Seventy-eight percent of college students have admitted to cheating of some type. Generally, everything that is written for school is edited American English, therefore, there is a good chance that school papers are plagiarized. Edited American English is a language dialect, that follows grammatical rules, and is usually found in writing and not in daily conversation. Although there are many characteristics of edited American English, three examples are clear, ethical, and objective. Clear writing should be easy for the reader to understand. Ethical writing should be fair, honest, and accurate. Likewise, an objective writer should not let their biased opinion persuade their readers. Therefore, edited American English follows grammatical rules used in formal and academic writing. (Reinking 242}.
First, consider the word ethical, in Edited American English. Ethical writing is accurate, fair, and honest; and should consider all the facts before committing to a conclusion. One example of unethical writing would be a student assigned to write an essay about George Washington. If the student made up all of the facts about George Washington, and led the professor to think that he researched the facts; the paper would be unethical. Unethical writing can also be found in advertising. For instance, "It would be unethical for a drug company's advertising department or agency to prepare, in the form of an article, an advertisement for a hair-loss treatment and pass off the article as an impartial news story." (Reinking 11) In this example the drug company wanted to disguise an advertisement that wasn't accurate or honest. Trying to deliberately deceive the reader would make the advertisement unethical. When people think of unethical writing they usually think of plagiarism. Plagiarism is "the act of passing off one's own ideas or writings, while they are actually somebody else's.
