That's not going to help you if that account is compromised or being used without authorization. That's why you only send the project to the email address displayed on the account and require a confirmation of the order sent from that email if it's not the same as the correspondence email.

Two Rules for Fledgling Academic Writers

1. Unless you want to lose 10% or 20% or 30% (or more) of you hard-earned money on a continual basis and waste a considerable amount of your time chasing down clients who renege on their promises to pay after delivery, just take the advice of all veteran writers and never agree to write (or even schedule) a single page of work until it's paid for in full. Let clients order (and pay for) partial projects if they don't want to trust you with a full prepayment, but don't ever write anything until it's paid for in full. No exceptions, regardless of the "reason." Ever.

2. Never email (or cc) any project to any email other than the exact email actually displayed in the PayPal account. No exception for any reason. Ever. Tell you clients in advance so as to avoid begging and frantic pleading about no longer having access to that email after the project has been delivered to the PayPal email. Sometimes, people no longer have access to their PayPal emails; that's why you explain in advance so they can fix the account info if necessary. If the PayPal email isn't exactly the same as the communication email, always email the PayPal email immediately after payment and ask for confirmation about the payment for the project. If you don't get a response, tell the client you're going to refund it and cancel the order unless the PayPal account owner responds and confirms from the PayPal email.

If you want to go through this constantly, ignore these two rules and listen to all the novices who chime in to tell you that it's perfectly fine to take "deposits" and deliver work before it's paid for in full.

If you know her name and school, you can easily find her school email address. Contact her there and let her know that if she doesn't pay for the project, she doesn't own it and you have the right to publish it to make sure she can't use it, as well as the PayPal address and email that she used for it to warn your colleagues about getting scammed. Keep in mind that the student might not even be the person who scammed you. There are plenty of thieves who pose as "writers" to real clients and as "clients" to real writers: they'll take the order and the money from the student, hire a writer for the project promising to pay on delivery, and then disappear after delivery, exactly as you describe. They may also pay you the first time to build trust and confidence (while charging the student much more than they pay you), and then try to get the next (usually, much larger) project from you entirely for free.

Building up a sufficiently large client base to earn a living doing this takes years. In the meantime, the only realistic option is to get hired by an essay company (or several) so that you have a steady income while you're struggling to build a private clientele. As your clientele grows, you can reduce the amount of work you do for the essay companies. At best, it's a very gradual process, even for someone with the ability to do this job well, and the vast majority of people who try to make a living this way discover that they just don't have the skills to do it well enough to earn a steady living from it over the long term.

You understand that you're responding to someone who posted the question almost 6 years ago and either graduated or dropped out already, right?

Not really, at least not technically. The concept of "censorship" only applies to government and quasi-government entities. A private employer, for example, can freely prohibit discussion of (or advertising) anything it wants to prohibit (as long as he doesn't treat different religions differently). I'm not suggesting that there aren't other more-harmful things that justify prohibition by Google or Facebook more than academic ghostwriting; but it's not "censorship" as that concept is defined by American law. Most people don't realize this, but "Free Speech" is only a right in the context of government entities. That's why an Internet forum or private employer can prohibit any discussion of politics or religion (or anything else) at work, whereas they can't do that at a government job, precisely because of the connection to government and the way that Free Speech does apply to a government employer.

If you completely rewrite it in different words, it won't get flagged by any anti-plagiarism scanner unless you use all of the same references and citations; in that case, only the reference list and the citations will get flagged. It's not at all unusual for a totally original paper to get some flags for the references and citations, simply because most of the sources you'll find for any project have also been found and used by others many times in similar projects. That's why you should always delete all the citations and the reference page before scanning your essay to get an accurate scan; then scan the whole reference page separately. The reason for also scanning the reference page is that isolated flags for individual sources listed is perfectly normal, but an entire alphabetized list of sources that gets flagged indicates that all of those sources were used by someone else for a similar project. This is especially important if the citation style requires page numbers in citations, because it's an obvious sign of plagiarism when all of the citations get flagged and all of them appear in the same order in the essay and cite the exact same pages of every source as another essay, even if all of the narrative writing is original and un-flagged.

If the question is only about plagiarism scanning (vs. what constitutes "plagiarism" as far as professors and academic institutions are concerned), then rewriting the entire essay will make it "safe" to use, even if the same essay has been submitted previously by someone else. I get orders requesting that sometimes: clients send me an entire A+ essay or thesis and ask me to "make it original" by completely rewriting it but without changing any of the content. However, if you're asking whether that constitutes plagiarism, the answer is yes, even if you change every single word of the original essay. That's because you're supposed to cite any idea that comes from someone else, even if you write it in your own words. If paraphrasing a legitimate source without attribution is plagiarism, then (obviously) paraphrasing an entire essay's worth of someone else's ideas is also plagiarism if you don't cite the actual author of those ideas.

If you're dealing with a legitimate writer, it really shouldn't matter. I only ask what country my clients go to school, because that's relevant to the expected academic level of the work. Quite often, clients actually volunteer much more specific info about where they go to school, including giving me their school library account ID and PW. I usually explain to them that it's never a good idea to have a writer log in to their school accounts because all that activity is readily available (and very difficult to explain) if anybody at the school ever had a reason to check and I ask them to just download all the project materials on their end and send them to me as files.

There's no shortage of online guidance for citation styles. The vast majority of academic projects typically request APA, MLA, Harvard, or Chicago style, but a good writer can handle any style required, including OSCOLA and Bluebook for advance law projects.

Nobody chooses to write for essay companies instead of writing for direct clients. We all start off writing for essay companies but it's very difficult to begin establishing a private clientele. Obviously, everybody would greatly prefer not to take projects through a company for much less money; but until you have a steady stream of direct clients, that's not really an option. Most of us who make that transition successfully do so only after doing a lot of work for essay companies first, and we typically spend a few years doing both simultaneously in the process before achieving full independence.

As a general rule, the university system does not accommodate international students in that way. They expect anybody who enrolls in their institutions to be able to complete coursework in whatever language it is delivered.


Not really. It's an issue that isn't unique to ESL students, but it obviously poses even more of an obstacle for them than it does for NES students in technical fields.

Generally, out-of-class writing assignments are overused because it's a lazy way of teaching and because it's a "tradition" that dates back centuries. Engineers and nurses (for just two common examples) don't really need to know how to write more than emails and other informal communications, and they rarely do any writing after they enter their respective professional fields unless they choose to. The university system doesn't really recognize the difference between students whose intended professional fields necessarily involve a lot of writing and students whose intended professional fields do not. I sympathize even more with ESL students than I do with NES students in technical fields who have to worry about passing writing assignments that have almost no relation to their long-term educational and professional goals. In my opinion, writing assignments shouldn't play as large a role as they do in the education of people who have chosen to continue their education after high school unless major writing assignments are directly related to competence in those particular fields.

Again, please speak for yourself rather than issuing blanket general statements that purport to apply to all writers. Not everybody necessarily aspires to move away from writing and into management. I define "taking it to the next level" differently: for me, it's the luxury of choosing to work with the brightest and most appreciative clients as my bread and butter and of not having to deal with as many clients who don't manage to catch on quickly enough how this works (and doesn't work) and whose project-related communications always come along with unnecessary headaches and avoidable complications attributable to deficiency in common sense and/or of the most basic understanding of what's appropriate when commissioning services of this kind and through an online medium.

I have no other familiarity with them, but it's obvious just from that ad that they don't really know when to pluralize nouns or when to use commas and hyphens. Generally, the quality of the writing in a company's website and advertisements represents their best; so I wouldn't be too optimistic about the prospect of getting decent work from any company whose simple web copy already shows hints of inexperienced ESL writing.

There's really no such thing as a class that can teach you not to make the more subtle kinds of ESL mistakes you're talking about.

Probably your best bet would be to tell your NES friends to correct you instead of doing the "polite" thing and ignoring your minor mistakes.

People don't usually interrupt someone to point out minor ESL mistakes if your English is good enough to be understood.

Incidentally, these are exactly the kinds of idiomatic mistakes that make (even some otherwise very good) ESL writing so easily recognizable as ESL, especially by NES educators. If there were a class to teach that kind of thing, it wouldn't be a class intended for NES writers, because those just aren't the kinds of mistakes that NES writers typically make.

Instead, it would have to be a well-designed class specifically intended for high-level ESL writers and it would be deliberately designed around the specific types of mistakes that even very fluent ESL writers still make, such as adding articles like "the" where they don't belong and omitting them where they do belong. English is highly idiomatic and many idioms contradict what you might think is logical or consistent with other rules of English.

Just tell your friends to let you know anytime you make a mistake.

Actually, I edited the name of that company out of my response before posting it to avoid an unnecessary conflict with the owners of this forum. We can certainly discuss that if you wish, along with which very-high-volume poster also obviously works for the same company and how your company advertises here in ways that aren't available (or fair) to any of your competitors.


As per the TOS of this forum, Admin does not get involved in disagreements between members and understands that all of our posts represent our own subjective beliefs. I have violated no forum rule and everything I said above represents my sincere and honest beliefs about you and what company actually employs you. The only way Admin here would ever get involved in this would be, precisely, because you do work for them, exactly as I (and others) have believed for a very long time. If anything I've said here is factually incorrect and Admin wishes to correct the record, they can simply issue a statement to the contrary and indicate that you don't have any affiliation with this forum (except as a registered user) and that you aren't an employee of the essay company that owns this forum. Unless you do work for them, their (standard) response to you in any such case would be that they don't get involved in disputes between members and that if you're uncomfortable with anything posted on this forum, you should just stop posting here, exactly as explained in their TOS.


Incidentally, this abbreviation at the bottom of some of my recent posts (including Post #11 above) stands for "Major to chime in to defend his company and ask me about my TOS any minute now" precisely because of how predictable you are in attacking me anytime you perceive anything I say to be suggesting that writers are safer than essay companies. Nobody who isn't employed by an essay company that competes directly with me (and with all writers) for business would ever do that, much less as regularly and as nastily as you have for years.

Correction: I didn't "focus" on essay companies versus writers at all, as was implied by Major. I did focus, specifically, on scammers, not legit providers of either variety; and I was careful to distinguish the former from the latter. Apologies for any confusion.

I didn't "focus" on scam companies at all. In fact, I very deliberately limited my statement to apply only to scam companies and, likewise, I purposely distinguished them from legit companies instead of painting all essay companies with an unfairly broad brush. Obviously, there are more scam writers than companies, because scam writers need nothing but an email address that can be changed easily. My comment was not a reference to any legitimate providers, irrespective of the distinction between writers and essay companies.


If you just check the TOS of your own essay company, you'll see that they don't (currently) say that you have the right to publish papers and student correspondence and to contact their schools only if they attempt to "defraud" or "scam" your company, which would be perfectly understandable. They specifically say that you reserve the right to do all of that if a customer merely violates any of your TOS; and your TOS expressly prohibit any use of your product in your customers' work unless they actually "cite" your essay company as the source of any incorporated material from the projects that you provide. Your TOS also expressly prohibit your customers from putting their names on your projects and state that your company reserves full ownership and copyright of your projects, even though they're fully paid for by your customers. My clients own whatever I write for them and I don't police how they choose to use my work or require them to give me the right to publish their work or our correspondence, or to contact their schools. This thread is about anonymity guarantees and the fact that your (current) TOS expressly reserve the right to publicize your customers' ID and contact their schools if they violate any of your TOS is directly relevant to that topic. Just read them for yourself if you doubt me.

Of course, now that I've pointed it out, I imagine that you'll be changing that wording ASAP, the same way you changed the TOS of this forum a few years ago immediately after I asked for the physical mailing address of this forum because your TOS here used to say that your physical address would be provided on receipt of a written request for it. Instead of responding to my written request with the address as per your TOS as they appeared when I made that request, you simply eliminated that entire provision of the forum TOS the next day.

It depends on the provider. I go so far as to maintain coded client folders that aren't even identifiable without my hardcopy client ID sheet. Scam companies will use your ID to blackmail you to withdraw legitimate payment disputes for totally plagiarized or otherwise subpar work or even for non-delivered projects. Some other companies that aren't scams actually reserve the right to publish your paper and to disclose your name and all of your correspondence, and even to contact your school to make sure that you haven't used their product in the event you do a chargeback OR if you violate any of their TOS, and their TOS include specific prohibitions against submitting your project for academic credit, putting your name on their work, or failing to cite those companies as sources if you incorporate any part of their product into your submissions. That's why it's always important to read their TOS very carefully when deciding on a provider.

mtcitdhcaamamtosamn

Probably the only way to check would be to visit the site from which you ordered it and see whether they sell pre-written projects; and if they do, enter the title and/or keywords related to the subject matter into the search field that their customers use to see what pre-written projects are available for sale. That's likely to be only partly reliable, because some companies maintain dozens of different websites and there's no guarantee that they resell projects on the same website from which they were originally ordered. More likely than not, they don't; so you'd have to try to figure out what other websites the parent company identified on the TOS page owns, which isn't necessarily easy (or possible at all), at least not without investing a lot of time and resources into that endeavor. If your project has an abstract, you could try Googling sentences from it or submitting it to plagiarism scanners. Sometimes, those companies use the actual abstract from the project to advertise it, but other times, they add new abstracts for that purpose.

Since, it's very difficult (if not impossible) to safeguard your ownership of projects after the fact to any reliable degree, your best bet would be to use writers or companies who never resell any projects and/or transfer copyright to their customers. Don't be afraid to ask about that; and understand that if their TOS specifically say that they do not transfer ownership and/or that the company retains copyright and ownership of all of its projects, there's absolutely nothing you can do about the fact that they may choose to resell your project even if they tell you that they don't. If you're searching on this forum, you might try to enter the term "resell" into the search function and the ID of any writer to see what that person has previously stated publicly about whether or not he or she resells projects. As always, change the default "titles" to "messages" to avoid accidentally limiting your search returns to threads mentioning the ID you're researching in the thread title.

mtcitdhcaamamtosamn

Clearly, this is someone who has never seen typical ESL academic writing. It's atrocious and incredibly obvious that it was written by someone who speaks English only as a second language.

It's none of my business to judge what my clients choose to do with the projects they order from me. However, I'd strongly disagree that universities don't enforce their policies about academic honesty or that professors know or expect any of their students to submit ghostwritten projects for credit. At least that's what most of the assignment instructions that they distribute say. I just trust my clients to do whatever they honestly believe is in their own best interests.

It's none of my business what my customers do with the work they commission from me, because it belongs to them. However, that's not necessarily the case with all service providers, as many essay companies expressly prohibit this in their TOS. In fact, many of them expressly limit the rights of their customers to reading or studying the work and require them to cite the essay company as a source if the essay they provide is used in students' work in any way at all. That's why you should always ask first and/or read their TOS very carefully.

mtcitdhcaamamtosamn

I do them all the time. In my experience, it's not "formatting" that clients need from me for their resumes, but writing. You can find formatting guides online for resumes just as easily as you can find formatting guides for APA essays, but neither will help very much if it is formatted properly but poorly written. In my experience, the resume drafts I see from clients are properly formatted, but not sufficiently well-written to generate a job offer, especially if there are a lot of applications for the job in question.

Essay-company TOS usually don't require them to provide specific writers, which means you probably can't do anything about it if a different writer completes the project. However, if you use the "project notes" or "project details" field of the order to make your choice of writer an express condition, you'll most probably be entitled to a full refund if the wrong writer takes it. You can add something like "If FreelanceWriter isn't available for this order, I want to cancel it and receive a refund. I don't want the project written by any other writer." In the days before the company added a 3-hour (later, 6-hour) reservation feature to their website for writer requests, that's exactly how I told my repeat customers to order their future projects to reduce the chance that some other writer would steal the order off the board before I saw it. If I didn't want one of their ordered projects with a request for me, I'd send the customer a message listing which other writers could be trusted to do good work on the project. The customer would then message the company to tell them which other writers would be acceptable, which would effectively modify the original express condition with a record of that in the messaging system. Sometimes, they'd place their order that way in the first place, such as by including the list of acceptable writers in the original order details instead of asking for only one specific writer.

Projects proposed for "proofreading" almost never require only proofreading; likewise, projects proposed for "editing" rarely require only editing. Usually, they both require so much work that those jobs amount to a full rewrite or nearly a full rewrite. I remember exactly ONE request all of last year of each kind that really needed only proofreading and editing, respectively. I took the editing project but I told the proofreading client that I'd be happy to take her future business, but the project in question really didn't need anything that the client couldn't do herself without paying anybody.

If you've already found this forum, simply use the search function here to check out the posting and feedback history for any writer here. (Always change the default "Titles" to "Messages" so that your search returns aren't limited to threads mentioning the writer in the thread title.)

I think you should be a little more careful about making assumptions and generalities about people you don't know. While my teachers always mentioned that I was a good writer, the fact of the matter is that, like many students, I hated having to write for school and never wrote anything for pleasure until several years after I graduated from law school. As I've explained in greater detail in my review thread, I specifically chose to go to law school over psychology grad school because I didn't want to have to do all the writing typically required in psychology programs. My hatred of (and intimidation by) substantial assigned essays as a college student helps me understand exactly why my clients need my services, especially those who are good students and capable of writing for themselves if they have to. It's ironic that I've now written more than enough psychology papers, theses, and dissertations to have satisfied the writing requirements of dozens of degrees, including doctorates, in that field. (This is not a claim to know as much psychology as doctorates in the field; but simply means that I've written more papers for those degrees than most people who actually hold those degrees.)


I'd also disagree that an impulse to "share knowledge" is characteristic of many writers in this industry, even very good ones. More often than not, whatever we know about many of the subjects that we write about comes from doing the research for those projects -- research that we had no interest in doing until it became necessary for a specific project. This is a job. People who happen to write well and who have learned how to research information and who learn how to adapt to the pressure of constant deadlines are well-suited to it; but it's really not like a "calling" to become a teacher or a doctor. It's a job that's workable if you're a good writer and if its demands fit your lifestyle better than those of traditional jobs. Nothing more and nothing less.

In my experience, there's very little "word-of-mouth" advertising in this industry, because, as I've explained before, the vast majority of clients don't ever want to divulge to anybody that they used a ghostwriter in college or grad school, and this includes customers who are extremely happy with their writer and who used the same writer for dozens of projects over several years. It definitely happens, but far less than it would if satisfaction with the services (rather than maintaining secrecy) were the main determinant of how many satisfied clients refer others by word of mouth. If only 10% of my long-term regular clients referred 1 new client who also became a regular, I'd probably be totally overwhelmed with projects very soon, with no choice but to turn many of them away. Therefore, I'm tremendously skeptical, as I've said before, of anybody's claims to have established, much less maintained a clientele over the long term based on direct referrals and/or on offering writing services to prospective customers in person. That could, conceivably, happen to writers who start doing this as fulltime students, themselves, only because being a fulltime student provides constant direct access to fellow students. That ends the day you graduate.

In my experience, this business is transacted almost exclusively online, between customers and writers who never know one another beyond their respective PayPal IDs and emails; and the whole reason a forum like this one gets any attention is, precisely, because that's such a risky element to this whole industry and because 90% of that risk pertains to whether or not a first transaction with any new service provider turns out well when the writer is legit or doesn't turn out well, either because the writer is a scammer or because the writer is inexperienced and unqualified. I've never known any writer in this business who built, much less who ever maintained a clientele over the long term by in-person marketing or by relying on word-of-mouth referrals. If word-of-mouth referrals occurred more often, we wouldn't have to market ourselves on forums and/or ever pay for advertising.

That's because company writers are under no obligation to accept assignments just because you request us. Generally, there's no human involvement in that process: You select a preferred writer from a drop-down list, the writer gets a notice of the request generated automatically by the system, and we either accept it, decline it (which automatically lists it publicly for any writer to take), or we ignore it, in which case it automatically gets listed publicly a few hours later, depending on whatever "reserve" time the system places on writer requests. On some systems, the project isn't even "reserved" except by the honor system, which is sometimes ignored by writers who just steal projects from the requested writer.

It's absolutely none of their business where else you find freelance work as long as you're not stealing any of their existing customers, either by using information gleaned from their system or by accepting offers from their customers who figure out how to contact you directly.


1. Because essay companies view all other non-affiliated essay companies as direct competitors.
2. Because essay companies know that the more sources of work you have, the less leverage they have over you since you're not as dependent on them for work and since you're less likely to accept lower-value projects or their lowest starting pay rates for unproven new writers.

At least once a month, a new prospective client asks me for a price quote, declines to order the project from me because of the price, and then contacts me again a few weeks later about the same project with a much shorter deadline and "emergency" or "urgent" in the subject field of the email. They end up paying for a totally unusable project from some company that hooked them with a low price in addition to paying me more than my first price that they declined, to do the project in a rush after burning off most of the time before their deadline in the process of trying to find high-quality work for an unrealistically-low price.

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.

Some companies maintain dozens of different essay-writing websites. There might be some legitimate marketing reasons for this, but when I was doing a lot of writing for essay companies, I noticed quite a few assignments where the customer's assignment description said something along the lines of this: "Hey, I hope you guys at ABC Essays* do better work than XYZ Essays* because the work I received from a writer at XYZ was horribly bad and useless to me. This is now the second time that I'm paying for the same essay, so I hope you guys are a lot better than XYZ!!" Meanwhile, the customer had no idea that both sites were owned by the same parent company and, much more importantly, that all of the projects from both of those websites simply get posted on the same assignment board for all of the exact same writers, because we were all employed by the parent company, not by any of the individual websites through which they take orders. The only difference ordering from one site instead of the other was the name of the merchant displayed on the credit card statement. I only became aware of how many different websites I was writing for gradually, when customers who ordered from totally different websites uploaded all of their payment-confirmation info as the cover page of the resource materials they provided for their projects.

[* Fictional website names]

As PV explained, relatively few academic projects (including "essays" as opposed to "research papers") don't require substantiating your argument with sources. However, even essay assignments that don't require external sources still (always) require proper citation for any idea that does not come from the mind of the writer if the writer chooses to use outside sources. Without seeing the actual text, it's not possible for anybody here to know whether or not necessary citations are missing from the OP's projects, because we can't know whether or not they reflect the writer's ideas or material derived elsewhere.


This is actually characteristic of most writing that I've seen from college students. While it's not "plagiarism," it's still totally unacceptable academically and usually results in a very low grade. The purpose of academic writing (regardless of the type of project) is for the student to demonstrate some original thought or thesis. Certainly, (except for common knowledge), every idea that comes from someone else is supposed to be properly referenced. However, that doesn't mean it's OK to string together an entire project consisting of nothing but properly-referenced sentences with zero original thought in between them. In principle, you're supposed to introduce your proposed argument or thesis and then incorporate source material as necessary to support your argument; you're not supposed to just present other people's ideas without any of your own. If "almost every sentence has a citation," you're not really writing anything.

Correct. That's exactly what I tried to explain to one of your colleagues (in another thread) who says that he:

1. Assigns projects to writers rather than allowing them to decide autonomously what projects they want;
2. Requires his writers to accept expedited deadlines anytime customers ask for earlier delivery of pending projects;
3. Requires his writers to contact and maintain communications with clients before starting on projects;
4. Requires his writers to furnish interim drafts and incorporate client feedback into pending projects before they're completed;
5. Requires his writers to own and use laptops instead of allowing them to use whatever computers they want to use; and
6. Imposes mandatory "rest days" whether his writers want to continue working or not.

From the point of view of the IRS, all of that control over how and when his writers work is fairly conclusive evidence that his writers are all employees rather than independent contractors. Conversely, a company that never assigns projects to writers or controls how and when its independent contractors work, but merely requires them to meet deadlines and adhere to certain quality standards that apply universally to all company projects is probably not in any danger of being deemed an "employer" by the IRS. Otherwise, almost all U.S.-based essay companies would probably go out of business, leaving this entire industry to us freelancers. However, I disagree with you that maintaining an automated platform through which orders are taken and uploaded and/or through which autonomous communications are transmitted anonymously is material to the issue or to any determination of "employee" vs. "independent contractor."

I had the opposite situation happen countless times, where company customers figured out my email (more often than not, from this forum) and then contacted me asking to do business directly by cutting out the company. Once or twice, they even tried contacting me from a new email pretending to be a new prospective client after I refused their initial offer.


I can't imagine how this is sustainable. Even if "most" writers are honest enough to refuse, I'm sure the company loses a lot of customers to those writers who aren't, especially when it's the customers who make the first overture rather than the writer.

Really? You run an essay company but you don't mind if your writers take away your customers and start doing business with them directly instead of through your company?

Actually, that depends entirely on the TOS of the particular provider. Some of them expressly prohibit their customers from claiming ownership and expressly retain all copyrights for the company, allowing their customers only the right to use any part of the product if they include a formal in-text citation and reference to the company that provided the work. Some of them actually say that their customers may not do anything with their projects other than print out a single copy to read and study it. (Of course, they all do this strictly as a means of trying to create what the law refers to as "plausible deniability" because they obviously know that their clients almost certainly submit their projects for academic credit, because no student who isn't insane would ever "cite" and "reference" any academic essay company as a source in his submitted project.) Others say that the work belongs entirely to the client.

Likewise, the TOS of some companies expressly permit the company to resell the work after a specified time period while others say that they never resell their work at all. Whether or not they honor those promises is very difficult for clients to ascertain and virtually impossible to do anything about if they don't, for various practical reasons. Personally, I give my clients full ownership of any work they commission from me and I've never resold a single project in almost 20 years of doing this for a living.

Agreed. I do sometimes wonder what happens to some of my clients after graduation -- especially the ones who aren't even ESL -- who can barely compose a coherent informal email and/or who pay me to write projects that are so simple that anybody who managed to get through high school ought to be able to write in 30 minutes without any help. They represent relatively few of my clients, though. Most of my clients seem to be fairly good students who just don't have the time to write the essays they order or very good students in programs like Engineering or Nursing that really shouldn't be burdening them with these essay assignments in the first place. Many of them will never again have to write anything resembling an academic research project in their entire careers; so they should just be tested on their substantive knowledge in their education fields. For them, these writing projects serve very little purpose and have no relation to whether or not they'll be successful as engineers or nurses, etc.

If a paper has already been submitted to any plagiarism scanner, changing 60% of it will result in a 40% plagiarism score, complete with a list of exactly when and from what school any unoriginal content was previously submitted for scanning, which is totally unacceptable and will guarantee a failure, and possibly formal accusations of academic dishonesty.


That depends on what a student is worried about: If the concern is merely passing the plagiarism scan, just rewriting (all of) it in your voice will probably work. However, to whatever extent the concern is whether or not you're violating the academic-honesty policy of your school -- or that of just about any school, actually -- merely rewriting the "presentation" doesn't change the fact that it's still plagiarism. I don't have any way of knowing what my clients actually do with my projects; but on a forum where students are looking for guidance about academic honesty and related policies in relation to model essays, I think it's important to provide factually correct information. By every definition of plagiarism and the originality of work submitted for academic credit, merely changing the words (even all of them) does not change the fact that presenting the intellectual ideasof someone else without citing the source of those ideas is still considered rank plagiarism.

Additionally, if you promise your clients drafts, what happens when a writer chooses to bang out a project the same day he takes it off the assignment board even though it's not actually due for a week or more, as sometimes happens, especially during slow periods? What do you tell the client if the completed project satisfies the original specs but he says he'd have asked for various changes if he'd seen an interim draft?

As far as the original topic of this thread goes:


As an essay-company writer, I got maybe 1 rewrite request for every 10 projects; of those, fewer than maybe a quarter of them were legitimate. So, maybe 1 legit request in about 40 projects. By "legit" I mean that there was really something in the original specs that wasn't fully satisfied. Typical illegitimate requests included things like asking for it to be rewritten at a lower level when the specs said nothing besides "Master Level" or "Senior Undergraduate Level"; asking to focus more (or less) on some specific element when no such focus was included in the original specs; and asking to include some direct quotes when that wasn't part of the original specs. Sometimes, we got absolutely ludicrous rewrite requests, such as demanding to know who "ibid" is and why "he" was cited in the text but not listed on the reference page. (I'm not kidding, either; it happened a few times.) Some other silly requests involved ongoing projects, such as where a college Composition course had a 4-page assignment in Week 1, followed by a revision of that same project in Week 2 that required incorporating a new class reading into the original project. Sometimes, you actually have to explain to clients that the only thing they're entitled to receive (at least without paying for more) is whatever they actually ordered originally and not continued revisions and additions to that completed project throughout the course.


Legit rewrite requests would typically be for things like accidentally providing references in APA when MLA or some other style was mentioned in the specs or forgetting to include an abstract that was mentioned in the original specs. Most legit rewrite requests involved things that could be fixed quite easily. Other times, a rewrite request might not be "difficult" but required a full rewrite, such as where we accidentally wrote 2 pages on each of 4 questions for an 8-page project because we missed the part of the specs that said to pick ONE question, or vice-versa, where we wrote all 8 pages on 1 question but the specs actually said to address the questions in 2 pages each. Generally, rewrite requests aren't any more difficult than the original project; they might just double the time involved for the project.

The same things can happen with private clients, but it's much less likely to get illegitimate rewrite requests, simply because many more of our customers are regulars rather than first-time clients who have no idea what makes a request illegitimate. Regular clients simply ask "How much to add a section on alternate approaches to the same issue?" or "How much to annotate the bibliography?" Probably the worst experience I ever had with a rewrite request was where I accidentally used the textbook chapters provided for an earlier project instead of the chapters provided for the newer project. It was very difficult to find ways to connect the reading to the essay prompt, but I did my best to do that. Then, the client told me I'd used the wrong book and he was totally right, because he'd sent me chapters from a totally different book for that project. Obviously, I had no choice but to rewrite the entire project using the right book.