I spent almost the entire day today doing my case briefs for my business law class. Not an ideal way to spend a Sunday. By the time I can finally exhale a breath, I was at the point when I start swearing.

Oh, it’s not the case briefs that’s frustrating me, in fact, they have become a little easier for me.  It’s the originality reports.

I was woken up at 7 am this morning, isn’t that nice, after I finally went to bed at 11:30 pm last night. It turned out my mom needed help because the last case brief was done by me. So she had no clue how to do it.

I went to sleep after that and didn’t open my eyes again until 8:30. I went downstairs and ate something before returning upstairs to work on my own case briefs. It only took me until noon to complete both of them. I was so happy and relieved after I submitted it because I thought I had finally completed my homework and can finally relax and do some blogging.

Unfortunately, right after lunch, I went online and checked the originality report on my assignment. HOLY FREAKING COW!!!

55% similar and I wrote all of it!

The next 4 hours were spent trying to change just about every word on my assignment. I twist each word when I can while trying to retain the meaning of the sentence, intend to do anything to BEAT the damn SYSTEM.

It is ridiculous! We’re doing a case brief, for god sake! The titles have to be the same. After all, the decision of the case didn’t come out yesterday and I am not the first one to do case brief on this specific case. The names of the cases cannot be original. It can NEVER be original.

I think the need to use this program is stupid but at the same time, it wouldn’t have so many similarities if my mom hadn’t turned in the exact same case just last week. Apparently neither of us read the instructions and we were just supposed to submit one of three cases. Well my mom submitted all three. If she had just ignored me and read the instructions, this wouldn’t had happened. Sometimes I hate her for whining that she doesn’t have enough time to double-check.

Anyway, I basically had to rewrite my case briefs, going over every sentence that was caught in the originality report. It was such a pain to search for fitting synonyms and rewrite each sentence. Eventually, after two more tries, I finally did it. I went from 55% to 49% to 16%. I am happy with 16% since 10% came from my mom’s paper which I co-wrote.

I enjoy writing and I enjoy puzzles but sitting in this seat all day doing this? Trying to satisfy the originality report? It’s not my kind of enjoyment especially when I never even been to these websites that the system is “accusing” me of copying my materials from.

I mean, the case name is Griswold v. Connecticut, it will be this name forever, you simply can’t count 10% against me for using the same title. There is no such thing as originality when doing case briefs for landmark supreme court cases!

Oh and by the way, does this satisfy today’s prompt? I think it does.

Daily Prompt: Enough is Enough