10 000 Words Essay Copy And Paste

[Eleanora Parrot]

Ihave essay questions in my exam. I suggest that student use Word or another word processing program to check grammar, spelling and to save the response in case the quiz times out, their computer crashes, etc. Then, students can copy and paste their responses from the word processing document into the essay answer area.

I do appreciate that by typing their essay in a word processor your students will benefit from its spell checker etc. features. However I'd like to point out that doing a copy and paste of text from a word processor (especially MS Word?) into Moodle's HTML editor will quite often result in unwanted "garbage" formatting codes being transferred along with the text itself. Almost everyday we see examples of this in these moodle forums. I keep telling my students and faculty colleagues to never ever copy-paste from MS Word into Moodle. Not to mention the copy-paste not working problem which is the main gist of your post.

If the spelling and grammar checker of a word processor are important features for your students' essays, may I suggest that, instead of using the Essay question type in the Quiz activity you use the Assignment activity, in which your students can simply post their Word document.

Our exams conducted as quizzes in our Canvas accounts, They are all essays based on a legal problem.

The way I answer my essay is that I copy and paste relevant information from the problem given to the text box below. In paper and pencil exams, I used to encircle the information that I think important from the given problem. I can't do this anymore since I can't really highlight on the text of the problem on the screen. When the problem is a few paragraphs long, it can get really hard to remember which information is relevant to the main issue. Also, I copied and pasted the problem portion for my conclusion so that I don't have to type it all over again. Example: "Is X liable for the offense charged." => "X is liable for the offense charged." I just transferred the word 'is'. And here I thought this saved me a lot of time.

There are talks on our schools that the professors can detect through canvas when we copied and pasted something on the text box. This made me really worried because even though I did not cheat, I might get accused of cheating, and I have no way of proving that I did not. I never once left the testing area to open another app or open another tab.

I think this is best a question for your instructor. Whether or not you are pasting can be detected depends on what other tools your school may be using to proctor exams. My understanding is that without such tools, all that your instructor can identify is that you have clicked away from the quiz assignment to another window or application. You stated you are not doing that. So, I would just be up-front with your instructor and ask.

Honestly, a best practice for answering essay questions to an web based text box is to type your response in an application like Word so you can save your progress while you work and then paste your final essay into the text box when done. Drafting your response into the the textbook without the ability to save your progress is just a heartache waiting to happen. I would hope your instructor would allow for this.

Hi gnoack,

Thank you for answering.

Our school does not use any other tools. Basically, I just log in using Mozilla Firefox, and that's it. They don't even require that we use a specific browser. No plug-in required or any special web browser. The reason why we are not allowed to use word processor to write our answer is that we, my class I mean, are worried about the instructor detecting that we left the testing area. I know this is worrisome if the internet connections cuts off, so I have an add-on on my Firefox that saves any input I make on a text box, so if things go south I have a way to retrieve what I have already written. It's called Form History Control (II) by the way if you are interested.

It's kind of an issue in our class because the school did not yet outright say what we can and cannot do while using the platform. They just say that cheating in general is prohibited. That's kind of fuzzy, because for example, if I clicked out and back-in in a second, would that be considered as cheating? It's just better not to get accused in the first place.

Many thanks,

Ian

I've just started noticing random hyphens appearing in text I'm pasting from Word into InDesign. I'm pasting into a series of InDesign docs in a journal that get updated every year, and I've never had this happen before. I just pasted in a 900-word story, for example, and there are 12 hyphens inserted into seemingly random words with no pattern I can detect.

Hi Laubender. Thanks for all your investigating! I just tried to reproduce the problem so I could answer Jongware's question, but for some reason the problem is no longer happening! I'm CUTTING and pasting away, the same text into the same documents, but no hyphens are appearing, which is as much of a mystery as to why it started happening in the first place.

Some more examples for reference. InDesign top, Word below. Most words that end up hyphenated in InDesign do seem to be at either the start or end of a line in Word, but as you can see in the screenshot in the post above, not always.

Thanks for your reply, Ian, but unfortunately placing the text isn't really practical in my example. If it was like a novel/essay, then sure, but in my case the InDesign docs are made up of many text frames for different profiles/stories, and I'm supplied one Word doc with text for a whole section. I'm no chance of getting each bit of text supplied as a separate Word doc, and importing all text then deleting what I don't need is not ideal.

I would still flow it into InDesign by choosing File > Place. Just drop it into a frame on the pasteboard where you can make it as big as you want. Now you can just copy and paste it out of that frame and put the "chunks" of text where they belong. Or try disabling hyphenation in the Word document before copying and pasting. I'd try the place method first though. I recall running into this issue in the past with other clients. If the Word doc is hyphenating the text, the hyphens will get pasted into InDesign.

I bet that someone converted a PDF with hyphenation back to a word doc at some point. I have seen that happen when hyphens start appearing in random places, conversion from pdf is usually the culprit.

I tend to cut-and-paste as it helps me keep track of where I'm up to in the source document. I asked a friend to try and replicate my issue on his Mac (to see if the problem was with mine), and as I watched I noticed he copy-and-pasted. He's a copier, not a cutter. I went back and tried his way on mine, and problem solved.

The results leave me rather confused. Set justification of the text to Fully Justified. First I applied Hyphenation "Automatic" to the text. Then I switched to "Manual" where every occassion of hyphenation can be fine-tuned:

Cutting instead of copying seems to do the trick. But that is a terrible thing, as I can't just cut, then undo and then paste every time, since I need to original documents when the final edit is being made.

If you can't copy from a placed text file on the InDesign pasteboard and must copy directly from Word, you need to make a selection of text before you copy, and the selection should still be active after you copy. You could hit delete after the copy while the text is still selected, and that would let you keep your place the way you did with cut. But I'd probably recommend the place-and-copy method myself. Hope this helps.

What is happening here is that he is getting random hyphen placement when he places or cut/pastes or copy/pastes. The goal is to get proper hyphenation. Weird issue for sure and bases on everyone's testing, the results seem to be random(ish).

I wonder does it have anything to do with the fact that when you send a file over the internet (such as an attachment to an e-mail) the filename should be hyphenated to avoid having spaces which can cause problems. (Bearing in mind the settings and complexity of applications.) Or is there another situation where hyphenation is advisory.

In all the years (decades) I've been copying and pasting from Word into InDesign, I've never encountered this problem before this week. Not even all articles. What the heck? I wonder if I copy and paste into TextEdit and then into ID...nope. Still getting the hyphens. I've never placed the text...

In the 15 years that I've been using ID, and copying and pasting text from a Word document, I haven't had to. This time, up until I started "placing" it, I've spent the client's money figuring out what was going on. And, because the attorneys writing these articles for this hella long newsletter are getting all fancy-schmancy with their headline formatting, I can't just copy and paste the part I need anyway. I have to place and clean up. So, yeah, to have a problem all of a sudden is ridiculous. But hey, you'll be comforted to know I'm doing it "the right way" now.

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