Cut and paste job

A cut-and-paste job or cut and paste approach is a pejorative reference to various kinds of work produced by cut and paste, i.e., a quick combination of pieces of text collected from various sources, a compilation. Cut and paste jobs often have a partisan agenda and present only facts in support of a certain thesis.

In application to book writing, cut and paste job implies little creativity, no original research and no new insights. It is often assumed that these books are produced by journalists that use pointing devices such as a computer mouse rather than experts in the subject offer user-interface .

While the phrase cut and paste today is associated with computer user interface, the phrase predates the computers. For example, aA Biography by Joseph Jay Deists says: It was a cut-and-paste job acting as censor's shears. Suspect material was deleted whole sections snipped from letters.

In human-computer interaction, cut and paste and copy and paste offer user-interface paradigms for transferring text, data, files from a source to a destination. Most ubiquitously, users require the ability to cut and paste sections of plain text. This paradigm has close associations with graphical user interfaces such as a computer mouse.