Intervention III: Replace Cheatin' Impulses with Writin' Tricks

The following Intervention is for anyone who has ever considered doing one of the following (and, lest I need to over-repeat it, I am NOT judging you on past transgressions or current impulses, I'm just trying to help):

1. Cut-and-pasting or cut-and-rephrasing from an online source
2. Paying your hard-earned money to some schmuck to write a "custom paper" for you
3. Looking at a friend's paper and "borrowing some ideas"

Here are some easy, reasonably fun and FAST tricks that can take the place of these impulses, will work better, and--BONUS!--are guaranteed not to get you expelled.

1. Instead of cut-and-pasting from an online source, just quote that source and footnote it. If you quote it directly, put quote marks around it, and if you paraphrase it, just add a li'l footnote superscript and then explain where you got it in the footnote. WORST-CASE SCENARIO: Your teacher or prof gets mildly annoyed that you went for the most obvious possible interpretation, but that annoyance is cancelled out by his/her relief that you actually attributed the source. BEST-CASE SCENARIO: In attributing/analyzing this source, even if it's something rubetastic like Dr. Spark, you will actually gain some insight into the material and the rest of the paper will be fast/easy to write, and all future papers will be, too. Because here's a secret: once you get the basic nuts-and-bolts of writing a paper down, all papers are basically the same and you can just become a paper-writing MACHINE. If you want to take it to the next level, you can also actually use that source the way you're supposed to--that is, get some insight from it and then go back into the text and use that insight to yammer about some more quotes.
2. When Ed Dante, the infamous "shadow scholar" who made about the same salary as a senior-level paralegal writing other people's papers (sometimes working on up to 20 a day), gets several hundred dollars' worth of your money to write a "custom paper," he spends about half an hour trolling Amazon and Google books and then plugs the fastest and most mediocre insights he can into a stock set of premade "analysis" phrases. The result, as he is quick to remind you, is a decidedly mediocre-at-best essay that Dante himself reminds you he does not revise. This schmuck can write your paper in 45 minutes. So here is my question: WHY. CAN'T. YOU? You can. Instead of paying a ton of your (or your parents') hard-earned dough to an odious paper mill, just churn out a paper-mill paper yourself. Mimic Dante's exact dubious practice--it works for him, and it will work for you, the difference being that this mediocre work is YOUR mediocre work and will thus not get you expelled. Craft yourself a couple of craptastic template paragraphs, and then customize them to work with the text you're supposed to have read (if you haven't read it, see my Hail-Mary Pass tutorial). Avoid self-plagiarism (also potential troub-troubs) by treating your template paragraphs as just that, templates, and allowing them to bloom into unique paragraphs in each paper you use them in (if you re-use stock literary-analysis phrases like "a careful consideration of ______ in the context of _______" that's not self-plagiarism, just a habit). If you can't write a coherent English sentence, just do an incoherent version of Dante's schtick and at very least you'll get a "see me" and a sympathetic referral to the campus writing lab. I'm going to do a YouTube tutorial that's a super-crash-course on writing a coherent English sentence soon, but obvs. that's going to take some magic and finessing. 
3. It is totally OK to work together with a friend as long as you attribute him or her in a footnote--unless you have a hardass prof who demands you write your paper in a vacuum, which definitely happens these days, but that's a rant for another time. Provided that you are actually allowed to have outside-human contact during your paper-writing process, then by all means put your heads together. Look at your friend's paper, see which of her ideas are actually really good, and then offer your OWN take on them in your paper--you'll be surprised how easy it is to take a friend's idea and then REACT to it. Then just footnote your friend: "I would like to thank the my insightful roommate Rob Pattinson for allowing me to proofread his paper, during which time I noticed his interesting take on this text. While I think his ideas about X and Y are great, my own take differs from his, in that I X, Y and Z." Like I said, some profs are real hardasses about this now, but I personally welcome collaboration between classmates because that is how some of the best ideas around come into existence.

Again, I can't emphasize enough that I am offering you this guidance out of pure self-interest on your behalf. Sure, I don't think you should cheat and I think there is a special place in the 9th Circle for paper-mill employees like, ahem, Mr. Dante, and the people who make them rich, but this is not about that. This is about showing you that you CAN write your own paper in less time than it takes to track one of these paper-mill idiots down, and definitely in less time than it takes to do a cut-and-paste chop job from the Internet. You don't have to know what you're talking about to write a passing paper any more than Ed Dante does, and it will actually take LESS time and effort to crap it out yourself than it does to search the Internet for stuff to steal, or explain to the Ed Dantes of the world what they need to do to write it for you.