Essay Etiquette. I requested a revision.

Today I ordered my first essay (well actually it was an assignment). The time frame I gave the company was 2 weeks and much to my surprise my assignment was completed in only a few hours.

I was very excited that my first experience was going so well, that is until I read my assignment.

I'm not particularly fussy, I did not expect a word document oozing academic perfection, I did however expect that the writer would have stuck to the 'criteria' of using sources from my country. Another expectation I had was that the assignment would actually make sense.

For example, an excerpt.

"Since, the article has also been drafted keeping in purpose the targeted audience and then using the proper media to communicate with them will ensure that there is maximum satisfaction and the targeted audience is appealed."

I'm unsure of how to go about getting a rewrite of the assignment because as a whole it just doesn't make sense. I really don't want to be rude, difficult or fussy in any way. I don't want the writer to get in trouble or fined or fired, but I really hope that somehow I can get the assignment that I paid for.

I requested a revision and was asked to point out which parts don't make sense and the writer would revise these parts. How do I point out, kindly, that the whole thing just isn't right? Is such a reply to my revision request justified and normal under these circumstances?

What company did you order the essay from? I am sure they have incompetent writers.

You can ask them to do the following things:

1- Break down all the sentences into shorter ones.
2- Don't use any passive voice sentences.
3- Use concrete words. Point out a few for them.
4- Highlight any passages that are very ambiguous to make sense. Ask them to rewrite using the above parameters and also tell them that "these passages don't make any sense".

I hope it works.

Apparently,"that writer" did a shabby job on your paper.The company he/she works for must not think twice before invoking penalties on the following counts:

- None-compliance with the academic writing standards
- Negligence of quality assurance policy
- Personification of the profession of writing

Additionally, the company should, with an immediate effect, impose an expulsion penalty or a penalty of an equivalent magnitude on the writer for willingly perverting the rights of a client.

Hey AussieBella,

Sorry to hear about your experience. I've been researching the international essay mills and haven't seen a lot of good feedback.

I've read this excerpt about four times... ''Since, the article has also been drafted keeping in purpose the targeted audience and then using the proper media to communicate with them will ensure that there is maximum satisfaction and the targeted audience is appealed" and would say it's the laziest writing I've seen in about four years!

In the interest of full disclosure, I run my own custom essay service that you should check out. Satisfaction is guaranteed (sounds cheesy, but my customer feedback doesn't lie!)

I couldn't get the hyperlink function to work (newbie to this forum)... but you can check it out here... bit.ly/wgBgS4

Cheers,

EGR

In the interest of full disclosure, here's an advertisement? I don't think you get how this works, buddy...

You have a slapped-together website making revenue by selling ad space to work-at-home scams and you want people to take you seriously?

Hi pheelyks

Please enlighten me as to 'how this works'?

I've read the Ts & Cs, looked at the last five pages of posts and offered a service to AussieBella, someone who it seems, has not got what she paid for.

In reference to the 'slapped-together website making revenue by selling ad space to work-at-home scams' comment, I'm not sure if you are familiar with what you are referring to.

Gumtree is the Australian version of Craigslist, which, as you may know is a good place for small businesses to advertise to their target market. I can spend a few thousand on a nicer page when I have got a bit more cash, but at the moment, the page is working great.

Your feedback is welcome on the next website though. It seems you've got a bit of free time, responding instantaneously to my post is evidence of this.

EGR

You might want to try again.

"The EssayScam Forum (that includes the private message system) is not a place for advertisements or publicity in any way."


Yeah. The half hour I've spent here today is evidence of my gads of free time.


Maybe six minutes is "instantaneous in Australia" (kind of like a spam-ad carrying website is the closest thing you have to craigslist), but really I just check the latest threads throughout the day.

A point of correction Mr. Manager! It should be this way:

...has not gotten what she paid for.


...I have gotten...

Mr. EGR I also find your ad not only awkwardly misplaced, but also very deceptive in nature.

Thank you for the advice. I received my revision and although it's much better than the original, it's still not quite up to the standard I expected. It seems more like something I would have written when I was 16. I have since done the assignment myself and feel much better about it now. Hopefully in the future I have better 'luck' finding a good writer/company, after all it is a learning experience (well, not so much 'learning' when you're paying for assignments).

In fairness to EGR, gumtree is the Australian version of Craigslist. Unfortunately :)

I got a revision form my essay as well and it's the equivalent of a 14 year old's skill. WASTE.

Apparently a revision to correct sentences that do not make sense in the English language is code for 'write my assignment so simple that I sound like a child'.

Oh well, evidently this happens to a lot of us.

In this case, I would not have asked for a revision. I would have demanded for a refund based on the fact that they duped me as a client. I expected to have the work done by an academic professional and instead, I got somebody who wrote the essay using his feet! Nothing made sense in that sample post. Nothing in that post indicated that a revision would have worked. I don't even think having that paper reassigned would have resulted in a better paper because, if this writer was any indication of the quality of work that the company writers produce, they should be sued for misrepresentation. I am sure that they made their writers sound more professional than they actually were and you were conned into hiring their services because of the cheap price right? There you go. Let that be a lesson to you.

A quick turnaround isn't always cause for concern, but a crappy essay indicates to me that the writer wasn't qualified for your project. I write dozens of pages every day and churning out a high-quality 3-pager in an hour is generally easy for me. Still, I check and double check before sending to the client regardless of whether it was completed in less than an hour or 2 weeks. Which makes me think that @WriteReview hit the nail on the head in that the company most likely uses poor quality writers and nothing you did or could do with them would make a difference... other than demanding your money back and telling them to burn the garbage they produced. ;)

The gibberish in the excerpt posted by the OP is typical of what I see whenever new clients ask me about "editing" or "revising" some project they got from one of those flashy-looking websites that claim to be based in the US or UK but whose web copy is full of hints of having been written by an ESL writer.

This is precisely the truth. The best writers can create a fast essay without necessarily struggling. This is because they've handled multiple cases wherein they were exposed to needing to handle these situations before. This also showcases the level of professionalism and expertise that a writer has. I personally had never issues in turning in essays that have faster deadlines. Newbie writers should evade taking in these types of orders.

An experienced writer with hundreds or even thousands of papers under their belt can write several high quality essays a day. I've had days where I wrote more than 20 pages and all of the clients who ordered were satisfied. The same goes for other experienced writers on this forum and elsewhere. The rookies, however, will often struggle with a simple undergrad paper, and will often spread the task over several days of work. We've all went through this stage, so prospective clients should not be worried about tight deadlines. However, reason should be used, because no writer, no matter how good they are, can write 50 pages of text in under 24 hours (it is possible, but it will not be of high quality). Plan ahead is the word of the day.

Just recently, a client in a post-graduate program asked me for the price to "edit" a 20-page outline "draft" of a complex 50-page international law project together with a peer-reviewed journal article on the same topic. She said that I should use that article as a "model" and that I could "use some of the same ideas" from that article, but she wanted her project to be "better" than the source article in several very specific ways, including finding a legal case from one specific country for each and every idea discussed in that source article. A review of the article revealed that every single idea in that 20-page "draft" was plagiarized (including section headings and sub-headings) from that article. She'd asked for (both) the highest academic standards and that her outline be followed to the letter, because it had already been "approved." That probably means that if it was checked for plagiarism, it was by a scanner that only compares words. The first time a human reviewer actually looks at the article and compares it to what this client had asked me to write, the whole thing would have been flagged for egregious plagiarism, whether or not the words were the same. She demanded that I follow the outline without any changes and that her project meet her expectations about her high academic standards. I just refunded it because those two demands were mutually exclusive and I just don't need the headache. She responded to the full refund with a nasty email complaining that I'd wasted her time, followed a couple of days later by another email asking me to help her find someone else to do the project for her.

I feel as though people who avail of academic writing or editing services should have more realistic expectations from their writers. Writers cannot - even if they tried - write specifically the way that they want to. If a client has demands that are out of the range and capacity of the writer, then the client and the writer should learn to compromise. Should the client demand that literally everything should be their way, it would be dragging the writer to the edge.

An experienced, reputable academic writer is fully capable of handling virtually any project typically assigned to students, especially in undergraduate programs. Writers should expect customers to provide the exact assignment specs dispensed by professors and customers should expect writers to produce a project that fulfills those specs and that is equal to or better than the quality of projects produced by the vast majority of students in the course. There's really no need to complicate things beyond that.

Maybe it could be indicated that my lack of experience in the field would be a reason why I struggle (at times) in fulfilling small requirements within shorter periods of time. I do wonder, though, how the process works out perfectly for efficient writers who are able to produce 20 pages per day. At the moment, I often max at 10 pages per day. Going beyond this would be a dreadful and mind-hurting process already.

Yesterday, a client contacted me with a question about a project that I delivered about six weeks ago. He said he couldn't connect two footnotes to the articles from which they were cited. I had to explain that while he probably has only one writer, his project is probably 100+ projects in my past and not fresh in my mind and that I don't necessarily save old sources for projects beyond a few weeks. The same question that would have been no problem to answer a reasonably short time after delivery is a huge pain that could require about a paid page worth of my time to figure out a month and a half later. Those two citations weren't mistakes on my end, and it's just not reasonable to expect your writer to find those sources all over again and then go through them and your project again to recall exactly which idea he considered it appropriate to cite six weeks ago.

I remember having a client who had responded the same way. It had been a month since I delivered the essay he asked for. I suddenly received a message from him, asking to revise a small portion of the text and add at least half a page into the introduction. Oftentimes, I contemplate on whether or not there is a discreet purpose when these things happen. I was frustrated to say the least. It also did not help that the client demanded that I produce the output within a day. I feel as though some clients have to recognize that writers do not just jump out of nowhere and produce content. While I agree that writers have responsibility (to an extent), they should not be given unreasonable expectations.

Based on the example given by the OP, she was well within reason to request a full revision for this paper. There was definitely no other way to put it. In this instance, the whole essay needed revising, hopefully by a different, more proficient writer. I pity the students who get scammed by these writing companies. Specially when they ask the student to point out the problem parts that need revision. The whole essay normally needs to be redone. In some cases, the company, having already submitted a paper, not necessarily a correct paper, no longer wishes to bother with revisions and other student concerns. They got the money. That's all they wanted. When the company starts dodging the client, etiquette should definitely fly out the window. I hope the client got a refund from this company.