Obviously, the OP is shill for the company; but that part isn't necessarily the tipoff. Clients usually have a cushion in between their actual due date on their end and the delivery due date for the writer or company. I've had clients contact me about a week after my due date frantically asking me where their project is, only to realize that it's been sitting in their spam folder since I sent it a week earlier. Some clients monitor the due date for the projects they order on their calendar and know immediately if delivery is late; but other clients all but forget about their projects almost until their own due date, when they suddenly remember that they ordered it but haven't received it yet. Those are probably the same clients who don't even bother reading the project before just submitting it for credit after attaching a cover page with their name on it.


Not a chance in Hell the OP is a NES:

The main problem with ESL writing is simply that it's nearly impossible for most people who speak English as a second language to write English without any detectable signs that the writer's language of origin is not English. There are exceptions, especially among people who learned English as children and/or whose primary language has been English for decades, irrespective of whether or not English was their language of origin. I've mentioned before that the three people who contributed the most to my writing development, were my father and his brother and a high school English teacher, whose languages of origin were German and Chinese, respectively. [The latter was Tek Young Lin, a literary genius who, shockingly, was implicated (and admitted his involvement) in the infamous Horace Mann sexual abuse scandal detailed in the New York Times and many other national publications, beginning in 2012.] nytimes.com/2012/06/24/nyregion/tek-young-lin-ex-horace-mann-teacher-says-he-had-sex-with-students.html


That might not have been your main point in your tangential thoughts on proofreading as a function of professionalism; however, it's precisely my point, and the reason that I'm suggesting that proofreading is probably not even related to the issue of why ESL-writing tends not to be very good and why it's almost always easily-recognizable by NES readers. I have no idea what factual or evidentiary basis there is for Writer4Life even to suggest that "many ESL writers do not take the time to check and correct inconsistencies to make the end paper fit the language for which it was intended." Frankly, I'd imagine that ESL writers probably spend more time proofing their English writing than NSL writers, because it would seem reasonable to me that ESL writers realize that their drafts probably contain more language-related mistakes than anything written in their own language of origin and that they need more proofreading for mistakes that are identifiable through proofreading. The problem, as I've suggested, is that the types of language-related mistakes that are typical in ESL writing aren't identifiable through proofing by ESL writers, because they don't know that they're mistakes in the first place.

Let me demonstrate what I'm talking about: This first link is to a peer-reviewed article that appeared in 2016 in the Asian Spine Journal. The authors are Middle Eastern and the Journal itself is owned and (presumably) editorially-controlled by the Korean Society of Spine Surgery: asianspinejournal.org/journal/view.php?doi=10.4184/asj.2016.10.5.955

You don't have to read beyond the second sentence of the Abstract to find this very obvious sign of ESL-writing; and one thing you can probably assume quite safely is that articles submitted to professional peer-reviewed medical journals are proofread many times, both by their authors and by editors at the journal. That sentence reads "In a small percentage of the patients, surgical decompression is necessary." Only an ESL-writer would insert "the" there and only ESL editors would fail to recognize that it doesn't belong there, which illustrates my point that ESL-related mistakes won't be caught by ESL-writers or editors. The rest of that Abstract illustrates another common ESL-indicator: namely, awkward overreliance on phrases like "constitute"; that's something that tends to happen when ESL-speakers encounter a new phrase (or term) and then start using it too much and/or where it's probably not even the fifth-best choice for what they're trying to say. The last sentence of that abstract doesn't make any sense linguistically, which I suspect was also left that way because whoever edited this lacks the English fluency necessary to recognize and fix it.

There is also evidence that the journal itself probably doesn't have anybody on staff with NES-skills: This sentence is from their About: Aims and Scopes section: "Manuscripts regarding disease and treatment which shows more characteristic features in Asian people would be preferable." asianspinejournal.org/about/

Technically, the only outright mistakes are that it should say that show and not "which shows"; but to be fair, most Americans (including most Americans who write for a living) don't know why "that" is correct there instead of "which." Aside from those two outright mistakes, the entire sentence is awkward AF and could be rewritten a half-dozen better ways, especially if it's intended for a peer-reviewed professional medical journal. The rest of that journal's website and the article to which I linked are replete with other obvious signs of ESL-authorship (including but hardly limited to outright technical mistakes that don't belong in high-level English writing); and most of them would never be caught in proofreading on their end, for precisely the reason I explained.

I don't mean this as an insult and I'm not asking this rhetorically, but may I also ask where you were born and raised, Malcolm?

I think I respectfully disagree with both of you. Obviously, taking the time to proofread is (also) largely a matter of discipline and professionalism; but IMO, that's not the main problem with (most) ESL writing. The main problem is that all the proofreading time in the world won't help a writer "catch" anything that's attributable to ESL-level-related mistakes, because you can't catch mistakes that you don't know not to make in the first place. The same goes for ordinary bad grammar that many NES-writers just don't know is bad grammar: if you don't know it, you can't "catch" it in proofreading even if you do put the time into proofreading.

One of the most common tip-offs to ESL authorship when the rest of the writing isn't necessarily so atrocious that it's patently obvious in every sentence is extraneous and missing articles (usually "the" and "a/an") that both Middle-Eastern and Far-Eastern ESL writers just can't seem to get right consistently. More importantly (to professors, that is), this isn't a mistake that (even pretty bad) NES-students (or writers) tend to make at all. To a client who doesn't write all that well and farms out his writing projects, they may not be very noticeable; but professors will recognize them as a pretty reliable sign of ESL writing, especially if the rest of the writing and the substantive content of the essay are fairly good. If they care, they will then start looking much more carefully for other indications that a project wasn't really written by the student; and, usually, there will be plenty of other clues that will be apparent to any professor looking for them, specifically.

I disagree (again) that this is a reliable method of identifying scams and horrible work quality. Obviously, if the representative barely speaks English, it's unlikely that you're going to get even halfway decent work (or any work, necessarily); but all you have to do is search this forum for some of these posted "chats" to see that many of these companies know how to exploit the con game very well. Remember that "con" is short for confidence, as in gaining the confidence of victims. So the fact that a phone rep speaks fluent English, knows how to discuss different types of academic projects, and expresses high confidence in the ability of a writer who is supposedly "perfect" for your project means absolutely nothing if that rep knows how to sell you on something that just turns out to be a con game. The only thing the phone test is good for might be identifying con artists who aren't particularly good at their "jobs."

I know nothing about this particular company besides the fact that whoever wrote that web copy is obviously ESL; but I do note that when I visited the site, one of the pop-ups offered me the services of "Jerimiah" and referred to him as one of their most experienced writers with "150+" projects to his credit in "8+" years, which works out to fewer than 20 projects per year. An "experienced" writer in this field typically writes 20 projects every week, especially throughout the busy seasons.

Maybe they just have different music preferences.
youtube.com/watch?v=2oy_zZBMf9Q

I'm sorry, but reproducing all of the "nuances" of every client's grammar, vocabulary, and writing style is neither possible nor even desirable in most cases. One of the reasons clients hire professional writers in the first place is that most of them just don't write very well and they want someone capable of providing a much better piece of work than they could possibly produce, themselves. Trust me, they're not spending this kind of money to receive projects that are no better-written than what they could have produced on their own any more than they're spending this kind of money just for model essays that they're going to completely rewrite on their end or cite as references in their own writing. Post-graduates simply expect you to be able to write something better than their best writing at their academic level, and so do undergraduates and high school students and ESL students, and parents who order projects for their kids in grade school, respectively. Frankly, anybody who is comfortable producing high-level writing can easily tone it down to a lower level and take on different perspectives at will; and nobody with dozens of clients has time to read something written by every client, first. Very few clients at any level want to receive anything with all of the same types of writing flaws and mistakes of grammar or vocabulary that they typically make in their own writing. All clients need to do is tell us how "good" they want it for their level and that's exactly what they'll receive.

I'm sorry, but this is absolutely ridiculous. A writer (or essay company) is totally responsible for correctly satisfying whatever specifications and instructions are provided for the order at the time it's ordered, no more and no less. Obviously, if the writer makes a mistake following those specs and/or instructions, the client is due a free revision ASAP. Just as obviously, the writer isn't responsible for revising a project for any of the utterly ridiculous reasons that anybody who's been in this business for more than 5 minutes knows some clients might think is a justified revision request, and neither writers nor any essay companies provide free revisions in those situations.

If you were actually to adopt the mantra that "the client is always right," you'd be doing free revisions for clients who received exactly what they ordered and then say "Hi. My professor says he would like me to write about a different topic than the one I ordered from you because it's too close to my friend's topic, so I'd like you to just write me something on another topic instead" or "OK, so the next part of this assignment is to incorporate two readings from my class into the essay that I ordered, so I'm sending the readings and please revise it for me for next Monday" or "I'm sorry, but it looks like I sent you the wrong prompt for my essay...sorry about that, but this is the right one, so please change the essay for me by Friday" and other such nonsense. I'm not making those examples up, either, because I've actually encountered variations of all of them.

I know nothing about them, but if any of that is true, it's a perfect example of why you can't necessarily judge an essay company just by the quality of its website. The website looks great and even its web copy (at least the one part that I checked) seems to be written in grammatically-correct English (for a change).

[Note to Moderators and Request: All of my quotes are within the system limits. If they need to be changed, please just explain to me what the issue is (beyond the 45-word limit per quote) and then allow me to reproduce the entire post as a subsequent post and then delete this post if any quotes must be edited for any reason. When you guys do the deleting, it often totally changes the intended context of the commentary that follows. I'd rather just edit my own writing, if necessary, if that's OK with you. Thank you.]


I disagree. While I don't consider it to be a "program," I've allowed undergraduates to order one (or several) sections at a time of a longer project, especially if it's my first project for them. Sometimes, clients pay in sections simply for budget-related reasons.


I disagree. I've also had high school customers (and/or their parents) pay for one section (or weekly chapter) at a time.


Only relatively rarely, in my experience. Much more often, the academically-advanced student has no idea how to write a thesis or dissertation and relies mainly on the thesis or dissertation instruction packet distributed by their particular department at their particular institution. Other times, they simply tell me to "just do it the way this is supposed to be done because I've never done this before and all they told us was that part of our research includes how to write a good thesis..."


If by "blueprint," you mean the guidance referenced immediately above, that's probably the case more often than not. But if you mean some meticulous outline and structural approach laid out by the student directing my work on the project, that's what I referred to immediately above as something that happens only relatively rarely.


Correction: Expect to get any revisions you want done as paid revisions, unless it's something that the writer actually did wrong, such as by accidentally ignoring some element of the specs, writing about the wrong topic, using the wrong (or wrong types of) sources, etc. If it's something subjective, such as the client saying: "It's good, but I think maybe I'd like the first idea to be a little less theoretical and the second point to focus more on the historical context," that's never a free revision (unless the specs said: "Please don't discuss theory in section 1 and please discuss historical context immediately afterwards.") That's a totally legit request if you ask for that in your order; and if the writer blows it, that's a free revision. But anytime the same request comes only after the fact as editorial criticism, that's a paid edit.


I disagree that it's writers' "mistakes" most often at issue in revision requests when it comes to any of these long thesis and dissertation projects that you consider suitable for sectional ordering and completion. As I mentioned, any outright objective mistakes of the writer are free fixes. However, the vast majority of revision requests for these longer, higher-level projects don't come (directly) from the client, at all. To the client, it almost always looks fine and he simply chooses to use the work in whatever way that particular client chooses to define the concept of "using" these projects.

The vast majority of revisions requested on these projects actually come through the client, but they exclusively reflect the demands of the project adviser, tutor, or advisory board. They're usually strictly subjective criticism that they view as a necessary part of the thesis or dissertation "process" and those revisions as part of their "role" to demand. There's no such thing (at least in the UK and most of the rest of Europe and Asia), as a PhD dissertation that gets submitted in whole (once) and then simply accepted as a qualifying submission. It usually goes a chapter at a time with revision demands on each submission; and it's not uncommon at all for different reviewers (where there are more than one on the project) to issue different revision demands and for those demands to directly contradict another reviewer's demands (or instructions), or to request to undo one another's previous demands. It should be obvious that all of that is extra paid work for the writer and not "included" in the original project price. In the US, that "process" isn't usually as rigorous; outside of the US, it can sometimes verge on the ridiculous, sometimes doubling the total cost of the project through no fault of the writer, whatsoever. Of course, the candidate always retains the option of revising the work himself if the only problem is that the writer followed the client's instructions and specifications perfectly, but it just turns out that the reviewers don't really agree with those instructions and specifications (or with choices given by the client to writer). Any reliable writer will be happy to stick with it even to satisfy the worst of the worst advisors, as long as the client understands that having been assigned to a super-difficult advisor who also probably kicks cats on his walk home from campus is the client's problem, not the writer's. Frankly, this type of work is more difficult and tedious than "straight" writing, but we understand that it has to be done and we're not going to abandon a client mid-way through the "process" or charge more for the revisions than the amount of work they fairly represent; but please don't get the idea that revisions to satisfy thesis or dissertation reviewers are included in the price of the project (unless that's something discussed and agreed upon in advance).

If they can't even write grammatically-correct English for the simple promotional material on their own website, what do you suppose the chances are that they can provide high-quality academic writing in English?

Generally, the visual quality and functionality of a website has almost nothing to do with the likelihood that the company is legitimate or that it provides quality work. Certainly, most of the big, legitimate essay companies do have very nice websites; however, the problem is that so do most of the worst scam companies out there, because they invest a lot of money into very slick, professional-looking websites, precisely because that's exactly how they hope to represent themselves as legitimate. Conversely, some of the best small companies such as the sole-proprietorships run by independent writers who are among the best essay providers in this entire industry run comparatively simple, bare-bones websites. Most of them either were once or still are (simultaneously) some of the very best writers at some of the very best big essay companies, as I've pointed out many times.

I agree Writer4Life's point about the grammar reflected in the website copy, but I disagree with the other 4 elements of your analysis for these specific reasons:


Nobody provides friendlier or more helpful-seeming "customer support" than the worst scam sites out there. Of course, all of that changes the instant they're in possession of your hard-earned money. Nobody needs to take my word for this: simply go through some of the complaints on this forum, complete with full transcripts of the "chats" with customer support teams before and after orders are placed. The rip-off sites invest most of their resources into their websites and their customer support, because they don't have to worry about actually providing the high-quality work promised. Conversely, those of us who actually provide the high-quality work promised don't really have the time to devote to endless "pre-sale" communications to convince anybody to use our services.


They can say whatever they want about their availability and support hours on their websites. Until you actually pay for an order, you really have no idea how much of that is true. Again, just go through some of the chat logs and email chains posted on this forum by customers who got ripped off by some of these scam operations to see what I'm talking about in this regard.


As explained above, once you've paid them, it's too late to use this information to avoid getting ripped off. The various chat logs posted in other threads on this forum clearly demonstrate a 180-degree turn from overly-friendly and personalized patient responses to every imaginable question to highly-impersonal and cold responses (and chats abruptly terminated by customer support after a few non-responsive or evasive answers) when customers have problems with their orders after paying for them.


Not necessarily. Many of their systems are automatic without any human being evaluating the relative difficulty of any orders placed through their systems. Typically, the first time that customers have any clue that there might be a problem with an order is either when they receive a totally-unusable piece of work for which customers have to request substantial revisions or a complete rewrite (see #s 1. 2, and 4 above) or when they receive nothing by the due date, contact the company to ask about the project, and then find out for the first time that no writer ever took the project and that it's just been sitting on the assignment board ever since the order was paid for. (Before I was prohibited from doing it here in 2010, I used to check some of the essay company boards as a courtesy to forum members who just wanted to know whether or not their orders had ever been taken by any writer at the companies for which I was writing.)

*[Quote shortened to fit the maximum word limit for quotes on this system.]

I know of no essay company that even allows writers and customers to contact one another directly, let alone that purposely facilitates that contact by providing either of them the other's information. They purposely use a messaging system that ensures that writers and customers remain anonymous to one another and identifiable only by the writer's user name and the customer's order #. They also use software that scrubs and/or flags any personal emails or phone numbers from messages, precisely because they know that writers and customers would prefer to work directly without the middleman. Certainly, they have the right to do this to retain their customers; but that's why it's just silly to suggest that any essay company ever "gives" writers and customers direct access to one another.

To the extent there may be advantages to using an essay company, those advantages relate primarily to your first order, before you really have any way of knowing for sure whether or not you're dealing with a legitimate entity that will actually provide the good product you're hoping to receive. As I suggested earlier in this thread, once you know you're dealing with a legitimate entity, there are probably more advantages to dealing with writers directly, especially when it's actually the same writer, which is often the case, especially if you're talking about writers on this forum. Almost all of us have worked for essay companies and also cultivated our private clienteles simultaneously; and it's usually the best and most experienced company writers who also tend to have the most freelance clients and the highest reputational profiles as freelance writers, mainly by virtue of how long we've been doing this for a living and how committed we are to it. To the extent there may be advantages to using a freelance writer, one of the most important relates to the fact that we're very unlikely to decline any future projects from our private clients unless we don't think we can do them. Conversely, when it comes to company orders, we often don't even know (or care) that unrelated orders may come from the same customer as previous projects; and we have zero obligation to take any orders (even those for which we are requested by customers and/or that are directly related to previous orders) if we don't want them for any reason, after which they usually just get posted on the assignment board for any writer who wants to take them. So, private writers often represent advantages in terms of consistency in writing style and consistency of availability to take on future projects.

We usually try to do our best on all of our projects, regardless of whether they come through companies or from our direct clients. However, it's only natural that we're more likely to go farther than the minimum requirements for our private clients than we are to extend ourselves for company clients, partly because our own personal reputations mean more to us than (even) that of an essay company from which we might get projects, and partly because we get paid a lot less for the exact same projects anytime they come through companies. That doesn't mean our writing style or the quality or our research is any different; but it does mean that we might simply decline to take future smaller company projects related to a previous project and/or ongoing sectional continuations of projects that aren't really worth our time or that are inconvenient for us than we are to go out of our way for our private clients. That's only natural when we earn approximately twice as much for the same amount of work on projects that don't go through an essay company. The same goes for revision requests, in that if it's a company order, we tend to stick to the absolute letter of the company's policy and absolutely refuse any requested (unpaid) revisions unless we actually made some mistake. For good regular private clients, we might sometimes do a little extra in that regard, depending on what's involved (and/or give them a significant price break on the extra work) even when it's not owed, such as where the need for revision is entirely attributable to the client's mistake or omission (or to the professor's arbitrarily changed mind after submission). We're also much more likely to do favors, like maybe deliver a project earlier than promised after a private customer contacts us to ask whether earlier delivery is possible because the due date got changed by the professor or because the customer realized he didn't leave himself enough time for review and personalize before submission.

Obviously, as a private writer who hasn't written anything for any essay company in roughly 5 years, I have a vested interest in hoping that new clients will always choose to try private writers before any companies. However, nothing I've written on this topic is either untrue or even an unfair characterization of my personal experience as a writer who spent years writing for essay companies and private clients simultaneously.

Agreed. The only possible justification would have been for a rush deadline that required the writer to start writing immediately after receipt of payment. Otherwise, there's no justification for refusing to honor a timely cancellation so soon after payment. Even if it was a rush deadline, the only thing for which the writer had a rightful expectation of payment was any work already done, in which case, he should have emailed whatever was already written (as proof) immediately on receipt of the cancellation request and then issued a pro-rata refund for the rest.


Possibly.


Well, one thing we know for sure is that it couldn't possibly have been me =)

In principle, he could have sued them if he relied on their representation about using only NES-writers and he received work written by an ESL-writer. Contrary to some of the opinions expressed above, neither "knowledge" nor "intent to deceive" nor hiring practices nor "bad faith" nor "malice" would ever be issues in a simple breach-of-contracts case brought by a customer. The only elements of the case would have been the company's public misrepresentation of using only NES-writers, his having paid for the essay relying on that misrepresentation, and his having received an essay that was written by an ESL-writer. His burden as the plaintiff would simply have been establishing that the work he received was written by someone who speaks (and writes) in ESL-English and not NES-English. That wouldn't have been particularly difficult to do, but he'd had to have convinced the fact-finder (most likely a small-claims-court judge, rather than any jury) that the writing was ESL. Essentially, if the contract was for NES-writing and he received ESL-writing, they were in breach, and if he could have proved that, he'd have been entitled to a refund. (Incidentally, nothing in this post is intended to be legal advice; it's just an intellectual discussion of this legal issue 6.5 years after the alleged breach.)

Nevertheless, it's really not a practical endeavor for several reasons:

1. Clean Hands Doctrine: If it seems to the fact-finder that he purchased the product to submit it for academic credit either in whole or in part, his case could get tossed, just based on that. Since that's an assumption very likely to be made by the judge (or arbitrator) based on the website copy and the project specs (both of which would have been essential evidence to establish his claim), he'd probably end up having had to rebut that assumption by showing the essay he received and the actual graded essay that he submitted instead of the essay he received.

2. He'd have to have sued in his legal name and court records are public information. Even if it's just a small-claims case, he probably wouldn't want every future employer (and anybody else) who Googles him and/or does a background search on him to find "Steve Jones vs. ABC Academic Essay Writing Company" under the Civil Litigation section of his background report, especially with a date that corresponds to the dates when he was in college, because most employers can add 1 + 1. That information stays out there, essentially, forever.

3. He'd probably have had to travel (several times) to whatever state the company is located or registered to receive legal process. Even if he could have filed the case online in that state, he'd still have to have appeared for the court date and the company could have gotten the case adjourned several times just to make things difficult and prohibitively costly for him, requiring him to have appeared each time they made that motion on the scheduled trial date in small-claims court. Chances are each trip could easily have cost him roughly as much as the maximum award he could possibly have gotten, depending on where he was in relation to them.

4.Even in the best-case scenario, any recovery, would be limited to a refund for his payment. There's no such thing as economic damages or consequential damages from a simple breach-of-contracts case. You don't get compensated for your time wasted writing it yourself, or for your grade, or your aggravation. The one exception would be if one could prove that he had to pay another company or writer more for the same essay written in NLE at a higher cost, in which case, his maximum compensable damages would have been the amount of difference between what he paid the second provider and what he paid for the first essay. This is called the "benefit of the bargain" and that's the only measure of damages (beyond the refund plus interest and court fees) in a simple breach-of-contract case. However, keep in mind that 1 through 3 above probably still make pursuing this as a civil claim a waste of time.

So, if he used the essay for his class, there was never really any legal recourse, at least none that could have resulted in a monetary recovery. If he didn't use it for his class, he might have had a case (technically), subject to 2 through 4 above. That's why anyone's best bet as a client who receives ESL-writing from any company that promises only writing in NLE, in keeping with the purpose of this forum, would be to just name the company and post the original specs and the essay right here. You don't have to worry about getting sued for anything by the company unless it's not obvious that the essay was written in ESL-English rather than NES-English. Even then, there are more reasons that the company wouldn't bother suing you than vice-versa.

You guys are giving out advice about becoming a professional writer to someone who (obviously) can barely write one simple sentence in grammatically-correct English. Most of my clients (including my ESL clients) write better than the OP. There's no such thing as "brushing up" this level of incompetence as an English-language writer. He needs to continue learning how to write (anything) in English, which automatically disqualifies him as a professional writer at any level. If you can't write a simple four-sentence forum post without a half-dozen rudimentary grammar (and idiomatic) mistakes, you shouldn't even be thinking about charging money for anything that you write.

While I don't disagree with Wordsies, I'll let a new client pay me for just a small portion of a larger project because I totally understand that it's a minefield of con artists and totally unqualified "writers" out there from the client's perspective . However, I will not, under any circumstances, ever even consider writing one word more than whatever portion of a project the client is willing to pay for in advance. If the client doesn't leave enough time for partial payment followed by the remainder of the payment for subsequent completion and delivery of the rest of the project at a later date, that's not my problem. In those cases, the client will either just have to trust me with full payment or maybe just try me some other time without the rushed deadline, to preserve the option of partial payment for partial delivery.

Actually, if the student shared his university information, I suspect the professor and the Dean of Academic Affairs might take the accusation quite seriously, regardless of the source, especially if it included all of the emails between the student and the company, together with the assignment information, proof of payment, and the full text of the same essay that the student actually submitted for credit. Universities have even been known to rescind degrees after having already awarded them if cheating allegations are substantiated, let alone pursuing investigations against students still matriculated at their institutions. If the student never actually submitted any of the work from the company, he would probably come out of the school's investigation OK; but I suspect it would still be investigated, first.

Whether or not he used the essay, that certainly doesn't mean that the student should give in to any blackmail threats, because he definitely shouldn't; he should report it as a crime, because that's what it is. However, you're not doing the student any favors by giving him a false sense of security that there's nothing they could possibly do to him. If nothing else, it could make the difference between the student simply ignoring emails from them and antagonizing them unnecessarily with spiteful sarcastic responses that could motivate them to hurt him to retaliate, even if they were just bluffing to get more money from him, initially. Even if the university doesn't take the accusation seriously because of the source, (and/or if the student never used the essay), the company could just publish their whole email history online, together with the student's full name and all of the information identifying the school and course. That information would be almost as damaging to the student because any future prospective employer is definitely going to Google all job applicants and avoid taking any chances on an applicant whose Google returns include accusations about cheating in college, complete with all that same information and identifying the same school that happens to be on the applicant's resume and a course that's listed on his transcript matching the time period referenced in the emails about the project.

This thread is almost 4 years old, but I'd still be curious to know how it played out. As to the OP's question, it really depends on the thesis policy, because some are much stricter than others. Some actually allow collaboration and assistance (especially for organization and editing) while others allow only editing help; still others strictly prohibit any collaboration whatsoever with any other person to any degree, (and this is more often the case). It's also unclear from the OP whether it's the reworking that the tutor knew about AND the 600 words written by someone else or that the tutor only knew about the reworking help and the OP was just telling us about the 600 words that he didn't write but the tutor didn't know about that part of it.

This is exactly what I did for years while I was trying to build up a large enough private clientele to stop writing for any essay companies and work exclusively for myself. There's no reason you have to choose one or the other in the meantime; nor is there any reason not to work for more than one essay company at a time (or not to move from one company to another if a new company offers better pay rates or policies).

If you can write well enough to do this for a living, you shouldn't have too much difficulty finding a US-based company that will pay you $20/pg, representing approximately half what they charge their customers for your work.

"All businesses" do not attempt to "sabotage one another"; only the dirtbags do that. Promoting your own business by (truthfully) emphasizing whatever you believe makes it better than the competition is an example of perfectly legitimate competition for business; so is drawing (truthful) comparisons, such as advertising that you provide 300 words per page vs. 225 words per page that your competition provides. Sabotaging your competition by publishing fake negative comments about them is not "part of [legitimate] competition in business" at all.

I compete directly against several other legitimate writers without "sabotaging" them and we even refer work to one another and back one another up in emergencies. In fact, when someone disparaged some of them dishonestly on this forum, I defended them, even though it would have been more in my interest to keep my mouth shut and simply let them absorb as much negative publicity as possible. I've (always) also competed fairly for new customers against the essay companies for which I was writing at the time, but never unfairly or by trying to "sabotage" them. I never stole any of their existing clients and (before my 2010 agreement with the forum owners not to discuss that company here), I used to defend them against false accusations posted by dirtbag competitors that I knew couldn't possibly have been true because I know how they do (and don't) do business.

If you're not a dirtbag, you deal with your competition fairly and honestly and you earn customers by establishing a reputation for providing good work, not by disparaging your competition dishonestly.

Another reason they establish different customer-facing websites might be that it also allows them to market some of them as being more "specialized" in particular academic areas or in projects for different levels of academia. It might also allow them to appeal to customers looking for bargain prices as well as to customers looking for the best possible work available, for whom price is less of a concern. For example, some of them maintain websites that claim to specialize in the highest levels of academia (including using abbreviations for those degrees in their company names) while others emphasize their ability to handle a broad range of academic areas and levels. I know, just from having checked some of the prices on different websites through which orders from the same parent organization came my way, that the former charge more than the latter, even for the exact same projects and even though all of those projects still get posted for the exact same pool of writers (who earn the same per page), regardless of which website the customer used to place the order. That way, they don't lose prospective customers who are looking for the best prices they can find or customers who are willing to pay more for what they believe is a "premium service" that specializes in higher-level projects. I'm sure there are other reasons, as well.

You're right; I misread that.

On a closer read, this is the only thing that sounds strange to me. In my experience (and practice) a standard list of references is always included with every project and not considered part of the word count. Only annotated bibliographies are charged, for obvious reasons.

Regardless of what company was involved, the OP did the smart thing by asking to order only a small section first, before ordering a 50-pg project.

This seems highly implausible. The vast majority of my clients use me many times for months or years; but direct referrals are just not that common, even from a large satisfied client base. This is probably because most students really don't want anybody (especially their classmates or anybody else at their schools) to know anything about where they got their projects. Occasionally, I've had clients refer me to 2 or 3 friends who all needed the same project written differently 2 or 3 times for the same class at the same time, as well as clients who referred me to their friends; but this just doesn't happen even remotely often enough to rely on it as a primary source of new clients. The only writers I've ever known whose primary client base came from direct referrals were still in school, themselves. Except for current students who write papers for other students at the same school, this business is almost exclusively conducted online between customers and writers who don't know one another.

If you're totally averse to any form of advertising, exactly what is it that you do when you "pound pavement" at universities? Tap total strangers on the shoulder to ask them if they're interested in having someone write their essays for them?

@StudentAbroad
Thank you; much appreciated, obviously.

I don't know which client this is, but the scenario described happens to me roughly once a month: someone contacts me for the first time and sends me some atrociously-bad "writing" received elsewhere and asks me whether I can fix it. Usually, it's so bad that it would be much more work (and, probably, with a worse outcome) than just doing it from scratch. About half as often, it's someone who contacted me for a quote first but then decided to go with a cheaper service; then, a few weeks later, the same person contacts me again for the same project after receiving something totally useless for that cheaper price. Usually, I don't warn them about that possibility in advance unless they specifically ask me whether I can "match" the cheaper price they're quoted elsewhere, because I know that just sounds like a hard sell. If they ask me to match the cheaper price before finalizing that order, I do respond by letting them know how often that happens and just suggest that they minimize their risk by ordering only a small portion before they prepay for a large project.

If he's legit, he might just be hoping that a good outline might convince some prospective clients that the writer knows what he's doing, because students often have a lot of trouble even with the outline stage. For a more experienced writer, a typical undergrad essay can be outlined in a few minutes, which might make that a worthwhile investment if gets him a few new clients, especially if he's starting out in this business and doesn't yet have a client base.

If you write well enough to do this for a living in the first place, you can write about almost any topic about which you don't mind reading and you don't need any additional formal education to produce very good work in almost any subject area. That doesn't necessarily mean that I can take every project in every field with confidence; but one doesn't need the same substantive knowledge about any academic area just to fulfill the requirements of most typical writing projects, especially in most undergraduate academic courses. Ordinarily, the projects we write are either about a specific topic that represents only a very narrow slice of everything taught in that course or they're about the client's choice of some course-related topic. By the time I've finished reading whatever I need to read for the project, I'd probably do better on a spontaneous test given by the client's professor on that particular topic; but that doesn't necessarily mean that I'd pass the rest of the test about any other parts of the same course.

The vast majority of undergraduate projects don't even require the same substantive knowledge about the subject matter as the client's; and very few college students really know enough about the material in any of their classes to pass a spontaneous final exam given on it without the opportunity for intensive studying for that exam, first. We're not exactly taking closed-book timed exams on entire courses here; we're just using the same types of authoritative materials that are available to our clients and we're applying the information gleaned from those materials to the discussion of the essay topic. If you're a writer, that's, essentially, your job description in the first place, unless you're writing fiction books. If a project requires discussing broader elements of the whole course, clients usually provide the whole textbook or whichever chapters would naturally be required for that type of assignment. Once we do the necessary reading, we probably know the material as well as our clients, because the only real difference is that we haven't actually attended the classes; and, as everybody knows, skipping classes and doing less than the amount of reading assigned (at least during the term before exams) is hardly a rare thing for college students, which means by the time we do the reading for the project, there's a very good chance we know more about the topic (or course material) than many of our clients.

Sometimes, with higher-level projects, the client may, indeed, be something of a subject-matter expert (at least compared to a writer who doesn't happen to know much about that field). In those instances, clients can often bring us up to speed by providing well-chosen background materials and ideas for the direction of their arguments, such as in detailed outlines of their projects. In fact, some of the most fulfilling feedback I've ever received doing this for a living might be from clients whose very successful theses and dissertations I've written in academic areas in which I never took a single college class, such as Nursing, Education, or Religion, and in academic areas in which my only formal education was one or two undergraduate courses 30 years ago, such as Political Science or Business Administration. Whatever I learn tends to come as an unintentional consequence or byproduct of researching projects in new areas as necessary to write those projects rather than as a function of any conscious need or deliberate effort to learn something as a prerequisite to being able to write about it intelligently.

I've told this story before, but the first time I ever decided to do someone a favor by letting her pay me after delivery (because she said she wasn't getting paid until the day after her due date), she ended up never paying. She wrote me a long apology about how hard things were for her financially and promised to make good on the debt "as soon as possible," but never did. She even had the nerve to contact me again about a year asking for more writing and offering to pay up front. This wasn't a new client, either; it was someone for whom I'd written dozens of projects over the course of 2 or 3 years. Basically, she just decided to get herself a free project when she thought it would be the last time she'd be needing any work from me. So, it's nothing personal at all; but if a satisfied long-term client can do that after all that time and 20 or 30 perfect projects, anybody can. Even aside from the risk of never getting paid, it would be a record-keeping nightmare to have to keep track of who still owes money on completed projects. Never again.

No matter how many satisfied clients a writer has, it's always a calculated risk on the part of new clients until they receive their first project from any writer. The only things clients can do before deciding which writers are likely to be legitimate is check to see how long various writers have been contributing to this forum, read through some of their posts, and then, limit your risk to a small project at first.

The vast majority of PhD candidates haven't ever written a dissertation yet, themselves. Usually, that's something that they do only once in their lives, and they follow the guidance of their institutions and their advisors throughout the process. Some of us who have been professional academic writers have been writing dissertations since our clients who are current PhD candidates were in grade school. We don't possess the same depth of substantive knowledge of their entire field, but we know how to find, read, and understand the appropriate source material, and how to follow institutional guidelines and direction from advisors. More often than not, these clients also provide much of the research material for us, which can be very helpful. Obviously, that still doesn't necessarily mean that we can handle every PhD dissertation or dissertations in every field; but we (are supposed to) know our limitations and we might very well have to err on the safe side by passing on half the dissertations we're offered, whereas we can confidently accept more than 95% of all undergraduate projects and roughly 70% of the master's theses we're offered.

College students have been cheating to complete their writing projects for generations; it's just that the most popular mechanisms have changed:

Thirty years ago, every fraternity on every college campus maintained a library of written assignments submitted previously, often cataloged by professor. Sometimes, those papers would be rewritten, updated, and changed as necessary to produce something that professors wouldn't recognize as ever having seen before; other times, they'd simply be retyped with a new cover page and submitted for credit as many times as the number of different professors in that course, or in that department.

Twenty years ago, companies began popping up online offering previously-written essays, providing many more options than the dozens of projects on every topic written by (and already submitted for credit by other) students at the same college and warehoused in fraternity libraries. Instead of being limited to projects already used at the same school for professors at the same school, students could choose from many thousands of projects written by students at hundreds of other colleges, nation-wide.

About 10 years ago, online originality-testing services began providing a means for professors to combat the student practice of submitting previously-written projects for credit. That mechanism, essentially, killed the entire business of selling pre-written college essays and promoted the explosion of essay companies providing newly-written original custom essays that couldn't be identified as unoriginal essays even when they were scanned by originality-testing systems. Unfortunately, because it's a totally unregulated industry, it also provided a ripe opportunity for any idiot who could pay for a slick-looking website to rip off unsuspecting customers, whether by taking their money and providing nothing in return or by hiring workers who just copy and paste unusable nonsense from whatever they can Google (and, often, right off Wikipedia) to satisfy the page count (but nothing else) of the order. For every legitimate domestic company, there are now dozens (or hundreds) of scam operations designed to mimic legitimate companies; usually, they originate and are operated from the same Third-World (and Second-World) nations that already earned well-deserved reputations for running scams targeting American consumers in all sorts of other industries, and long before they decided to jump on the scam-essay-writing bandwagon.

Nowadays, instead of retyping old papers themselves or buying prewritten papers online, college students have to spend that time doing some research, but not necessarily research of an academic nature; instead it's research simply intended to identify legitimate and reliable sources of quality writing and to distinguish legitimate service providers to avoid getting ripped off by all of the scam companies (and scam "writers") in this industry. That's the main reason they read forums such as this one.

Agreed. Guarantees of "money back" and "satisfaction" aren't the same thing at all: the former necessarily means that your money will be returned; the latter leaves entirely open the means of following through on the guarantee. Three years ago, I argued (in Post # 2) that promises of future credit are worthless if you're dissatisfied because of the low quality of the product in the first place; but if that's all the company guarantees (or if it leaves open the specific type of compensation), that's all you're entitled to. If it says it's a "money back" guarantee, there's no other way of satisfying that guarantee once it's properly invoked.

This is complete nonsense. The test of whether it's allowed isn't whether or not the project is "somehow" connected to the previous class or what the student "claims." The test, as I've suggested earlier in this thread, is simply whether or not the professor would allow it if asked; and if you ask a college professor in just about any college course whether it's OK for you to use some of your research from a previous class (let alone any of the content from your actual essay in that previous class) to fulfill a writing or research requirement in a current class, the answer will almost always be "absolutely not" and that the professor expects you to find a topic that you have not yet researched or written about for any other class. If you're afraid to even ask the professor, that means you already know that the answer is no.


Obviously, if the project is part of ongoing long-term research within a longer post-grad program, that's a totally different situation than what the OP asked about in connection with "two courses." Trust me that no doctoral candidate needs to ask anybody on this forum whether it's OK to continue his long-term research project within his long-term growing expertise in his chosen area of research. We're talking about undergraduates who are thinking about reusing work from one course to fulfill the writing requirement in another course. Obviously, the projects and the two courses at issue have to have some content "connection," because if they didn't, the opportunity to reuse a project wouldn't ever come up in the first place.


Professors know full well whether they're teaching graduate students engaged in long-term research that bridges consecutive courses or just undergrad students who sometimes take courses with some overlapping content, whether subsequently or even concurrently. Except maybe in very rare circumstances, professors absolutely prohibit using any research already conducted for a previous course, and even then, it would only be with their explicit permission in advance. No undergrad professor will ever allow a student to "rehash" anything from an old project or to submit anything already written for a previous course. Whether or not you'll necessarily get caught doing it and want to take the risk is up to the student; but there's no question that it's never allowed without permission in advance and that permission to do so is almost always denied.

Agreed. If I had to do that, it would be much more just so that the same audience of any complaint of his could see for themselves that I provided him with a quality project than it would be to bother or harm him, necessarily.


Understood. There are some precautions that I take to prevent (or, at least, to substantially reduce) ever finding myself in that position, but I don't want to discuss them publicly for obvious reasons.

That's not necessarily true. I've had plenty of these scammers pretending to be customers approach me and I've even posted about it on this forum.

As far as customer service goes, I provide what I consider to be very reasonable customer service that satisfies all of my long-term clients. However, I don't have the time or patience to write the kinds of super-polite emails addressing every inquiring potential client by name and I definitely don't have the patience to deal with people who waste my time with questions that are fully answered in my FAQs or (especially) for anybody who asks me to do business differently than what's explained in my FAQs about how I do (and don't) do business. I've also explained that in previous posts even in my paid advertisements. That doesn't mean I don't have patience with first-time clients who need some reassurance to trust me on our first transaction, because I do; but that's not the same thing as asking me questions that are already answered in my FAQs after I've specifically asked someone to please read my FAQs before asking questions.

Whenever I'm a customer of some other types of service providers, I know not to waste their time that way and I wouldn't expect them to appreciate it or to be very patient with me if I did. I just expect my clients to conduct their end of our business the same way I conduct myself when I'm in the role of customer. I believe the example that I once used to explain this was the guy on Long Island who re-palms hockey gloves: He explains exactly how to ship them, how to include a return chipping label, and he explains the only options available for choice of materials; and I follow his instructions to the letter and don't waste his time with questions already answered in his FAQs.

I also do lose clients sometimes, even if they're happy with my work; that's because, unlike the vast majority of my clients, some of them just don't seem to be able to follow fairly simple instructions about things such as how to ask me about different delivery dates, how to send me new project inquiries, and how to send me materials for their projects. Once we're beyond the first assignment or two, I expect my clients to communicate their subsequent inquiries in just one or two clear emails and to provide the information that I need to give them a price. It's really not very complicated, but I have certain procedures designed to make things easier for me and to save my time. If they just can't get the hang of that and continue sending me a half a dozen (or a dozen) unnecessary emails for every new project or if they waste my time in other ways, I'm not concerned enough about losing their business to respond in what you'd consider the tone of "excellent customer service." Just last week, I had a repeat customer with whom my exchanges went something like this:

Me: What do these two very long articles have to do with your Chapter 1 assignment?
Him: They are both for the Ch. 1 assignment.
Me: I understand that. I'm asking you what they have to do with the assignment question because the topics don't seem to relate to the assignment question at all.

Him: You can forget about those articles and just do the assignment without them.
Me: Why are you wasting my time downloading and reviewing these long articles that I don't even need for the assignment?
Him: Please give me a refund and deduct for whatever time of yours I wasted.

I then immediately refunded the hundreds of dollars he'd paid in advance for the whole series of projects minus slightly less than the price of 1 page for the time he'd wasted of mine reading and responding to half-dozen or more confusing emails and reviewing two long articles. (If he hadn't offered to allow me to keep anything from his payment, I'd have just refunded the entire thing; but since he offered, I took him up on it.) Plenty of other writers or company reps have the patience to deal with that; I don't and it's not worth the aggravation.


I don't offer refunds just because a client says he isn't "satisfied." If I make an outright objective mistake, such as answering the wrong assignment question, leaving out something that was in the original specs, accidentally using the wrong citation style or the wrong book, I'll fix that at no charge and very quickly, and more often than not, the same day that they notify me that there was a problem. However, if the complaint is that the client says he "would have" devoted more pages to X and fewer pages to Y or that he "would have" focused more on one thing and less on another thing, I simply explain that this is precisely what "editorial criticism" means and that the contract that we execute explicitly says that there are no free rewrites for that kind of thing; but I can do whatever they want along those lines if they want to pay for the extra work. They almost always understand and then either pay for the requested changes or know to include any such requests in their specs for future projects.


Frankly, I really don't understand your hostility toward me (in general) or why you always respond to my posts so angrily and sarcastically. Here, you seem to be trying your best to steer fraudulent customers to me. In many of your other responses, you accuse me of attacking (all) essay companies anytime I respond about something that one essay company has done, even when I've never even identified what essay company was involved. I understand that we're competitors, but I've never said a word about your essay company and I also pay your company good money to advertise here. In fact, I've never said a negative word about any essay company in the decade that I've been a member of this forum, other than pointing out the atrocious "English" on the web pages of the ones who flagrantly violate the rules of your forum by recommending their own companies and post their websites in their posts. The only specific websites I've ever discussed here were those for which I've written, and that was to defend them against accusations that I knew couldn't possibly be true.

You treat me as though I'm here taking every opportunity to bash all essay companies, which simply isn't even remotely the case. Even back when I used to defend certain companies here, I was already competing directly against them for new customers. I've also defended other independent writers whose work I knew was good, even when someone posted a thread whose title said that the other writer was horrible and that customers should trust me instead of him. It would have been much easier for me to keep my mouth shut and simply let him absorb as much damage to his reputation as possible. Instead, I posted what I knew to be the truth about him and his good work. I've been similarly fair in discussing the relative potential benefits and risks of using companies vs. freelance writers. I've certainly never created any threads obviously designed to steer customers away from all essay companies and toward freelance writers the way you did here:

"Why no 'Terms of Service' when ordering from professional freelance writers?"
https://essayscam.org/forum/wc/terms-service-ordering-professional-freelance-4608/

I've previously mentioned that you and the other essay-company reps here would have been livid if I'd ever dared to create a similar thread intended to steer customers away from all essay companies the way you created that thread to try to do exactly that to us freelance writers, titling it something like "What if some essay-company writers are good but others are horrible, even at the same company?" and then opened that thread with a first post that said something like "When you order from an essay company, you have no control over which writer takes your project because they allow any writer to take your project if your requested writer doesn't want it...or do they?"

As I mentioned in your thread in 2014 (in Post #45), I believe this business is big enough for all legitimate freelance writers and all legitimate essay companies to co-exist amicably and without attacking or denigrating one another. The real enemies of all customers and of all legitimate essay providers (whether they're companies or freelance writers) are the scam companies and scam "writers" who rip off their clients and publish defamatory lies about their legitimate competitors. There is no reason that you and I have to treat one another as enemies. I compete fairly and honorably against all of my legitimate freelance competitors and against legitimate essay companies; I've mentioned before that I still occasionally refer projects to the essay company for which I did the most work when I did a lot of company writing. I have no quarrel with you or with your company and even if we have intellectual arguments about things like your apparent hatred of Obama, your belief in the afterlife, or your sincere belief that the Earth is flat and that NASA never actually landed on the Moon, I don't treat you like you're my enemy and I never instigate arguments with you about whether freelance writers or essay companies are better, in general.


I'll answer this, even though you haven't answered how your company handles this: This actually happened to me just this week. I wrote a difficult project more than a year ago for a UK grad student at the University of the West of England whose lecturer was extremely (and unreasonably) difficult to satisfy. At the time, the customer expressed gratitude for my good work, both on receipt and even after the lecturer tore it apart, and he indicated that he understood, completely, that the changes demanded by the lecturer weren't my fault and that some others were actually his fault for not expressing to me what he needed more clearly. I believe there might have been one element of the changes requested that could fairly have been considered my fault, and I made those changes free of charge. He paid for the rest of the revisions demanded by the lecturer and thanked me several more times for my hard work and he repeated several times that he understood that none of it was my fault. This week, a full 13 months later, he demanded a full refund for everything besides the paid edits and said that it was my fault that he failed his EXAMS. Obviously, I'm not giving him a refund.

If you're asking what I'd do if he began threatening me or tried to harm my reputation, the answer is simply that I'd have no choice but to post the essay in its entirety, as well as his change requests and the subsequent changes that I made to the project; and I'd allow readers to draw their own conclusions about whether or not I provided a quality project and whose fault it was that he failed his exams 13 months later.

Now that I've answered your question, why don't you do the same and just tell us what your essay company would do in the exact same situation?

I'll be more than happy to answer your question, and in some detail, as soon as you explain exactly how your company deals with that same situation.

Blackmail and refund policies have absolutely nothing to do with one another. More importantly, if any entity actually misuses customer information for blackmail purposes, what makes you think that their refund "policy" actually means anything or will turn out to be true?


Legitimate companies don't usually offer refunds for any reason other than missed deadlines, plagiarism by their writers, and outright failure to follow project specs; and except for missed deadlines, they usually reserve the right to fix the project, first. In fact, one of the most obvious signs that you're dealing with a scam company or writer is that the refund policy is too good to be true. No company issues refunds just because customers says they're "not satisfied." Legit companies don't promise that in their refund policies in the first place; it's the scam companies that usually do.


You don't seem to understand that one of the tools that illegitimate companies (and writers) use to perpetrate their scams is, precisely, by posting very generous-sounding refund policies that promise refunds anytime a customer isn't satisfied with the work "for any reason." Of course, customers who try to invoke any of those generous-sounding refund policies find out very quickly that the refund policy itself was just part of the scam. That's also precisely when they find out that all of those customer service reps who were super-polite and super-helpful before they got hold of their customers' money suddenly become unreachable or start threatening to use customers' personal information against them if they try to force a refund, even for missed deadlines, outright copy/paste plagiarism, and projects whose content and/or writing is completely worthless.

This might come as a huge shock to you, but clients care about getting the best possible results, not providing "work experience" to fledgling and wannabe writers. Nobody wants to be a surgeon's first 100 or 200 patients, which is why you want someone who's already performed whatever surgical procedure you need thousands of times. Likewise, if you have an important project upon which your grade depends, you don't want a writer who just decided last month to try his luck at writing academic projects for some extra income while he's living in his parents' basement because he's not having any luck finding a job after college. If clients want their money's worth and the best possible results, they'll go with a writer who's actually been doing this fulltime for a living for many years and who's written thousands of projects during that time.