Swales' CARS Outline

Tyler Kingsley

Professor Moody

ENC 1102-0105

Apr. 13, 2010

Swales’ CARS Outline

Move 1: Establishing A Territory
Discussing the topic if plagiarism detection services are effective by including previously submitted student essays in its search is very important. If my research concludes that these detection services are ineffective, then teachers might stop using them altogether. Since teachers usually give the same essay assignments each year with a standard rubric, the word and sentence structure that students use are bound to repeat. When these essays are submitted into detection services, they are added to the service’s database and used against essays submitted after it. This leads to essays being marked as plagiarized, when they really aren’t. From previous research, I have found that a large number of student essays are being accused of plagiarism when they are checked against other student essays.

Move 2: Establishing A Niche
With my research, I will raise a question about existing research that I have read. My sources mainly evaluate how plagiarism detection services work and how they use student essays in their database, but they never answer how effective they are by doing this. My research will raise questions about if plagiarism detection services should included student essays, if these essays are limiting the effectiveness of the detection services, and how much of a difference there will be if these essays are excluded from their databases.

Move 3: Occupying The Niche
The purpose of my essay is to evaluate if plagiarism detection services limit their effectiveness by including previously submitted student essays in their databases. I have found that plagiarism detection services are effective except when they use student essays. If they eliminated the essays from their database, then the detection services would be almost completely effective. In my essay, I will give background information on my topic, introduce my argument, discuss previously done research, which includes statistics and case studies, and a personal experience I have with using Turnitin.