To be perfectly honest, I do not know, offhand, of any company that requires those fields. When a new client (to me) told me that he needed me to redo the same project he'd ordered from an essay company with atrocious, totally unusable results, I made a few suggestions about how to protect himself from getting ripped off, and he mentioned that he was afraid to argue with them because they knew where he went to school and even which professor taught the course. I asked how they knew this and the client explained that the order form included fields requesting that he fill in his personal information and his school information and email address. He wanted to avoid any problems with the company for that reason and just needed me to do the same project properly (and in much less time). I've actually had this kind of exchange with several new clients; but to be entirely fair, I have not seen those order forms myself and don't really know whether those fields are optional or strictly required. I just know that my immediate thought about that practice is that there's not much legitimate need for it; meanwhile, it provides ripe blackmailing amunition if that's something the company in question is in the habit of doing.

You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. There's ZERO difference in quality between projects that I book a day or two before they're due and projects that I book weeks in advance. The only difference is that the rush deadline increases the inconvenience to me and, therefore, the price. To affect the quality of my work detrimentally, a large project would have to be ordered only a few hours before deadline, because one or two days is plenty of time for me to write 25-50+ pages of high-quality work if I really have to and if the client is willing to pay me enough to completely rearrange my schedule (and my non-work life) to get it done. Even something substantial that I have to write in a few hours is still going to be much better than the vast majority of students in that course could produce in a week; but it could end up with some minor mistakes that I'd ordinarily catch and correct through proofreading, because if the deadline is just barely enough time to get it written, there's just no time to let the finished project sit long enough afterwards for me to do what's called a "cold" proofread.


With respect to this and your other comments about what you list as the "requirements of the presentation," when someone orders a piece of primary research, professional academic writers don't actually conduct research by collecting real data from real subjects. What we do is create questionnaires and other original survey instruments, but we fabricate what's called "mock data" and then analyze and discuss those mock data. This is fully explained to the customer and agreed to in advance and in almost 20 years of writing for a living, I don't think any client has ever changed his mind about ordering a primary-research project after being informed about how this is really done. The same goes for interviews: we create original interview questions and then usually write and analyze mock responses to those questions qualitatively. On only a very few occasions, I've actually conducted real interviews of a specific person by phone when that was required; but nobody in his right mind would ever think that real interviews (or real primary research of any kind) could possibly be scheduled, conducted, and then written up on one day's notice, so that just doesn't happen. In my opinion, anybody who suggests that professional academic writers actually collect real data from real subjects for primary-research projects has never really earned a living doing this.

I'd be more worried about essay companies that require customers to fill in fields identifying their colleges, because there's no justifiable reason for making that a required field just to place an order. Once they have that information, they'll threaten to use it against you if you try to avail yourself of any of their satisfaction or free-revision "guarantees." There are some recent threads on this forum detailing exactly that issue.

That may or may not be entirely accurate. To the extent it is accurate, it's only because the entities that capture your keystrokes haven't (yet) chosen to monetize them that particular way. I don't have any of this crap installed, but if you don't turn off Grammarly and/or you type emails using Google and gmail, all those systems store your keystrokes (including unsent drafts). You may be able to disable or opt out of some of it; but I'm pretty sure the rights you consent to give them to "use" your info includes ways that could conceivably get it flagged on a plagiarism scan.

There's really no reason that any aspiring writer needs to make a choice between one and the other. Most of us who have successfully made the transition to independence did so only after working for essay companies (for many years) while simultaneously building up our private clientele, albeit slowly. Just work for essay companies and try your best to find your own private clients at the same time.

Grammar and sentence structure provide preliminary indications of how well someone can write in English, and plenty of Americans (including some who consider themselves to be "writers") exhibit bad grammar and sentence structure. However, even bad American writers know how to use articles and common idioms correctly. It's the wrong use of articles and idioms that's so characteristic of most ESL writers (even some fairly good ones); and that's what usually exposes their writing as ESL, regardless of where they might actually be physically located or what their nationality of origin might be.


Writers have absolutely no control over when students choose to contact us for the first time in relation to their deadlines. If you wait until a day or two before your deadline to find a writer for a large project, you're severely limiting your options when it comes to things such as requesting "drafts" and (more importantly) the option to place a smaller order first, to test out the writer you've chosen to try for the first time. Sometimes, what some of us can produce in just one or two days might seem like a miracle to someone who doesn't write academic projects for a living; but even the best of us don't have time machines.

If you don't contact me for a 15-page project until 24 or 48 hours before it's due, there's just not going to be any time for you to "test" me first with a smaller order; but that's something that's totally under your control, not mine. I don't refuse those very short deadlines if I can squeeze them in and I know that I'm going to do a good job on them, but there's just not going to be any realistic way for you to ascertain that to your satisfaction in advance and you won't really have any way of knowing that until you receive the finished project. If you procrastinate until the last day or two before your deadline to order a large project, you're just not leaving yourself any options besides reading whatever you can find about the writers you're considering and then hoping that you made the right choice.

As an independent freelance writer who has also written thousands of projects for essay companies, I can tell you that there are some potential advantages and disadvantages to both, but the relative risks are, generally, comparable, particularly in connection with what they do with your information.


This is an absolutely ridiculous argument, mainly, because you're comparing apples and oranges: namely, by comparing the risk of furnishing "personal" data (apples) to one entity with furnishing "masked" data (oranges) to another entity.

Quite obviously, divulging your "personal data" is always riskier than only divulging anonymous data. Scam essay companies and scam writers represent an identical risk as pertains to your identifying information; and all you have to do is review some recent threads on this forum to read about nightmares involving essay companies that blackmailed customers by threatening to contact their schools if the customer tried to dispute a charge in connection with a horrible piece of work received or in connection with attempting to cancel a project shortly after ordering it. There are also older threads about scam independent writers doing the same types of things. However, legitimate independent writers generally do not require you to divulge any of your "personal data" to place an order; we just refuse to email your completed project to any email other than to the exact email address shown in your PayPal account and we tell you that anytime we see that the email address in your PayPal account doesn't match the email address from which you correspond with us. Legitimate independent writers don't usually require you to divulge any of your "personal data" or your identifying information just to place an order.

More importantly, what makes your argument completely specious is that (to my knowledge) there are no essay companies that allow you to order a project without furnishing your "personal data" in the form of identifying information such as your full name and address and your credit card or PayPal information; some of them also require a drivers license and/or some other form of photo ID, especially if you're located in a different country. The legitimate companies only use that information to verify that the charge is authorized and that the credit card isn't stolen or otherwise invalid. The scam companies use that information for illegal purposes, such as for identity theft and blackmail.

The only real difference between companies and writers in that regard is that when you furnish your "personal data" to a company, you remain anonymous to the writer, whereas when you furnish your "personal data" to an independent writer, the person who receives that data is the same entity as the person actually writing your project. Legitimate companies and legitimate independent freelance writers pose absolutely no risk arising from your sharing that information with them; it's just standard online business practice, the same as when you order other kinds of products online. Meanwhile, if you furnish your information to a scam operation that intends to misuse your information, it makes absolutely no difference to the customer whether it's an individual criminal posing as a "writer" or a larger criminal enterprise posing as a legitimate "essay company."

Just out of curiosity, what is your natural language, because it's obviously not English, based on your use of articles and idioms, and based on your vocabulary. For just one example, I believe you have the concept of "in-text citation" totally confused with the concept of block quoting. Whenever you "paraphrase" any idea from any source, you still need a citation for that source, which usually takes the form of an in-text citation, like this: (Jones, 2017). There's no such thing as "paraphrasing" anything (even if you rewrite the idea entirely in your own words) without a citation that doesn't amount to plagiarism for using someone else's intellectual ideas and presenting them as your own, which is exactly what you're doing if you don't cite whatever you've "paraphrased."


Where are you getting this information? Because if you mean that the threshold for properly-cited quoted material is 20%, that's plausible, precisely because it's not "plagiarism" to use quotes with proper attribution, but professors still don't want students filling up their essays with quotes (even properly-cited ones) instead of their own ideas and arguments. However, if you're suggesting that professors allow students to actually plagiarize 20% of their writing, that sounds ridiculous to me, because it means that a student could literally copy & paste a full page of material for every five pages of an assignment. There is no professor who allows students to copy & paste material for one-fifth of written projects.

I'm not saying (any of) this for the purpose of insulting you, but ever since you joined this forum, you've been dispensing advice as though you're an experienced professional writer; but quite a lot of what you say either makes no sense or completely contradicts other things that you say, often in the same post. It's also quite obvious that you cannot possibly be an experienced professional writer.

If you don't speak English very well, it's quite dopey to hire a professional writer and then turn in the work for credit, especially in any situation (such as an ongoing dissertation-review process) that includes face-to-face interactions with supervisors about the project. I recently had a client do exactly that, and then, when he couldn't answer any questions about the arguments in the proposal that he was supposed to discuss with his dissertation committee in person, he actually responded that he got all the ideas in question from his "friend." They didn't fail him or bring him up on any charges as they easily could have, but they refused to accept the proposal and indicated that he needed to resubmit a new proposal that represented his own ideas.

If you're going to hire a writer for your projects and if you choose to submit them for credit instead of using them as models for your own work, that's entirely your business, not ours; but, for your own sake, at least take the time to read them very carefully first and make sure that you understand everything in them and all of the vocabulary and language. Also, if your English isn't very good, let your writer know that you want it written as simply as possible when you order the project. Finally, exercise a little common sense and imagine obvious consequences that are so easily predictable: So, if your professor has been reading your ESL writing and rudimentary vocabulary, sentence structure, and grammar all semester, don't suddenly turn in a project written by someone else whose English use and grammar are both perfect.

Yes. That's what I was trying to explain. Anybody could have written the "sample" provided; so any sample is meaningless unless you already know that the writer in question is generally trustworthy and legit and you just want to see his or her writing style. If you're talking about customers already perusing this forum, I'd suggest that a review of a writer's posting history will also help them determine whether a given writer expresses himself well in writing as well as how well he knows English grammar. With respect to the suggestion about grammar tests, just consider the writer's posting history to be a "grammar test" because no busy writer is going to bother dealing with any client who asks him to spend his time taking some "grammar test" for him.


I didn't suggest that ordering a short project was a "perfect" test; it's just that there's really no other way to test out a new writer at all besides ordering a short project. Not every writer who can produce a coherent 2 pages can necessarily write a good 50-pg project; but the more important point is that a writer who can't even do the former certainly can't do the latter, and this test, albeit imperfect, will help customer weed out writers who can't even write a good 2 pages.

Another option would be to pay the writer for just the Introduction (or Literature Review) of the longer project, or to pay for a short outline and proposal before ordering the full 50-pg project. Whichever option a customer chooses, it's always a good idea, although not necessarily a "perfect" test, to simply try out any new writer with a shorter project of some type before paying for a long one. That's all I'm suggesting.

Scam writers perpetrate all sorts of complex fraudulent shenanigans; what's to prevent them from just posting a sample of fantastic writing that they didn't actually write? The only reliable way of "testing" a freelance writer if you don't know the writer is, simply, to order a very short project. A sample can also be useful in that regard, but if and only if you're already sure that you're dealing with someone legit, in the first place, who really delivers completed projects after payment and who really wrote whatever samples he's offering you.

Ten years ago, when almost all of my projects were for essay companies, I worked constantly whenever I was awake, taking breaks only for meals and to workout. Even when I wasn't actually writing, I was never more than a foot from a laptop, because the only way to get the jump on newly-posted projects and grab them before other writers was to hit the refresh button every 30 seconds or so to catch new projects the instant they got posted. Eventually, I built my own gym at home, specifically, because of the time wasted travelling to and from the gym and so that I could still keep an eye on my screen even while I was working out. To make a living doing this, I would often write half a dozen (small) projects nearly every day of every week. Even while I was writing, I was still hitting the refresh key on another laptop constantly; and I'd routinely have to stop working on one project to write another one that just came in that was due in a few hours. However, I still preferred that to a traditional job with regular hours that required me to set an alarm clock to get up at 6:00 AM Mon through Fri but required no work whatsoever after I left the office (and frequently, little or no work for much of my work-weeks). At least as a contract writer, I could still choose to work or sleep at any time of day or night and almost never had to set an alarm clock. I'm thankful to the essay companies that gave me my start in this business (and still refer projects to one of them, sometimes); but looking back on it, I really don't know how I was ever able to do that without burning out.

Nowadays, working only for myself, I still do work a lot; but probably no more hours than one typically works at a traditional job with regular hours, with the exception of April/May and November/December. It's also great not to have to be tethered to a computer 24/7/365 because while responding to constant emails is still a requirement, I no longer need to monitor assignment boards every waking minute of every day of my life. I also have time to play a lot of hockey again, to take my wife out for fun, and to enjoy doing absolutely nothing in front of the TV when I want to. It's pretty much the best of both worlds in that I earn roughly the same as I'd be earning now if I'd stayed on my job writing for the federal government, but without ever having to set an alarm clock, or go to an office or deal with a boss; and I can work in a much more relaxed way, such as sitting outside in the sun.

In my experience, establishing a client base is simply a matter of providing good enough work that all (or almost all) of your clients become long-term repeat customers. Certainly, they do sometimes refer their friends; but it seems to me that much more often, once they find a reliable writer, they really don't want to share their "secret" and prefer to keep you for themselves.* Slowly but surely, as each client you get becomes a regular customer, you'll have a customer base that grows with every new client you get who continues to use your services over the long term. Eventually, you just have to replace graduating clients with new ones at roughly the same rate that they complete their studies, while also adding new clients, maybe slowly, but steadily.

[The reason this* seems somewhat apparent to me is that I've definitely noticed that direct referrals often start coming in to me from clients only after their graduation rather than during the whole time that clients typically use me, which is usually several years. There isn't really any other way to explain this phenomenon, because (presumably) most clients have friends who could benefit from the same service simultaneously and because one would imagine that if clients like my work enough to use me for 10 or 20 or more of their own projects, they'd like my work enough to recommend me to their friends much sooner than they typically do, when they do. Conversely, if they didn't like my work enough to recommend me to their friends, they probably wouldn't continue using me, themselves, for years; nor would they suddenly start referring their friends to me right around the time that they graduate.]

Experienced writers who have written thousands of projects don't usually need to write "drafts" in the first place. Typically, for anything shorter than roughly 10 pages, we just write the project, let it sit for a few hours, and then do a proofread to catch anything that needs to be corrected. When it comes to ordinary academic projects, nobody writes out "drafts" besides students and very inexperienced fledgling writers who don't yet really know what they're doing.

I've explained many times that no experienced writer who is in any kind of demand needs the headache of dealing with clients who request a "draft" before being paid (in full) for the project or the risk of scheduling and writing anything that isn't paid for in full. As I've also explained many times, there's only one realistic way for clients to limit their potential risk when dealing with a new writer: simply order and pay for a very short project (or a small section of a longer project) first, before trusting the new writer with a longer pre-paid project. In fact, I'd suggest that customers avoid any writer who agrees to write "drafts" before payment, because that's an obvious sign that you're dealing with a rank amateur whose writing calendar is empty.

For the vast majority of college students, college is probably the last time they'll ever have to write anything like a research paper; so, it's a skill that's important only because they'll have to write them in college. The truth is that for many (if not most) students, there's really not all that much educational value from being forced to write research papers in college. Colleges just do that partly because of a tradition that dates back to the Middle Ages and partly because it's an easy (but relatively ineffective) way to "teach."


Clients in this industry aren't usually interested in learning anything from it any more than people who hire photographers are interested in learning how to take their own photographs. They're only interested in receiving a good product and in the end result in terms of fulfilling their course requirements and receiving a good grade. If it were possible to learn how to write research papers just from reading those written by others, they wouldn't need to order custom-written projects to do that, because they could learn just as well from simply reading any similar project written previously that received a good grade, which they could easily obtain online for a small fraction of the cost of custom newly-written projects, or, often enough, just as easily, for free. Likewise, they'd be able to write their own projects after the first or second time they received one from me, instead of ordering a dozen or two dozen of them throughout their 4 years in college.

To the extent it's possible to learn how to write a research paper that way, they'd have to know how we go about choosing source material, organizing an outline, and developing an outline into a complete paper. In nearly 20 years of doing this, I've had maybe 2 or 3 clients actually express a specific interest in learning how to write their own projects; it's probably far more common that they don't even read them. In terms of learning how to write well enough for the types of writing that most college students really expect to have to do after graduation, their English Composition courses are much more valuable than the types of research-paper assignments they typically order from me.

There's no need for the "as cited" part: all you have to do is cite Martins in the text and list Martins as your source on your Reference page (not Smith) if you only read about Smith in Martins. The point is simply that if you only found Smith's argument in Martins, you have to cite Martins for that argument because you can't properly cite Smith as your source.

I have no idea how anybody continues to work for any company that uses "fines" to chip away at a writer's earnings. The first project for which I was unjustly fined would be my last project for that company.

It happens to me routinely (at least once a week, lately) and it's not an issue at all.


It's usually got nothing to do with whether or not we're "capable"; it's just something for which we charge extra for the time involved.


Nobody who considers 24 hours to be a difficult deadline for a typical10-pg college paper should represent himself as a professional writer. An experienced writer who knows what he's doing can write a good 10-pg college paper in a few hours; we just charge more for it because of the inconvenience of having to squeeze projects in on short notice instead of using that time for whatever else we had planned for that time.

I don't think it's possible for users to remove their posts here. The TOS here also prohibit that kind of direct solicitation by writers through the messaging system.

It's going be some shock to the real EJ the first time she does a Google search on herself and finds this thread.

The most fascinating part might be the way they discuss this as though it's just some annoying and inexplicably-strange feature of our societies.

The rest of it might be a tougher decision; but the easy part is definitely NOT to do this:


Nothing good can come from this; only bad. So, if your reasoning is that the consequences of their finding out from the company won't be as bad if you tell them about it first, you're wrong; and they may never find out in the first place. Don't do it.

Whether it's a freelancer or writers at essay-companies, you're right about all of the best and brightest writers likely being "booked solid" for any 6-hour turnaround on 4,500 words; and nobody other than the best and brightest is even going to attempt such a project even with a full-day deadline. It's definitely the wrong time of year to expect anybody who's already busy making deadline after deadline to invest an hour or more just into figuring out a price to quote the customer for a project he might not even choose to order once he finds out the cost of meeting his deadline, assuming it's possible, which probably wouldn't have been the case on this particular deadline.

However, I've known only one other independent writer who regularly gets and maintains the volume of work that I do in this business and neither of us is ever likely to be "booked solid" three months in advance, even during our busiest seasons. Typically, we may have a few ongoing long-term dissertation projects that started a few months (or more) ago; but the vast majority or of our inquiries and booked projects almost always tend to be in the range of a couple of days before deadline to a couple of weeks, and maybe one full month before deadline. Three months ago, trimesters hadn't even begun yet and even semesters were barely a few weeks old. The vast majority of our customers don't start looking for writers more than a month before their projects' due dates; in fact, most of them wait until the last week or two, or much later than that. A few days for this project could have been manageable, but he waited until a few hours before his deadline for a project that was anything but straightforward.

The guy to whom you're responding isn't likely to have found any help from an essay company either, at least not without a deadline extension. As I explained, he first contacted me about 7 hours before his deadline for a complex 4,500-word project that would have required an hour or more just to figure out what it needed and what to charge for it, leaving only five or six hours of working time, assuming lightning-fast payment. Whether it's a freelance writer or an essay company involved, that process would have been substantially the same, because he couldn't even have known how many pages to order and pay for on his own; and at essay companies, the order would also have had to be processed and then posted onto their project boards before any writers could even have seen it. The automated order-processing system at the last company for which I did a lot of writing doesn't even accept deadlines shorter than 8 hours and from what I've seen on other companies' websites, they also limit the maximum length of projects that can be ordered for rush turnaround, however they define their "rush deadline" category.

I guess that's the way to go about it if your business model is based on a constant supply of first-time/last-time customers.

Clients do sometimes express their appreciation for what we can do for them as though it's motivated by altruism, which is understandable when they know how important our work is to them and what they're doing while we're writing their projects for them, especially, if we're providing something for them that is totally beyond their ability to do for themselves. But as you know, it's motivated more by our own self-interest, simply because it's by maximizing output during our busiest seasons that enables us to maintain annual income stability through the slower seasons. It's very much a symbiotic mutually-beneficial relationship where both parties benefit in their respective ways.

If I want to live comfortably, I need to do a lot of projects and the waves that new work comes in this time of year means you either have to pass on some projects or prioritize writing to make deadline after deadline after deadline while letting the rest of your life revolve around your work until things slow down again. If you don't keep working pretty much whenever you're awake, it can start to feel like this and you'll have to turn away projects that you'd have been happy to write if you'd have gotten to all your pending projects ASAP instead of relaxing a bit in between deadlines:

I think the content available throughout this forum provides enough information to make it very clear that you're just not going to find any original content written by anybody whose first language is English for that price.

I never bothered updating my Elance account when they became Upwork, but most of the inquiries from students on that platform were just ridiculous low-ball offers from people who found me here first, anyway. Their TOS prohibit academic writing for hire and they often deleted those jobs before I even had a chance to decline them. I did find a corporate client (a veterinarian) through Elance who paid me very well for about a dozen projects over two years.

Actually, that company contacted me again right after my post to inform me that they found me because another writer I know to be totally legit recommended me. They also explained that their system took the order automatically and that nobody made a decision to accept an order for which they had no writer capable of writing. I apologized, saying that I wish they'd mentioned how they found me in their initial email and I asked whether they wanted a public apology and they said they'd rather just let the topic die out on its own. That's why I never responded to your comment suggesting that it must not have been a US/UK company. Originally, I was annoyed because I thought they chose to accept a project despite not (yet) having anybody who could do it, instead of simply declining to accept the order as I had the day before when the customer contacted me for it, first.

In any case, there was no "backstabbing" involved. I never even named the company and it wasn't in "private," either; because my comment was in public right on this forum. All I knew at the time that I posted my original comment was that a company with whom I had no relationship had contacted me out of the blue because (it seemed to me at the time that) they were scrambling to find a writer to complete an order that I thought they never should have accepted in the first place. They explained the situation to me afterwards and I apologized and offered a public retraction that they declined.


In the 10 years that I've been on this forum, I have never once chimed in to attack or criticize any other writer whose work or legitimacy had been criticized. In fact, I've done the exact opposite by defending legitimate writers under unfair attack. When someone attacked Pheelyks in this thread entitled "Pheelyks Versus FreelanceWriter: A Comparative Analysis," https://essayscam.org/forum/es/pheelyks-versus-freelance-writer-comparative-analysis-3051/, the easiest and most beneficial thing I could have done to promote my services "in a positive light" would have been to simply keep my mouth shut. Instead, I responded in detail immediately to defend him, because I knew that he was a good writer despite the fact that he was one of my strongest direct competitors here at the time.

Likewise, you know as well as anybody that I used to defend a certain essay company here against maliciously-false accusations that I knew couldn't possibly be true because I knew first-hand, as one of their writers, that they just didn't do business the way they'd been accused of doing business. At the time, I was already competing directly against them for new private clients even as I was still doing a lot of writing for them simultaneously; so, it would have been much more in my personal interest to just keep my mouth shut there as well, instead of risking my membership here by defending them, which I agreed not to do anymore in 2010 as a condition of being allowed to maintain my forum membership.

Not any of the legitimate writers I've ever known. My legitimate independent competitors and I compete against one another honorably and amicably; we also refer clients to one another when we're booked up. Likewise, I compete honorably against essay companies and, on some occasions, I still refer projects to one of them, as well. In my experience, it's only the idiots who aren't legitimate independent writers in the first place (and some cutthroat company reps) whose behavior on this forum and elsewhere matches your description.

I've seen the kind of writing you're talking about: it's usually an endless string of badly paraphrased ideas and numerous unnecessary quotes on every page punctuated by a bunch of "as _____ states," or "_____ writes" with virtually no actual original writing in between. Even most of what's paraphrased and quoted are non sequiturs and orphaned points that have nothing to do with the points either immediately preceding or following them. Basically, just nonsense and gibberish to fill the page count.

It was originally just intended as a way to explain why I couldn't help him out with a last-minute request for overnight turnaround that particular night. I said something along the lines of "unless you want to pay me enough to make it worth puking up the sleeping pill I just took..." but he offered a price that made it worth doing.

That's an unrealistic expectation based on how long students need to write their own projects. As long as they receive their work from us by whatever deadline we've agreed on and they're happy with the work, it's irrelevant when we write the projects on our calendars. That doesn't necessarily mean we wait until the very last day; it just means something that students would probably need to work on for days or weeks is something that we can do (and a lot better) in several hours, simply because we've written thousands of similar projects and we know what we're doing. It not much different from watching in amazement how contractors or landscapers transform your whole house or grounds in a day or two and accomplish better work that a typical homeowner could have done in weeks or monhts.

If we had to spend the amount of time that students need to do these projects, we probably couldn't make a living doing it because 1 or 2 10-pg projects per week won't keep your rent and insurance and much else in your life paid. It's admittedly a learning experience, because most of us have always been good writers, but writing 5 or 10 or 20-pg projects in a day or two was something I'd have considered so intimidating as a college student that it kept me from pursuing graduate veterinary school or psychology grad school instead of law school (where you do a lot less writing. In my services review section, I've tried to let my clients see that I used to be very much like them, intimidated by projects I can bang out in a couple of hours today. I go into considerable detail in that thread sharing how I looked at writing assignments in college.

Generally, I block out a day or 2 (as appropriate) for every paid project on my calendar for my month. If it's a standard 10-pg project, it gets a day when I'm not playing hockey or busy with a building Board meetings or committed to doing something else with my wife. When the day comes around that says "Cuban Missile Crisis 15 pgs Due 10 PM," I wake up knowing that's what I'm doing that day and then it's finished in time to sit around for a few hours or an extra day so I can do a "cold" proofread the next day before sending off to the client (usually) earlier than expected, I may not wait until the day it's actually due except in cases of emergencies; but the point is we writers know how much time each project will require and we usually schedule it in some slot on our calendar that works for us. That's also why your rush projects costs a lot more: It's not that they're usually any harder to do than the projects we already have scheduled from a week or two ago; it's that they often come in asking for the exact same deadline as a project we're already planning to write that same day. That means we now have to change other plans (work and or non-work stuff) to fit your project in when we thought we already had our weekends planned out for work and our lives. If I have to skip my workouts or miss a hockey game or blow off a building Board meeting (as the VP), or cancel plans with my wife to squeeze your project in because you only ordered it yesterday for tomorrow, I'll accept the work because this is my job and how I make good money, but part of the reason I make good money is that I'm going to charge you a premium to make that project worth whatever sacrifice it represents to me, I once stuck fingers down my throat to puke up a sleeping pill to take an overnight emergency; so for the right price, you might get lucky.

Just don't compare how students write papers to the way a writer with 8,000 or 10,000 similar projects under his belt writes, because students are sleeping in libraries searching for materials, and copying them, writing notes in them, and then spreading them all over their tables and floors and only then start trying to come up with some coherent way of turning all that into something readable of academic quality. The professional writer is just doing some advanced searching on his laptop on his couch and then maybe sitting outside on his balcony getting some sun for a few hours while writing your 10-page project that's probably going to be a lot better than that submitted by anybody else in your class. So the difference between the way students are used to working and the way professional writers are used to working is the reason students have an unrealistic belief about how long we need to work on their projects to provide something much better than they could ever have produced themselves in 10 times as much time and maybe 100 times as much anxiety. That last part might be the best value of finding one reliable writer with whom you can work so you can spare yourself having to go through all that stress for the entire duration of your degree program.

[Please excuse any typos to my Ambien already kicking in. Goodnight.]

One probable limitation to my suggestion that it probably doesn't matter to most employers would be the distinction between US and European employers. European employers are probably much more likely to consider it a potential negative, notwithstanding the desirable writing and time-management skills and (often) the ability to work under extreme pressure that it obviously represents.

If that's the case, you should just post it now without any title or references (if you used the same ones). Since you scrapped it and rewrote it all yourself, there's nothing to worry about by posting it. You don't need to bother posting your version for comparison, because the issue is how bad the writer's work was and nobody here needs to read what you wrote instead, just to recognize bad writing, especially if it's as bad as you describe.

It's just the worst possible time of year to ask for immediate turnaround (7-8 hours, I believe) for a substantial rewrite of a complex 4,500-word project; that's why I had no choice but to decline when you contacted me directly, which I do appreciate, nevertheless. This particular project wasn't straightforward writing, either: it would have required a good hour or more just to go through it in sufficient detail to figure out how much work it needed and what would have been a fair price for it.

Most writers who are experienced enough to provide quality work on that particular kind of project are swamped with deadlines right now and just too busy to put that kind of time into figuring out a price for it the moment we receive the email, and in time to respond and then wait for payment to come through to start working on such a short deadline, by which time there'd probably have been only about 5 hours of working time remaining to make your deadline. (That's especially true when we already know that it's going to be very expensive because of the rush and that there's a very good chance the client will decline the quote after we put in the time to price it, simply because she may not anticipate how expensive it's going to be if a writer has to drop everything he's already doing today to take on this kind of project on such a short deadline.) At the very least, taking on that project today would have guaranteed that I'd be working through the night and into tomorrow morning just to make the other short deadline(s) to which I was already committed today.

That's not to say that it's impossible or that I haven't taken similar projects with similarly-short deadlines; but that would have been impossible for me today. Please understand than none of us is in business to decline projects, but if you wait that long to solicit help with such a long and complex project, you're really narrowing down your options. Best of luck with this one.

Even some students who write their own essays might still be concerned because they genuinely don't yet know how to paraphrase properly and whether or not their genuine attempts to do so constitue plagiarism. However, if they're asking about it on this forum, the more likely explanation is simply that they purchased work from an essay company or a writer and they just want to make sure that what they received is actually the original work for which they paid and not something that has already been sold before or something that was plagiarized by the writer.

Find as many different workstations as possible and move from one to another before you spend enough time working to become uncomfortable in any one of them.

It's not necessarily a "scam" in and of itself; it's probably more of an attempt to just capture more customers. On the other hand, there's obviously an element of dishonesty to it, especially in connection with customers' attempts to try different companies after disappointment with one. I also noticed that some of these subsidiary companies charge a lot more than others, even though they're all just the same company with the exact same stable of writers.

As a writer for one of the biggest of these companies, I first noticed this from some of the files uploaded by customers. Ordinarily, we writers had no idea which of the many subsidiary companies took the order, because they all just got funneled to the exact same assignment board for the exact same group of writers, regardless of which of the main company's subsidiary companies the customers used to place their orders. However, sometimes, the customers uploaded files (especially faxed files) that fully disclosed their complete order information, because they happened to include their receipts or invoices as their cover pages. Those documents clearly identified the company they used.

However, there were also definitely some occasions where an order would specifically say something like this: "I really hope you guys can do a good job on this, because I already wasted a lot of my money ordering this project from _______ company and those guys did a horrible job. I am never using them again and I hope you guys have some better writers than they do."

On one hand, I don't think the purpose of using multiple subsidiary companies was to "trick" clients dissatisfied with the work of one of their companies into using another of their companies and all of the same writers. On the other hand, if you're one of the clients described above who purposely went out of his way to try to find a totally different company and different writers from the company that disappointed him, you might have a very different take on the whole issue of what seem to be many different essay companies all really being the same company using the exact same stable of writers.

You just paraphrase or refer to the original primary source in your writing and provide a citation to the secondary source and list the secondary source as a reference. Technically, citing and referencing the primary source that you didn't read instead of the secondary source where you discovered it is a form of plagiarism.

Ordinarily -- at least at the companies with which I have first-hand experience as a writer -- customers don't ever find out which writer took the project until it's delivered. There's no confirmation or screen displaying the writer ID; in fact, the only way the client even knows after the fact is that (most) writers put their company names on the cover sheet. The messaging system just says "Writer" and "Customer" without divulging either one's ID to the other; so the only way you could confirm that your requested writer took the project is for that writer to send you a message confirming that in the body of the message, which is not something we'd normally do, because when we get requests, we simply take them if we want them or ignore them if we don't.

When we don't take a request, it simply gets posted publicly for all writers after a few hours (and I was the writer who eventually got the company for which I did the most writing to extend that reserve period from just 3 hours to 6 hours, but only after asking for that quite a few times). Before then, I might wake up to an email notifying me that a project requested me 5 or 6 hours earlier that was already gone because it had gone public while I was sleeping. Many times, if I saw a request for a writer I knew and it was about to go public, I'd take it and send both that writer and Admin an email notifying both that I took it just to protect it for that writer and then Admin would reassign it after the writer responded. If we didn't protect one another that way, the order would just get taken by someone else and (depending on the deadline) completed before it could be reassigned.

Generally, even if the company provides a mechanism to request specific writers, they still reserve the right to allow other writers to take the order. However, if you want to protect yourself and restrict their right to do that you can: Just make it explicitly clear in your order that you only want the project if that particular writer takes it and specifically state that you want a refund instead of the project if that particular writer doesn't take it. That way, it becomes an explicit term of the contract and your credit card company will take your side if a different writer takes the order and you dispute the charge for that reason. I can't speak to how they dealt with other writers (because I discovered that varies substantially based largely on the relationship established between writers and the customer service reps), but I didn't necessarily take every project requesting me, even that expressly; it's always still my choice what projects to take or reject.