate over news that the US Government may have been monitoring the online activity of not only its own citizens but those of other countries too, you have to admit one thing. It provides a great opportunity for ICT teachers everywhere to bring some real-world issues into their lessons, in a very newsy (ie current) way.
Privacy keyboard by g4ll4is Here are a few suggestions for class activities you might wish to pick and choose from -- and add to.
Find out: what are the plain facts. Or at least, as far as we know them. The thing is, we don't actually know all the facts, and that is a major part of the problem. So, perhaps a better question to research might be...
What are the issues being discussed?
How did the news/information become known?
Think about how the results of this research might be presented:
A timeline depicting the events unfolding. Students could do this in a spreadsheet, in the form of a graph.
Or how about a more visually appealing approach, using an application like Prezi, which has the merit of showing all the slides on the page (albeit in miniature)?
You can bring some programming into this, using PowerPoint. In a low-level way, students can automate the presentation so that each slide appears after a set interval. At a slightly higher level, they could use hyperlinks. For example, the first or second slide could have a series of labesl, like "Prism", "Whistleblower" and so on. Clicking on each of them would take the viewer to another slide, a video, or a website where more information is presented. They could make their presentation even more sophisticated by using Visual Basic for Applications.
They could create a website, and code it so that it's not just a static page or series of pages.
They could summarise the events in a series of tweets.
They could write a blog post about it.
They could make a (one minute) video.
Think about how the issue(s) could be made easy for young pupils to understand. Why not have some older pupils create a video or simple animation (or even an interactive game) to explain the issues to younger pupils?
There is scope also for how the research findings are used, and some of this could bring in colleagues from other subjects. For example:
Have some students make a video for a left-leaning organisation, while others make a video for a right-leaning organisation -- using the same basic information.
We have known for a long time that GCHQ in the UK, and other Government agencies in other countries, monitor web and email traffic for keywords. How about getting students to write a simple computer program to simulate the process? You will probably need to provide them with a set of acceptable keywords, or some (especially boys!) will try out every swear word they know. Discuss: is the program useful? Why/why not?
Finally, there are the legal and ethical issues.
If the USA is trawling through our data, where does that leave our assumed guarantees under EU Data Protection law?
Does it matter anyway? Is there merit in the view that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about?
How come this is news anyway? Boris Johnson has argued that ever since the web was invented you should have assumed that as soon as you do anything like send an email to someone, which goes to a server, or request information from a website (which resides on another server), anyone can read it. On the other hand, not everyone takes the same pragmatic view.
That last point raises another interesting issue: do your students know what happens when they send and email or do a Google search? There's another good lesson there too.
My courses running in June and July at the City Lit can now be applied for using a 15% discount code. In fact, you can use the discount code on courses to the value of between £99 and £500 running in June, July and August.
My next course, on 13th June, is Writing Using Constraints. More information here.
Be daring — leave the safety net at home!
From the blurb:
“What if the secret to unleashing your imagination was working against it? Discover the radical ideas of the French Oulipo movement, where creative constraints become a springboard for surprising, inventive writing. Experiment with challenging limitations - and find out what you’re really capable of.”
I asked Claude to convert a pdf flyer into an HTML format I could insert into a Markdown block in Squarespace. Here’s the result:
<! data-preserve-html-node="true"-- Paste this into a Squarespace CODE block (not Markdown block).
Set Type = HTML. Works on 7.0 and 7.1. -->
Write Like You
Mean It
Creative writing courses by Terry Freedman — City Lit, London 2026
Three Courses · All Levels · Write from the Very First Session
<div class="tf-course">
<div class="tf-course-head">
<span class="tf-num">01</span>
<span class="tf-ctitle">Writing Using Constraints</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-meta">[ One-day workshop ]</p>
<div class="tf-tags">
<span class="tf-tag">Oulipo</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Lipograms</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Queneau</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Experimental writing</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-blurb">Rules that set you free. An intensive day exploring the Oulipo — the literary movement that turned constraints into creative rocket fuel. Lipograms, univocalics, style rewrites, and more.</p>
<a class="tf-link" rel="NOFOLLOW" class="fbz_link" href="https://p.feedblitz.com/t3/48551/0/30554553_/~tinyurl.com/tfoulipo" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tinyurl.com/tfoulipo</a>
</div>
<div class="tf-course">
<div class="tf-course-head">
<span class="tf-num">02</span>
<span class="tf-ctitle">The 60-Minute Writer</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-meta">[ 11 weekly sessions ]</p>
<div class="tf-tags">
<span class="tf-tag">Voice</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Dialogue</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Memoir</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Experimental forms</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-blurb">Every session, you write. No long lectures. No waiting. Just words on the page from the very first lesson — and a growing sense of what you can do.</p>
<a class="tf-link" rel="NOFOLLOW" class="fbz_link" href="https://p.feedblitz.com/t3/48551/0/30554553_/~tinyurl.com/tf60min" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tinyurl.com/tf60min</a>
</div>
<div class="tf-course">
<div class="tf-course-head">
<span class="tf-num">03</span>
<span class="tf-ctitle">Writing for Blogs</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-meta">[ One full day · Jul or Nov 2026 ]</p>
<div class="tf-tags">
<span class="tf-tag">Platform</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Audience</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Ideas</span>
<span class="tf-tag">Promotion</span>
</div>
<p class="tf-blurb">Find your voice, find your audience, get started. From blank page to blog plan — you leave with ideas, a reader profile, and the confidence to publish.</p>
<a class="tf-link" rel="NOFOLLOW" class="fbz_link" href="https://p.feedblitz.com/t3/48551/0/30554553_/~tinyurl.com/tfwfblogs" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tinyurl.com/tfwfblogs</a>
</div>
What You’ll Cover
Writing Using Constraints
What is the Oulipo?
Lipograms & univocalics
Queneau’s style rewrites
N+7 & snowball poems
Transformations
Design your own rules
The 60-Minute Writer
Point of view & voice
Memoir & subversion
Vibrant verbs
Magic metaphors
Dynamic dialogue
Erasure & story machines
Writing for Blogs
Why blog & where
Audience & personas
Generating ideas
Structure & format
Images & illustration
Promotion tactics
“Oulipians are rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”
Raymond Queneau — basis of the Writing Using Constraints course
Terry Freedman
Terry Freedman is a writer, educator, and the person behind writersknowhow.org. He has been teaching creative writing at City Lit for years, running courses that are rigorous, surprising, and genuinely fun. His writing and teaching draw on experimental literature, constraint-based methods, and a conviction that everyone has a voice worth developing.
How to Book // All courses at City Lit, Keeley Street, London WC2B 4BA.
Book at citylit.ac.uk
· Small groups · All levels welcome · No experience needed
Well, I didn’t like that much, so I neserted it into a Code block instead — which is what it said to do in the first place! Here’s the result:
Write Like You
Mean It
Creative writing courses by Terry Freedman — City Lit, London 2026
Three Courses · All Levels · Write from the Very First Session
01Writing Using Constraints
[ One-day workshop ]
OulipoLipogramsQueneauExperimental writing
Rules that set you free. An intensive day exploring the Oulipo — the literary movement that turned constraints into creative rocket fuel. Lipograms, univocalics, style rewrites, and more.
Find your voice, find your audience, get started. From blank page to blog plan — you leave with ideas, a reader profile, and the confidence to publish.
“Oulipians are rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape.”
Raymond Queneau — basis of the Writing Using Constraints course
Terry Freedman
Terry Freedman is a writer, educator, and the person behind writersknowhow.org. He has been teaching creative writing at City Lit for years, running courses that are rigorous, surprising, and genuinely fun. His writing and teaching draw on experimental literature, constraint-based methods, and a conviction that everyone has a voice worth developing.
How to Book // All courses at City Lit, Keeley Street, London WC2B 4BA.
Book at citylit.ac.uk
· Small groups · All levels welcome · No experience needed
It didn’t include the graphics I had inserted. These were a photograph and some speech balloons. I daresay I could have tweaked the code to make that happen, but you know, life’s too short!
If you would like to see the pdf flyer, click the button below. And if you’re reading this before 13 June 2026, there are still some places left on the course!
Click the pic to see this book on Amazon (affiliate link)
The FAST in the title stands for Focused Adaptable Structured Teaching. The book contains some interesting ideas. One of the things it doeasn’t agree with is when learning objectives are put on the screen at the start of the lesson, in the form “Students will be able to…” — though for different reasons from myself. The author writes:
“It is distracting to students when this information is presented at the beginning of the lesson. It does not add anything. Who do we think will be doing the work?”
— From Teach FAST
When I was observing a lesson once the teacher displayed:
“By the end of this lesson, some of you will have achieved X, Y and Z, some of you will achieve X and Y, and some of you will achieve X.”
As I said to the teacher afterwards, I don’t think that sort of formulation is helpful because some students, perhaps even most of them, will think they’re probably going to be in the least-achieved category, and that lack of self-confidence will probably end up being a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Let’s put it this way. I am trying to lern how to play the saxophone at the moment, and I am pretty sure that if the teacher began the lesson by stating that some of us will be able to play the F#Major scale and some won’t, most of us will think we are going to be the failures!
This book is full of useful techniques, logically set out, but in my experience there needs to be a certain degree of flexibility. For example, telling students that for the next 5 minutes they must be absolutely silent while you explain or demonstrate something is an excellent idea — but what do you do when it doesn’t quite work out that way.
The author recommends chunking: breaking up concepts into smaller learning objectives. That sounds like common sense, but how does a new teacher know or work out how small the chunks should be? This is one of the objections I have to Cognitive Load Theory.
The author also distinguishes between declarative and procedural lessons. I had not come across these terms before. Apparently, the former focus on learning a new concept while the latter focus on learning a new skill. There is a table showing the differences between these in practial terms.
There are plenty of diagrams to help the reader understand the concepts introduced. There is also a lot of focus on the nitty gritty, even down to details such as how students should hold up their individual whiteboards.
There are many good ideas here, and it would be worth using this book as a means of adding to your teacher toolkit, so to speak.
