While my clients own the copyright to any work that I provide, I have never encountered the TOS of a single essay company (including the one company for which you have repeatedly vouched since joining this forum) that do not expressly retain copyright and expressly prohibit any submission of their work to any academic institution for credit. In fact, any complaint by a customer about an unsatisfactory "grade" would immediately and very obviously violate several such TOS provisions.

How would inserting another person -- especially a person who has no first-hand knowledge about the project -- into the communication chain between the writer and client ever add clarity to those communications rather than doing the exact opposite?

The main variable is likely to be the reduction of disposable income among working students. Professors will probably continue assigning the same amount of written work even if classes are conducted online and I expect that students from wealthy families probably won't order any fewer projects.

Professors might even assign more written work than usual (hopefully). Those of us who have managed to do this for a full-time living are probably luckier than most people who work for a living, whether because they can't get to their workplaces or because fewer customers frequent their places of business.

My hockey league has suspended games, but (so far) the rink is still open for practice time, which is pretty much the only reason I leave the house, anyway. Before that, the rink sent out a memo suggesting that players keep their gloves on and bump gloves instead of shaking hands during post-game handshake lines. That's what I've always done, because shaking 30 gross, sweaty hands has always seemed insane to me, especially during flu season. Suddenly, I don't seem "rude" for doing that, nor do I have to try to sneak squirts of alcohol gel discretely after I touch doorknobs and handles or after I can't avoid shaking hands with people.

Since I'm already sort of a hermit, I don't expect my life to change very much as long as grocery stores stay open and their supply chains aren't affected. I've never been happier that I have my own gym, because not being able to workout would be the worst part of this for me. By the end of this, I hope that handshaking will be a thing of the past, along with having a know-nothing lunatic sociopath in the White House just because of a strong U.S. economy next fall.

As I suggested earlier in this thread, I really don't think that writers need to continue substantive learning to be able to do this job extremely well. I've written (literally) thousands of really good essays on topics about which I knew almost nothing (or that I'd never even heard of) before those particular projects came up. It isn't as though we're writing these projects off the tops of our heads from our own independent knowledge of the subject matter. Reading extensively might help you become more comfortable taking on projects in some new areas and it helps you when projects require you to propose a topic; but that's really about it. If I need to write a project tomorrow about some disease (or, more broadly, about some issue in any field that I handle) that I've never heard of before tonight, that's no problem whatsoever and it really wouldn't matter whether or not I've ever read anything about it previously.

Actually, sleep deprivation is epidemic throughout American life and it's been formally identified as a cause of myriad illnesses and it is responsible for even more traffic accidents than alcohol. I haven't written a project for an essay company since 2013 but I'm sleep-deprived right now and about to go to bed at 9:00 AM because I had 2 deadlines yesterday, a weight workout after that, a hockey game at 9:30, and another deadline that I just completed. I'll have made up all of that lost sleep by Sunday or Monday. It's an easy enough topic to research and a very quick Google search yields some of the numbers right here:

cdc.gov/sleep/data_statistics.html


Negative. Be very skeptical about anything you just "hear" because most of it isn't true. For example, it isn't true that we use only 10% of our brains or that Albert Einstein suggested that the complexity of the human eye provides evidence of a "god" who designed us. We use all of our brains and Einstein was an atheist who absolutely rejected ANY notion of a conscious "god" that created human beings to be any more "special" than other animals and whose only concept of any "god" was the mystery, eternity, mathematical symmetry, and beauty of the universe; and I "hear" both of those beliefs all of the time from people who sincerely believe them because they've "heard" them. We always recover lost sleep, eventually; it's a homeostatic process. As soon as whatever causes that interfered with your getting as much sleep as you needed in a given time period are removed, you will automatically begin catching up and you will quickly make up whatever "sleep debt" you accumulated. A very quick search yields the following articles about sleep-deprivation debt and making it up.

health.harvard.edu/womens-health/repaying-your-sleep-debt
scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-can-you-catch-up-on-sleep/

I don't accept the premise that students who buy essays "don't care" about their grades. Most of them probably care very much; they just don't have the time to write their own essays. Many of my clients come to me only after having first been burned by some company that provided work that is either totally unusable or after having received a C- (or worse) on an essay for which they paid good money. Recently, I even received a very annoying email from a client who had specifically asked me not to make his essay "too good" for a college freshman. A week or two later, he emailed to say that he "only" got an A- and he provided me with all of the instructor's comments and asked me to review them so that his next essay would be an A, as though I need help from his instructor to correct everything that I specifically put in the essay so that it wouldn't be "too good" for a college freshman.

I had no expectations whatsoever of earning big bucks doing this when I first started. Frankly, I didn't think it was even possible to write enough projects to actually earn a living from doing just this and I was very pleasantly surprised the first time I earned the equivalent of a full month's salary from just writing these types of projects.

It's not a regulated field (at all) and it's fully saturated by rank amateurs and criminal rip-off artists. However, those of us who actually earn a full-time living doing this (and doing it well) are definitely professional writers. The work itself is much more challenging than the writing I did as a full-time writer/editor for the federal government and I have to do a lot more writing to earn a living; but I'm able to earn approximately the same as my government job paid. The biggest differences are that I have to pay for my own health insurance and I take a big tax hit being self-employed; but it's more than worth not having to get up at 6:00 AM and commute back and forth to an office five days a week. Another difference is that as a government writer, I routinely went several weeks or more at a time without a single assignment to do, which never happens in this industry.

It's really none of my business what my clients choose to do with my work because they own it. However, I think the issue of plagiarism is much simpler than the analysis offered above. Original writing is (understandably) much more expensive than recycled writing and/or copied material. If someone advertises "original writing," the client has every right to expect exactly what was advertised and paid for and nothing less than or different from that. Nobody wants to pay for original writing only to receive something copied and pasted; nor does anybody really need to pay someone else to copy and paste material found online. That's really all there is to this issue, IMO.

Word-of-mouth referrals are always the easiest new clients because they aren't worried about getting scammed. A few times every year, I get direct referrals or orders from one or two friends of a satisfied client who all want the exact same assignment written for multiple students in the same course. I've been doing this for so long that I've also actually had about a half a dozen adult children of my former clients contacting me for work, usually preceded by an email from the original client/parent introducing us. Unfortunately, even the best of the best writers only get a handful of direct referrals every year, simply because the vast majority of our clients don't want to divulge that they've used a ghostwriter to anybody, even their closest friends.

The OP specifically said that he received confirmation of his payment for the project (in his 3rd sentence). What probably happened, as I explained earlier, is that the project was never taken off the assignment board by any writer; it just sat there listed on the board until the due date came and went. The "confirmation" to which the customer referred initially was simply the confirmation that the order was accepted by the system and that payment went through. (To my knowledge, customers didn't get any additional confirmation once a writer actually took their projects off the board.) The payout for that 1-pg order was probably $8 to $15, depending on when it was ordered in relation to its due date (and the payment rate of the particular writer looking at it).

Most likely, no writer wanted to bother with any "1-pg" order that required reading substantial portions of an entire book. It's not a complicated situation, but one that can happen anytime an essay company doesn't have a system for monitoring the status of projects that are in danger of not getting taken by writers by the posted due dates for those orders. (Sometimes, the payment offered for orders in danger of not getting taken by their due dates was increased to encourage writers to take them; but other times, they just sat there for quite a few days, long after those deadlines came and went.) The customer probably received a full refund but came here to find out whether he'd been ripped off and/or to complain in between the due date and the refund, which probably wasn't issued until about a month later.

Actually, I think the OP is more likely to be a legitimate freelance writer who just stumbled onto this forum while researching the topic and figured he might as well try to get an interview with a writer. The name he used seems to be a real person who's done a lot of work for (and received some professional training from) the BBC, and who has an online writing presence; and the email format he provided seems to match the BBC system, at least at first glance. I didn't invest any time to peel back the top layer of information to dig any deeper, but a cursory search, at least, seems to suggest that he was legit.

As I've acknowledged previously, it's certainly possible for someone to learn English as a second language and, eventually, to become as much of an expert in English grammar and writing as a native speaker. However, just because it's possible doesn't mean that it happens very often or that more than a very small percentage of them ever reach that level of fluency. In the 20+ years that I've been writing for a living, I've met some ESL writers who are good, but I've never met a single ESL writer whose English writing is not easily-recognizable to me (and to any college professor) as having been written by someone whose native language is not English.

124. Specifically ask me not to write a project too well for a typical college freshman and then email me a few weeks later asking for another project and attaching a scan of the marked previous project with the comments and corrections from the professor about how it "would have been an A" (instead of an A-) without those minor mistakes that I deliberately inserted, at your request, just to make the project believable as freshman writing (reliance on passive voice, periods outside closing quotation marks, and a few missing commas) as though I really need any help from you and/or your Composition 101 professor (who was probably born around the time I graduated from law school) not to make those same kinds of minor mistakes in your next project because you want an A on it instead of another A-.

This industry exists substantially as a function of the laziness of college professors and academic program curricula developers. There's almost no educational benefit to most students by virtue of having to write research papers and essays, especially in courses totally outside of their academic majors. It's not that writing isn't an important skill for many professions, because it is. So is mathematics; but we don't require liberal arts students to do math problems in most of their liberal arts course throughout all four years of their college studies. College isn't mandatory in the first place, so people who choose to attend college should have the complete autonomy to decide for themselves what skills they choose to develop. Certain professions and their corresponding courses of study obviously require much more writing by their very nature: Journalism and English Studies and Political Science should emphasize writing, as should Education, Psychology, and Sociology, to a lesser extent, and largely depending on what students actually intend on doing with those degrees. Conversely, Math and Computer Science majors (especially) and students majoring in most other fields shouldn't have to do as much writing in college.

Assigning "research" projects to undergraduate students, especially in courses outside of their majors doesn't promote learning, or research skills, or, for the most part, even writing skills. The typical undergraduate views it as a miserable chore, leaves it to the last minute, and then does little more than string together a bunch of block quotes and/or heavily paraphrased (and almost always incorrectly or insufficiently-cited) material as much as necessary to satisfy the assigned word count. In many cases, they simply fill up pages with paraphrased passages loosely strung together and with virtually no independent thought whatsoever in between all of those cited passages. Students detest those assignments and get very little out of them. The fact that essay topics are typically open to the choice of students means that there's very little educational value to the chore and negligible substantive educational value to the subject matter of any particular project.

Everybody needs to learn how to communicate somewhat effectively in writing, but those skills can be taught much more directly and effectively without the connection to specific elective courses. It's just a lazy way of assigning work capable of being graded. It would make a lot more sense to eliminate the writing requirement in most courses and either require students to take more (pure) writing courses that focus on routine business (and general written) communication skills or to require those types of courses only for students whose professors have identified them, specifically, as needing some remedial writing work, either from their written exams or from annual writing tests given strictly for the purpose of identifying students who are not yet capable of expressing themselves in writing well enough to pursue their career goals (which should vary depending on their chosen major course of study).

Back when essay companies were still the main source of my projects, I built a full gym in my apartment so that I wouldn't have to go out for 3 or 4 hours most days of the week just to get my workouts in. There was always intense competition to grab the best projects as soon as they got posted on the assignment board, so being away from my computer for several hours at a time almost every day was costing me a lot of money. I don't actually write (projects) during my workout, but I do answer emails in between my sets.

What prevented the writer and client from exchanging contact info and then doing business directly without the essay company. That's the main reason that companies don't usually permit their writers and clients to communicate except through a monitored system.

I'm of the opinion that even someone totally new to this industry can still identify a trustworthy writer using nothing more than the search function here and Google. It's still always safest to start with a smaller project, but there's enough information right here to avoid getting ripped off by the first writer you hire if you just do a little bit of homework and due diligence before making that decision. (Anytime you use the search function here, you should change the default from "titles" to "messages" so your results aren't limited to threads mentioning the writer you're researching in the thread title.)

That's equally true for both ENL and ESL writers. That makes it what mathematicians refer to as a constant; and it should be treated exactly the way mathematicians treat constants.


Negative. Being a good researcher has nothing to do with whether or not someone happens (also) to be a good writer. Likewise, both being a good researcher and being a good writer (in any language) have little to do with one another and nothing to do with how well someone writes in English if English isn't his native language. Is it possible for someone to become a good writer (in English) despite learning English as a second language? Definitely: both my father and my 10th-Grade English teacher were perfect examples. Do the vast majority of ESL writers write in English as well as ENL writers? Definitely not.


This is true. However, this is also a constant, precisely because it is equally true of both ESL and ENL writers. Aside from being a constant, research skills and English writing skills have nothing to do with one another: someone could be a great researcher and a horrible writer and vice-versa, because those two skills are almost completely unrelated.


Again, the ability to analyze issues and express ideas well in writing is another constant, and one that differs tremendously among different people, even within any given language, and that ability exists and varies irrespective of the language. If someone's writing is obviously ESL, it doesn't do an American or British or Australian client much good that the underlying research and/or strength of substantive argument might be good. There's no shortage of legitimate peer-reviewed journals published on other continents that illustrate the proposition that there are plenty of great researchers whose English writing is either bad or obviously recognizable as ESL writing (despite perhaps being pretty good otherwise). Writing well in English that doesn't exhibit any of the obvious indicators of (even pretty good) ESL writing is totally unrelated to how good or bad a researcher a writer might be.


Both skills are critical, but (again), they're unrelated. Each of those skills is something that lawyers and logicians would refer to as "necessary but insufficient conditions" for the quality of work in this this industry, at least as pertains to ENL clients. Neither skill is worth much without the other.


Nobody would disagree with that. However, that's the crux of the issue: If ESL and ENL writers all had "equal English writing abilities," this wouldn't be a topic worth discussing at all. The issue is, precisely, that the vast majority of ESL writers do not exhibit "English writing abilities" that are anywhere even remotely close to being "equal" to ENL writers, leaving aside any and all other issues and constants that ordinarily dictate the quality of academic writing.

They can afford to charge much less per page because their writers are in Ukraine while most of their customers are in the US. Just Google and compare the per capita income in those two countries.

That 30-day rule only applies to your university. Google results live forever. You might want to just chalk it up to experience and do a better job of vetting your next writer, because if the guy who scammed you has your name and all of your contact info, the university might not take action after 30 days, but prospective future employers who Google your name really won't care that 30+ days have passed since you hired a ghostwriter to do your college essay for you. They won't have the time or interest to investigate further to determine whether or not it's true and will simply move on to consider the next applicant on the list who doesn't have questionable Google results possibly implicating that applicant in connection with accusations of academic dishonesty. Don't jeopardize your future just for the sake of vengeance. Consider yourself lucky to have dodged that bullet and move on.

For someone who actually blames the writer she used in college for her getting fired from her job after college for incompetence, there's never going to be any kind of "awakening" later in life about anything. She's just going to go through her entire life blaming others for every choice that she makes and for every consequence of her own failings.

I also have to disagree with this, and most particularly, with the word "must" in both places where it appears. I never liked -- let alone "loved" -- reading, but as anybody familiar with this community over the last decade or so will attest, I've managed to become about as successful doing this as anybody in the recent history of this business. As a student, I detested assigned reading; and even as an adult, I only chose to read for the purpose of learning about specific topics about which I had some interest in knowing more. My reading comprehension and writing ability drew compliments from my teachers since grade school, but they are both largely innate, although the latter is also substantially attributable to having been raised by a father who was a grammarian and whose lessons were then perfectly supplemented by a 10th-Grade English teacher, a master of the language, himself. My own development as a writer completely disproves the proposition that love of reading is a necessity; and I've known plenty of intelligent adults who love to read but who would not even remotely be considered good writers, thereby disproving the other part of that particular argument, although, admittedly, only anecdotally.


I agree, but this actually contradicts your earlier statement about the significance of a love of reading before becoming a working academic writer as a necessary prerequisite to success as a writer. As I've described in much greater detail elsewhere on this forum, I was as intimidated by writing assignments in college as my clients are today, despite the fact that my writing was always technically good whenever I was forced to do it. That's one reason that I understand exactly why they need me and why I don't think they should be apologetic or ashamed about needing my services.

When I started doing this for a living roughly 20 years ago, I was already a very good writer, notwithstanding the facts that I rarely read for pleasure and that I was no better at research than any typical college graduate who never wrote anything that hadn't been assigned in school. At first, writing a 10-page essay took me several days and many drafts, just as is the case for most non-professional writers, even though my writing was actually already very good. It was, in effect, my on-the-job training doing this for a living as an essay-company writer that allowed me to become sufficiently proficient and efficient doing this to be able to write a (good) 10 or 20-page project (or half a dozen short essays) overnight, if necessary, and to produce a high enough volume of writing to earn a decent living doing (only) this.

I understand what you're saying, but technically, whether or not a writer pays taxes is irrelevant to the issue of the underlying ethics of any job, because the IRS specifically requires that you pay income tax on all sources of income, (expressly) including illegal sources of income. Obviously, choosing to pay your taxes or to avoid paying your taxes is an ethical issue, but one that's entirely unrelated to how you earn that income. Likewise, doing things in one's own interest (such as contributing to a retirement account and buying health insurance) is also unrelated to the ethics of how someone earns a living. Arguably, there are plenty of traditional jobs that are perfectly legal but raise legitimate ethical issues, such as political lobbying for the benefit of industries and to the detriment of the general public affected by the results of that lobbying, talking people into buying stocks that brokers know full well to be of highly-questionable real value as investments, and choosing to represent people who are likely guilty of terrible crimes (as private defense attorneys vs. court-appointed attorneys). When it comes to earning a living as an academic writer, the main delineation between ethical writers and unethical writers, in my opinion, is simply that the former provide their clients with exactly what their clients pay them for while the latter rip off their clients in any of several typical ways. Any ethical issues related to what their clients choose to do with the product is on their clients and not under the writer's control, much as is the case with manufacturers of alcoholic beverages and firearms and what their customers choose to do with their products.

My clients own anything that I write for them as soon as they receive it from me.

Back when I was dependent on essay companies for work, the only way I eventually discovered how many different companies were actually using me was that customers would sometimes include their invoices as a cover page of the files they uploaded as sources for their projects. I'd only applied to and signed a contract with a single entity, but the projects posted on the assignment board from which I took assignments came from many different companies with websites that provided no disclosure of being affiliated with one another.

Writers shouldn't even be scheduling, researching, or writing even a single page of any project until that project (or a section of that project) is paid for in full. Once you've spent your valuable time doing the work, simply not turning it over to the client pending payment serves no purpose to the writer, because that work has already been done and the corresponding time has already been spent on the project by the writer. The principal value of maintaining a no-work-prior-to-payment policy is that providing notice of that policy well in advance steers away potentially dishonest and problematic clients before the writer ever has to deal with those types of headaches.

For clients who've found this forum, the only thing they really need to do to prevent getting ripped off is use a writer with a very long history on this forum for providing high-quality work. There's zero risk that anybody who's spent a decade or more establishing a good reputation here is suddenly going to decide to start taking money from clients without delivering projects or delivering poor-quality work. New clients can (and should) still limit their relative risk by trying out any new writer with a short project; but if clients do their part to identify legit writers first, they should expect to be satisfied with the work they receive and not lie awake at night worrying about it in the interim between payment and receipt of that first project from their carefully-chosen writer.

Thanks, but I was simply asking him what he meant by the following:


What he meant by that is hardly something that anybody else can "research" other than by asking the question simply and directly. One thing a good researcher never does is draw totally baseless conclusions based on assumptions about what may or may not have been in someone else's mind with zero evidence to support those conclusions other than an uninformed guess..

I think it's pretty obvious that the real purpose is simply to detect plagiarized admissions essays and that the language about "streamlining the admissions process" is just standard PR doubletalk intended to downplay the main purpose of the venture and put a more positive spin on it.

However, these two statements seem to contradict one another:



In any case, in my educated opinion after having written at least 10,000 academic projects and hundreds of admissions essays, original admissions essays are substantially less likely to be flagged incorrectly as plagiarism than are original academic essays, precisely because of the emphasis on specific choice of language and phrasing in application essays. When original academic essays are flagged incorrectly, it's usually because there are only so many original ways to say "Sigmund Freud was the father of psychotherapy" and "World War Two started with the Nazi invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939." (If you want to test that proposition, just do a quick scan or Google search for those two phrases, both of which are totally original, because I just composed them off the top of my head and without any sourcing.)

By contrast, when students plagiarize application essays, what they tend to do is retain all of the exact language of someone else's essay, practically verbatim, while merely substituting their own information for that of the student info in the original essay. Unlike the two examples of false-flagged plagiarism above, when students copy/paste specific language from older application essays, there's really no mistaking that for coincidence.

Only bad writers (and students) exhibit that tendency. While I always prefer to write all of my projects from scratch, I don't refuse to rewrite a project if the client insists on that instead of a brand new paper. On those occasions, I don't retain any of the original wording at all, let alone in its original place within any sentence or paragraph. My vocabulary, grammar, and sentence structure will always be much better than the writing in the original paper, so in addition to just being entirely different -- and, therefore, unidentifiable as the original paper -- the new paper that I provide is also, invariably, written much better than the original. Once the citations and references are changed to appropriate alternate citations and references, it is completely unrecognizable, whether to software or to any human eye. To a reader, the new paper is nothing more than a totally different project on the same topic as the original and not any more connected to the original than projects authored by different students on the same topic in different semesters, which occurs routinely, especially at the undergraduate level.

If you've already submitted it, it's too late to do the safest thing and just not use it. It's a tough situation, because if you pay blackmail, there's a good chance he'll just continue extorting you for more money. If you don't, there's a good chance he'll be vindictive and expose you.

Does the writer have a website or any history linked to his name and email? (Google both.) How did you find this person? Does he have any history on whatever platform you found him? If it's just an email address, you can't really threaten to publicize his practices because he'll just create another email. About the only leverage you might have is threatening to share everything with PayPal to get his account closed and also pursue a full refund of the money he already received. How did you find this person and what made you think he was trustworthy? If he has nothing but an email address that can be changed, about the only thing you can threaten him with is having to create a new PayPal account if you get his current account closed. If you have the money, you might even consider "negotiating" to pay less in conjunction with telling him that if he takes the $200 (or whatever), there won't be any subsequent payments and that if he bothers you again, you'll have no choice but to focus your efforts on getting his PayPal account closed.

It's a frustrating situation, but if you provided too much personal info to some anonymous criminal scammer, you might have no choice but to weigh that relatively small cost against the costs associated with the consequences of his reporting you to your school. In anticipation of some bad advice that some people have doled out here before: If he can identify the dean of students and/or your professor, it really won't matter to them that he's a stranger or a criminal. If he provides them with convincing emails and (especially) the exact same essay content as the essay you actually submitted, that will probably be enough to cause you much more trouble than the value of $200 or even $500. This thread should provide a warning to anybody considering doing business with any writer who doesn't have a very long history on a platform such as this forum and a uniquely-identifying email and forum ID associated with a good reputation going back many years to care about maintaining.

To give you any helpful advice, I'd need to know whether or not you've already submitted the project for credit.

The only question about the atrocious web copy on their website is whether it's attributable to having been written by an ESL writer (most likely from India) or just a really terrible NES writer.

Negative. Plenty of people can write well enough to compose coherent emails -- including many of my clients who need my services -- but that hardly provides any gauge of their ability to produce high-quality academic content. About the only relevance of email communications is that someone who can't compose a coherent and grammatically-correct email obviously can't write a good academic project.

As an independent writer, I know as well as anybody that clients are in good hands once they find a reliable writer. However, during the process of finding a reliable writer (and until they're successful in that regard), the risks associated with using a new independent writer are comparable to the risks associated with finding a legitimate essay company.

The number of words per page is actually the least of your problems when you order from a shady company and there are actually totally legit companies that promise fewer than 300 words per page. If the company provides great work but only 275 words per page, you're much better off with them than a company that provides 300 plagiarized words and/or totally unusable gibberish.

Essay companies include those disclaimers for plausible deniability and so that they can refuse otherwise legitimate rewrite requests as "TOS violations" anytime their customers admit to submitting the project for credit. Obviously, they have no way of knowing what customers do with their projects unless their customers tell them.

They know exactly what their customers intend to do with their projects. The reason companies post those disclaimers is that they think it gives them what's referred to in law as "plausible deniability" of what they obviously know.

Sorry the OP got ripped off, but all that anybody would have needed to do to identify that particular company as a very bad choice is read the "English" on their main page. There isn't a single sentence without elementary mistakes that make it incredibly obvious that they're ESL writers, and not even good ones. How could anybody possibly order a project from any company whose money-back guarantee says: "This guarantee ensure that how we are professional, if we not fulfill your demand then we will back your money"? Sometimes, sites invest in NES writers to write their websites, at least; and in those cases, it's possible to get sucked in. Other times, it requires nothing more diligent than reading their website copy. If they can't even write their own website in good English, there's zero chance that you're going to get a high-quality English essay from them, let alone a "dissertation."

In my opinion, most people never really get the whole point of studying Sociology in the first place. They just memorize some facts about the practices and beliefs of indigenous people to be able to regurgitate that material on exams or in assigned essays. Meanwhile, the main value of studying Sociology is that it should help you appreciate how much the practices and beliefs of your own society and culture of origin are equally arbitrary and (in many cases) provably false and just plain silly. The same holds true for studying Greek Mythology without ever questioning one's own religious beliefs or appreciating the implications of the fact that there are thousands of distinct human religions, almost all of which contradict the fundamental beliefs of all other religions, by definition.