It's weird how these hit rates change
By John Welford
@indexer (4852)
Leicester, England
January 23, 2019 10:29am CST
One thing I do is write analyses of poems, which I put on one of my blogs. To date I have done more than 100 of these, on poems that I have enjoyed for various reasons - some of them well-known, others less so. There is a preponderance on poems by Thomas Hardy, who is certainly a favourite poet of mine.
I monitor the hit rates of these blog posts and am amazed at how these vary. Last month the most popular was on "Little Red Cap", by Carol Ann Duffy, but it is currently falling out of favour.
However, today I see that my piece on a somewhat strange poem by Craig Raine is all the rage, with more than 1000 hits recorded over the past month. The title is "A Martian Sends a Postcard Home", and my piece gets first-page billing on most Google searches, but why are so many people currently doing the search?
My suspicion is that some school, somewhere in the world, has set this poem as a piece of homework and the teacher will be amazed to discover that all his kids are producing essays that all look strangely similar!
Let's hope my work gets an A plus!
2 people like this
2 responses
@responsiveme (22923)
• India
23 Jan 19
No, because however well written yours is and I know it will be,the teacher will get suspicious to see such a good synopsis and the number of similar ones and will promptly search the net .
2 people like this
@indexer (4852)
• Leicester, England
23 Jan 19
The problem with using copy and paste to cheat on assignments is that teachers and lecturers have easy access to Turnitin and similar programs. Clever students will use material found on the Net in an intelligent way - taking ideas they find from several sources and producing their own thoughts based on what they have read. This is exactly the same as using good old-fashioned books!
2 people like this
