Re: Oftentimes in Aus?

Jonathan Morton wrote:

I've spent most of today reading a dissertation which I've a number
of reasons to believe contains significant chunks not written by the
(non-native) supposed author. One reason is that parts of it have
the Word language setting set to English (US) (for anyone who
doesn't know me, I'm in the UK). That happens quite often with
student work, but what's a big deal this time is that other chunks
have the language set to English (Australia), and that's something
I've never seen before. The dissertation contains three uses of
the word 'oftentimes' which to me is non-standard - I'd just use
'often'.

Looks a dead giveaway to me.

I thought so, too. Then there was the fact that the bits I think were
written by someone else are 1.5-line spaced, while the actual student's
are 2-line. Mind, the real clincher is that the suspect bits are
written in very good, sophisticated English with barely a perceptable
error for pages (I've put in the odd comma here and there), while the
stuff the student wrote has a correction every two or three words, and
is generally bollocks.


They should have used the optional MS language setting - "English
(plagiarist)".

I'm sure I've seen that...

I would agree that there are many Windows/Word setups in the UK
(including many by people, such as in-house IT departments, who
should no better) where "English (United States)" is on by default,
but I've never seen this with "Eng (Aus)".

Where it causes difficulty is that I use 'track changes' in Word to
correct stuff; if you try and do a global change of language setting
this results in a 'formatting 'change' message with every subsequent
change, which messes stuff up considerably. In fact I usually tell
(international) students I don't care if they use Br or Am spelling, as
long as they don't mix up both in the same document.

DC


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