Where there's a will
"My students were practicing narrative techniques and literary elements by writing creative stories. I gave specific content requirements (include dialogue, a conflict, a clear theme, figurative language, etc), but I gave the students free choice of topic," writes Justin Franco on Quora.
"I had one student that year who was notoriously lazy. I caught him [skiving] a couple of times and eventually told him to log off the computer and write his story by hand. He sat down and began writing. The story was due the next day, and I assumed this student would not hand one in. To my surprise, he did turn in a story, and even more astounding, it seemed decent!
"It was still clearly his language. It had grammar errors ... awkward phrasing in some parts, but other parts seemed remarkably cogent. A little too well-written and insightful in fact ... I wanted to give this student the benefit of the doubt ... Still ... something didn't seem quite right. The story seemed somehow familiar ... As I began to dwell on this idea, I realised that a couple of the plot points reminded me of something I'd seen.
"Maybe on TV? All at once, a fuzzy memory came back to me ... [he had] lifted his entire story from the plot summary of a Wikipedia article about a Will Ferrell movie, Step Brothers, and wrote it just poorly enough to make it seem believable.
