My only familiarity with the identities of other company writers was the result having seen their IDs in requests for them in newly-posted assignments. A few of them were very good, but I was shocked the first time I actually had the opportunity to read something written by some of the other writers who got a lot of requests when their essays were included as resources for subsequent assignments, because they were of such low-quality work. If that's the kind of work that earned future requests, I can't even imagine how bad the work was from some of the other writers whose IDs I never encountered because nobody ever requested them.

There are people trying to buy and sell those types of accounts right on Essay Chat.

No. There are only two reasons to go to college in the first place just to get one degree, let alone after having already been through college: (1) To pursue a specific career path or change in career that requires a degree in a new field, and (2) To compete realistically for entry-level jobs (nowadays), even ones that don't require a degree, just to avoid being at a significant disadvantage simply because there's such a glut of unemployed and underemployed college graduates applying for ordinary jobs such as a barista at Starbucks. The last thing anybody needs just to pursue knowledge in a field of personal intellectual interest is to pay to enroll in a formal educational program and obligate one's self to all of the other requirements and assignments and schedules that go along with formal studies. You can explore and learn about anything in which you might have some intellectual curiosity simply by taking (or auditing) individual courses, and even that is unnecessary, considering that you have the Internet right at your fingertips. Especially, if you already have the requisite skills to be providing academic essays for hire in the first place, you should have no problem whatsoever simply finding all of the information you need to pursue knowledge at just about any academic level and on any field of academic interest without enrolling in any formal academic program.

There's really no magic or secret involved in becoming a successful professional academic writer. You just have to be a good writer who is capable of writing well in grammatically-correct English and who knows how to do basic research online. Beyond that, it's really just a matter of cultivating a clientele very gradually, broadening your subject-matter range, and becoming more efficient at writing relatively fast without compromising the quality of your work. That's the formula. A person who struggles to compose a 3 or 4-sentence forum post without glaring mistakes of grammar, proper word choice, and idiomatic expression will not be able to succeed as a writer in this business, at least not one whose clients are mostly NES and looking for a writer who writes at least as well, and, preferably, a lot better than they do. Nobody who isn't ESL himself wants to pay good money for writing that's full of glaring elementary mistakes or that is instantly recognizable as having been written by an ESL writer. A good NES writer can always simplify his writing to the ESL level, but the vast majority of ESL writers, even fairly decent ones, simply cannot do the same in reverse.

I'm surprised that anybody would use the same core name for all of those different ventures. Ordinarily, the whole point of creating dozens of different sites is, precisely, to mask their interrelatedness and ownership.

Generally, academic writing is supposed to represent original theses of students and original arguments that support those theses. Authoritative sources are supposed to be used to support the critical thinking in those original arguments and theses, not replace them. However, when it comes to experienced writers with 8,000 or 10,000 projects under our belts representing 20 years of working in this industry, about the last thing we need, quite frankly, is any "guidance" from our customers about how to produce the projects they hire us to write, much the same way that professional automobile mechanics don't need any "guidance" from their customers about how to repair the vehicles those customers leave at their shops. We know how incorporate sources appropriately, and much better than the people who need our services. The only thing we really need from our clients is the exact assignment they receive from their professors along with any specifications from their professors that go along with it. That's usually all we need to provide a project that is equal to or better than the best projects turned in by anybody else in the same course.

I just received one two days ago. Someone emailed me saying that I'd provided several projects to a friend of hers last year. I asked who the friend was and she responded with a name I recognized. She paid for a few MBA application essays that night and I wrote and delivered them yesterday. Initially, she waited three days before responding to my question about who her friend is and I'd already figured it was another example of an entirely different curiosity: Namely, people sometimes contact me saying that they've been referred by a friend who already used me.

Only because they mention it, I usually respond by asking who the friend was. Much more often than not, they never respond at all and I never hear from them again. This has always puzzled me, because it's not like I'm running some club that only accepts members by referral; I only ask because they mention it and, sometimes, it's helpful to me to review my correspondence with the friend, because I've learned that appreciative easy clients tend to refer friends who are somewhat like themselves in that regard while unappreciative difficult clients tend to refer friends who are also pains in the ass. But they have no way of knowing that and, unlike the referring friend, the referred friend really has no incentive to maintain anonymity with respect to the referrer since the referrer has (obviously) already disclosed having used me to the new client. So, that little bit of weirdness around new prospective referred clients who often disappear after I simply ask who referred them has always seemed somewhat strange to me.

Dude: You're here constantly pontificating about writing and about how well ESL writers can write in English. Meanwhile, practically every sentence of yours in every single post of yours contains glaring errors in grammar, word choice, and idiomatic expression. On plenty of occasions, you use words that have entirely different meaning than you think they do and that aren't even synonyms for the right word, but merely sound similar to the right word. I've had no reason to go out of my way to embarrass you by pointing out all of your obvious mistakes, but if you'd like to learn from them (or if you suggest that I'm wrong about this), I'd be more than happy to start correcting your English for you. Either way, if I were you, I'd really just stop making arguments about how well ESL writers can write in English. Certainly, there are some who can, but you're definitely not one of them.

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.

Unfortunately, inexperienced clients in this industry often wait until they encounter problems with sites they've already paid for work to start researching those sites. It's not any different from taking a used car to your mechanic to check it out after you've already paid the seller for it instead of before you've paid for it.

In my experience, large essay companies often have some writers who can handle highly-technical projects, such as physics, chemistry, and even straight math projects that are 100% calculations and zero writing.

I'm curious what you'd consider to be "bold" about referring to the slowest season as a time when fewer clients need work.

Actually, I'd bet that the average new client spends a lot more time than that on the decision; but I'd agree that they rely on aesthetics and that they miss all of the telltale indications of scams and bad ESL writing all over those types of websites. New customers probably choose their first essay company based on a combination of aesthetics and price, which is precisely why those companies invest heavily in flashy websites and set their prices substantially lower than their qualified legitimate competitors who actually provide the kind of work customers expect from this industry.

@whalebale

How do you know any of this unless you're an employee of that company; and if you're an employee, why don't you use the ID-designation function here and indicate "Company Representative" on your profile?

I really don't understand what "perspectives" or "cycles" you could possibly have in mind. Customers simply want quality work for their hard-earned money and the last thing they want to pay for is something written (or, just as often, copied and pasted from the Internet) by someone who can't even write as well as the customers who pay a writing company (or a "writer") for the good work they expect in return for their money. About the last thing of concern to customers is how essay companies treat their writers. Generally, essay companies situated outside of the US and UK charge less simply because they don't have to worry about paying qualified writers and because their entire marketing strategy is to trick first-time customers in this industry into falling for their low prices. Unlike companies and writers who provide high-quality work for the fair market price of high-quality work and who earn long-term patronage from returning customers based on that high-quality work, the sites we're discussing in this thread target an endless list of disappointed first-time/last-time customers.

For writers whose native language is English, success doesn't involve any kind of continual training. It's just a matter of prioritizing writing projects and deadlines over all of the other things in your daily schedule and being available to write most days of your life.

Just FYI, most of the legit writing companies have at least a few writers who are capable of handling CS projects.

There are exceptions, but generally, writers who are willing to go through a bidding process against other writers aren't as experienced or as good as writers who have managed to build their own clientele and who don't need to participate in any bidding systems for work.

Unfortunately, that's exactly the kind of enterprise with which we legit writers have to compete for clients. After receiving the kind of work described, many of them probably just give up on this industry without ever trying another provider. Their main website makes them look totally legit, and unlike most of these types of companies, their web copy isn't full of obvious ESL indicators. About the only immediate clue that something isn't quite right is that one of their supposed testimonials from a student in California uses UK spelling.

The Western Union option also allows customers to maintain complete anonymity if they have someone willing to issue the payment for them. In that case, the only ID info the writer needs is that of whomever issued the payment.

I just don't see the point of getting an advanced degree in a language one barely speaks.

While I've been preaching the small-project-first-as-a-test approach here for years, I still get regular orders for huge projects from first-time clients fairly regularly. By the time they contact me, there's barely enough time to do the project, so testing me with a smaller project or breaking up the large one into smaller sections is simply no longer an option if they want to make their deadlines.

The terms "cycle" and "each other" both imply that there are individual writers and individual clients who sometimes collaborate successfully but who scam each other at other times. In English, "each other" is reserved for situations involving only two people; when you're referring to more than two people -- such as universes of many writers and universes of many customers -- we say "one another." Likewise, "cycle" implies repetition or alternation between individual writers and clients scamming and not scamming each other. Legitimate writers never scam any customers and legitimate customers never scam any writers.


I have no idea what this is, but it sounds like something having to do with the policies of an essay company.


This can't happen to an experienced independent writer, because we don't book any project -- much less actually complete it -- until payment has cleared. No essay company I've ever known lists projects until payment has been issued, either; so I'm not sure what you're referring to here. If you're referring to situations where payments fail after having been issued, reputable companies still pay their writers for completed projects and eat the loss rather than expecting their writers to absorb that loss.


Unless you're referring to writers and clients of essay companies, the best way for clients to protect themselves is to try out any new writer with a short project; and the best way for writers to protect themselves is simply never to schedule any work until it's been paid for in full and never to make any exceptions about that for anybody for any reason.

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.

Legit providers don't promise specific grades or charge extra for promises of higher grades in the first place. However, the most that this customer would have been entitled to demand in this situation is (obviously) the return of that 10%, not a complete refund. If they provided B-level work on those MBA projects and 100% original work, the only thing that the customer paid for and didn't receive was that 10% for the A.

If they're legit foreign sites serving the needs of American and British customers, they charge less because their product is inferior and their target market is customers willing to accept inferior work for a cheaper price than good work costs. If they're not legit foreign sites, they charge less for the same reason as all of the other scams: that's how they compete against legitimate providers charging the market rate for a high-quality product. It's no problem for them to charge less, since they're either not going to provide anything to the customer at all or they're going to provide some copied and pasted gibberish for which they only pay their "writers" a couple of dollars per page.

It happens to customers all the time. The scammers advertise and/or contact students directly through Facebook or Twitter. Once the payment is issued, they attempt to scam writers into providing the project before payment so that they can actually deliver the project and then continue getting paid by the same customer for future projects. After tricking some novice writer or some other writer who's desperate enough to do the work before being paid, they'll just continue taking payments from the same customer and trying to scam other desperate or naïve writers so that they can continue delivering projects to keep the client as long as possible. The first time they can't find a new writer to scam for free work, the client gets neither the project nor a refund and the scammers just stop responding or block their most recent victims or they create some new account IDs to continue the same scam on new customers and new writers.

That's why the biggest red flag for customers is being contacted (first) by supposed "writers" through Facebook or Twitter, simply because legit writers don't contact random students offering to provide work. The biggest red flag for writers is responding to an inquiry from a new client by asking the supposed "student" for additional basic info about a project and having the "student" respond that he'll have to get back to you with that basic info instead of just answering the question, because that means the client is really just someone posing as a student to you and posing as a writer to the real student. Alternatively, the scammers tell the writer that they're ordering a project for "a friend" from the start, so that those delayed responses to basic questions don't arouse immediate suspicion, which is precisely why new "clients" asking about ordering projects for "friends" is another red flag for writers.

If you're that dependent on a single client and that worried about being able to find others, consider offering that client some kind of reward for referring friends to you.

I don't think there's really very much you can do besides develop the largest possible clientele in general. The more clients you have, the more work you'll get tricking in even during the slowest periods when fewer clients need work and those who do need less work than they usually do during the rest of the year.

New users of this forum should just use the search function to identify writers who have used the same ID here for a decade or more and read just some of their posts. Chances are that writers whose posts are full of misused English vocabulary and idioms won't provide writing that's any better than that in their projects. Conversely, if someone's forum posts are logical and well-written, at least you know that he has full command of the language and that his projects won't be full of misused words and idioms. As always, change the search default from "topic titles" to "messages" and then try out any writer you might be considering with a smaller project before paying for a much larger one.

As always, the only reliable way for clients to protect their interests continues to be doing some basic research first (starting with information available on this forum) about any service provider and then placing a small order for a project with a relatively long deadline before trusting anybody with a much larger pre-paid project. To do that on this forum, use the search function but always change the default "topic titles" to "messages" so your search results aren't severely limited. Once you receive high-quality work from that provider, you know you're dealing with someone legitimate and reliable. The only reliable way for writers to protect their interests continues to be avoiding anything other than full payment in advance for any project (or any portion of any project ordered) before scheduling or working on it. Nothing about that will ever change, simply because no experienced writer who already has enough work to keep busy is ever going to agree to provide any work that hasn't already been paid for in full.

No other arrangement (such as half payment in advance and half payment on delivery of a complete project) will protect writers, because it still requires writing half a project that hasn't yet been paid for. That's why no essay company (or any other online service provider or retailer in any other industry) ever accepts anything less than payment in full for any project to schedule it. The only reasonable thing customers can do to limit their risk is test a new writer with a small project and/or order your first large project in pre-paid sections if you don't already know that you can trust the writer.

What I'm suggesting is that, with the exception of numbers 1 & 2, all of the other proposed justifications, (or rationalizations, more accurately), for the decision to leave college would be highly illogical for anybody who hopes to be successful at earning a decent living.

Regarding #3 above:

Generally, when people leave college because they realize it's just not for them, it's almost always because they're just not up to the task, academically. Leaving college because one hopes to be the next self-created billionaire is silly. People like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg were all bona fide geniuses who could have completed any degree they pursued, whereas the vast majority of college dropouts are people struggling just to pass general-studies courses, not geniuses with viable and remotely-realistic alternate self-created career paths likely to put them on the billionaire pathway. Generally, a college degree is even more important in today's economy, simply because most applicants even for jobs that don't require a degree have degrees; so if you don't, you probably can't even compete for a job as a Starbucks barista, simply because all the other applicants have 4-year degrees. Over a lifetime, people with college degrees earn $1,000,000 more than people without degrees.

I don't know anything about the company, but this describes a business model that probably represents the vast majority of this industry: companies that put all of their effort and resources into maintaining a continuous flow of disappointed first-time/last-time customers.

Here's a weird phenomenon that I've experienced a few dozen times in this realm: I've received an email from someone saying that he or she was "referred by a friend" who used me. In my response, I ask who the friend was and, almost invariably, they totally ignore the question as though I never asked it, which is something I really can't stand, in general, because I always answer all questions asked of me in emails. (Actually, I feel the same way about forum conversations.) Anyway, I'll ask again and they either ignore the question again or they never respond to my email again at all. Other times, they'll provide a name that I don't recognize and when I ask for that person's email (just to figure out who it is), they respond that they "don't know" their friend's email. Maybe they think I won't consider their projects without a "referral" or something (which is really silly). The only reason I even ask is that they mention it initially; but it's always weird to me (and annoying) not to get a straight answer to such a simple and obvious question.

Roughly how long have you been writing for hire and roughly how many total clients have you had since you started?

In my experience, only about 1 customer in 100 tell me that they just want the work as a reference. About 1 in 10 tell me about the specific reasons or life circumstances that require them to use my services. My response is that it's not something they need to explain to me and they own whatever work they purchase from me and can use it however they think is most beneficial to them.


If you mean writers who do this instead of pursuing or completing a PhD, I've encountered that, too. As a matter of fact, one of the best writers I know recently retired from writing to pursue a PhD in Forestry Science, after doing this for about 10 years.

Get used to using a standing desk, too. I got one something like this about 10 years ago, but larger, sturdier, and less formal; then I had some work done to it to convert it into a standing desk with shelves and ports for pc equipment power cords and cables and a slide-out keyboard.

• 
  Home Bar/Standing Desk
  

At the other end of the spectrum of this issue, sometimes new clients order projects without any indication that they've already submitted their previous work in the same course. Then, instead of using the product as a model, they just submit it for credit and the professor immediately realizes that someone else had to have written it. I don't police what my clients choose to do with the projects I provide (and my clients own the work), but they should always let their writers know if they want projects written at a lower level for any reason.

If it were me, I think I'd just pursue my education through the best possible program in my native language and perhaps work on my English simultaneously.