Student plagiarism is considered to be increasing partly because of students’ use of the Internet and practices such as copy and paste. Many schools and institutes of higher education make use of text comparison services that detect text overlaps in order to deter students from plagiarising and detect students that plagiarise. In discussion about results from such comparisons overlaps of less then a percent is generally considered to be satisfactory while overlaps of more then 10 percent are considered as severe transgressions unless accompanied by quotation marks and proper attributions. Less attention is paid to imitation  and the requirement that students manage to join the target discourse. From such a perspective overlaps of less then a percent is problematic. Drawing on data from the analysis of a one year production of student essays this study engages in a critical discussion of the use of text comparison services and argues that encouragement of imitation is at least as important to student writing as deterring plagiarism.