Why Is It Easy for Me but Not Them?

I really just don't get it. I don't get why a B student would plagiarize 90% of his paper, even after participating in both workshops. Inadequate paraphrase is one thing. I probably did it myself when I didn't realize it. But copying and pasting entire websites into your paper with only a few sentences actually in your own words? How is a B student that desperate? If you don't have time to do the work, can't you at least write something crappy and short in your own words? At least you'd pass the course then. I've turned in papers several pages under the minimum, turned in papers I felt were C or even D quality because I was tired of writing. But I'd never dream of fleshing out a paper with Ctrl+v.

Teaching and tutoring make me realize that writing was a lot easier for me than it was for a lot of people. In peer review workshops, I used to assume that the upperclassmen knew something I didn't, so if they didn't use much evidence to back up their claims, I actually thought I must have been overdoing it. I stopped using so much textual evidence. It never occurred to me that maybe I got better grades than they did.

I never had to be told not to "drop" quotations in without a signal phrase--at least, I never remember being told. Yet I find this is very difficult for many of my students and common among even upperclassmen in the writing center. I almost always rather easily grasped the goals of the assignment, whereas this is a major hangup for students in all majors visiting the writing center.

I want to get into people's heads, to be able to sympathize. I understand using imprecise pronouns or not being good at paragraphing, because I still work at those things. But there are some things that to me seem so obvious that I never thought of them as even needing to be taught. And I can teach them, but I can't sympathize. I can only go through the motions of explaining in a way that I hope will facilitate my students' understanding.