I thought I was cheating

When I was in high school, I used to take two different encyclopedias and copy all the cool stuff about my assigned subject on to 3×5 cards. I’d shuffle the cards a bit, use a thesaurus to change all the adjectives and adverbs, and type it up on my trusty Smith-Corona. I thought I was cheating, but I was never caught. But in retrospect, what I was doing was a lot closer to real research than what Elrod does. It was also a fair amount of work, and I really did learn stuff, too.