I'd be a shrink. Ironically, the specific reason I chose to go to law school instead of applying to graduate school for Psychology was that I was intimidated by the prospect of having to do all the writing typically associated with most grad school programs. In law school, you hardly do any writing except in one or two Legal Writing classes and one required major writing project; the only other writing you do is on your final exams that determine your entire grade for every class. So, I totally understand why my clients need my services and why this industry exists. If I'd had any idea that I could bang out 10-page grad school psych papers that were likely As in a single day on a regular basis way back then, I'd have pursued a career as a psychologist instead of a law degree in a field I never had specific intentions of entering after getting my degree. Either that or po%%, way back when there were only about 10 guys doing it and only one of them had anything even resembling a decent build.

In my experience, the only time client emails are ever an issue is with skittish first-time clients who don't yet know for sure that I'm legit. My website FAQs explain that once the project is scheduled, they won't be hearing from me until I deliver the project unless I have a question, and that they won't be getting any "updates" before I deliver the project. If they email asking me "how's it coming along?" days before it's due, I just remind them what it says in my FAQs about updates and I tell them that I understand why they might be a little nervous with our first project, but that they're just going to have to trust me that they'll have it on or before whatever deadline we agreed to initially. If they happen to be forum members, I ask them to use the search function for the words "coming along" here under posts from my S/N. Once we're past the first project, they rarely bother me except maybe just to make sure I have their project on my schedule, which I don't mind.

No essay-writing company ever asked me to upload any documentation of my degrees; then again, the last time that ever I applied to one of them for work was back in 2002 or 2003; and they started me off at their highest pay rate just based on the law degree and my writing samples, while making clear that the high pay rate (and continued employment) depended on my work meeting the high standards they expected of me. Another company recruited me right from this forum around 2009 and started me out at their highest pay rate after asking me for nothing besides my ID and payment information. They might have called the Alumni Affairs office to check my claims, but that's the most they could possibly have done.

In my opinion, having a degree isn't a very strong determinant of whether or not you can do this for a living successfully. The primary determinant is simply being a good writer and that's something that's more often dependent on a natural talent than a learned skill. Most undergraduates typically don't really learn much about how to write in the process of pursuing their degrees. In fact, much more often than not, even relatively good students view the handful of substantial written assignments they have to do in college as dreaded chores they have to get through, and from which they don't really learn all that much about writing, even when the professor purposely structures those assignment in steps designed to facilitate that learning process. Most students just slog through their essays, get little benefit from them, and are thrilled when they're done. Even the guy who literally wrote the book about his experiences as an academic-essay-company ghostwriter described earning $66,000 a year (and this was roughly 10 years ago) without ever having earned his own undergraduate degree from Rutgers. I strongly suspect that if you were to approach an essay company that says its writers require degrees and you offered to complete a sample project for them at no cost, you could probably get hired by them even after honestly disclosing that you don't actually have a degree as long as you can prove your ability through that sample project (or a few of them).

If you think about it another way, very few of even the most successful of us have degrees in more than one or two fields. If the proposition were true that a degree is necessary to do this work, we wouldn't really be qualified to handle projects that lie outside of our specific degree areas, especially, given what I just explained about how little most students who do earn degrees actually learn about writing from slogging through the 5 or 10 assigned major essays they had to do in college. I was always just a naturally good writer and I learned how to become better and much faster at this through the process of doing it, and all of that progress came long after I received my last degree from law school and after being hired as a writer by the best company in this business. As a college student, I dreaded having to write long essays, exactly the way my clients do, today. Even once I started doing this quite well (in terms of the quality of my work), I was still very skeptical about being able to write fast enough and at a sufficiently high quality and to sustain a large enough volume on a regular basis to actually make a fulltime living doing just this; and that would have been impossible if I'd limited myself to law, history, and psychology. I never took a single Nursing or Education course as a student, but as a freelance writer (and company writer), I've produced as many as 1,000 projects in just those two academic fields alone, including hundreds of them at the graduate level and more than 100 at the postgraduate levels for clients who were happy enough with their results to use me for the rest of their academic careers, including those who started with me as freshmen undergraduates and retained me through their post-graduate and even into their post-education actual work in their respective fields.

I don't think they choose those names because they think it makes them less traceable; they probably do it because those names sound quintessentially American to them and precisely because they don't realize they're so generic that they're transparently fake to Americans.

I've never understood why any writer would ever agree to work on, let alone actually deliver anything before it's paid. Essay companies don't take any orders until they're fully paid and neither should any freelance writer. In fact, there's probably no product of any type that can be ordered online without being paid for in full when you place the order, and custom essays should be no different. If a client wants to limit his potential risk with a new writer, he can simply order and pay for just the first few pages of a project first; and more generally, it should always be up to the client how many pre-paid pages of a longer project to order at a time. Obviously, that means clients can't wait until a day or two before their deadlines just to start contacting prospective writers.

If the client does wait until there's only a ridiculously short time left before his deadline, his procrastination shouldn't become the writer's problem. In those cases, it's the client, not the writer, who has, essentially, eliminated the client's option of limiting his risk by ordering the project in smaller pre-paid sections. The suggested solution of writing and delivering 5 pre-paid pages every few hours all day long isn't that practical, because unless the client is available to receive each email and issue the subsequent payment immediately upon receipt of each section, the writer is inconvenienced by having to choose between waiting for each payment before continuing work or doing more work on the project before it's paid. It's not impossible, but (again) it turns the client's procrastination into the writer's problem and/or unnecessary inconvenience. Generally, nobody is assigning 10 or 20-page projects to students a day or two (or even a week) before they're due; those projects are usually assigned very early in the term and not due for months. So, if a client burns 7.5 weeks off an 8-week deadline, that shouldn't be the writer's problem and it shouldn't be the writer who needs to take a risk or be inconvenienced because of it.

I've suggested many times that clients should try out any new writer with a very short project and a long deadline first, before ordering a longer project or one with a very short deadline. In the worst-case scenario, at least you can still get the project from someone else in time for your deadline. If you wait until the end of a term to contact writers you've never used before for a big important project, you're putting yourself, totally unnecessarily, into a bad position where you don't really have a chance to limit your risk anymore. As between who should fairly have to take the risk of getting burned, the writer didn't cause that problem in the first place and getting burned for 20 pages (or whatever) of hard work that doesn't get paid by the client is just as bad as getting burned for the money when some writer doesn't deliver a pre-paid project as promised.

What's the moral difference, in your mind, between writing essays that you know will almost certainly be turned in unchanged for academic credit and writing out answers to questions that you know will be submitted as written test answers? (Assume for this question that you're not actually accessing a college system directly by using the student's credentials, but simply agreeing on a specific date and time to write out the answers that the student copies and pastes into an email for you during a timed test.) Likewise, what's the moral difference between taking an actual exam in real time and writing an essay titled "Final Exam Question" that a client orders?

If the purchaser is aware that it's a pre-written essay, I'd suggest that it's probably totally "safe" for the writer, but unethical without the permission of the client who commissioned the work originally. If the buyer is unaware that it's a pre-written essay, it's totally dishonest and unethical of the writer and probably also "unsafe" for the writer if he cares about his reputation. It's totally "unsafe" for the purchaser because of services such as "turnitin," which explains why there's no longer really any market at all for pre-written projects. Before plagiarism scanning came of age, some pretty big essay companies made a lot of money selling pre-written essays. (I believe some of them still offer them for sale, but I'd be very surprised to learn that anybody buys them.)

My "greatest" project was probably a 300-pg (freelance) dissertation on religion and law. About half of it was a comparative survey and analysis of laws pertaining to religion worldwide; the second half was about the history and evolution of 1st Amendment law on religion in the US. The client eventually got it published as a book.

My most difficult project might have been a much shorter (company) question-and-answer project about stellar nucleosynthesis. It wasn't the subject matter itself as much as the question-and-answer format that demanded some very specific information that was much harder to find than just researching the topic for an essay.

My favorite (company) project might have been a Freudian analysis of a fictional character: I chose "super-genius" Wile E. Coyote.

My most "impressive" project might have been a 25-pg thesis on the evolution of human psychosexual behavior that I wrote entirely from my own knowledge and then filled in all the in-line citations by pulling all the books off my shelves from which I'd learned everything that I'd written. The client later emailed me to thank me for the A+ he received on that project.

My most frustrating writing project would probably be the 70,000-word book I wrote on sexually-open marriage for which I was unable to find a traditional publisher, despite the fact that I was employed fulltime as a professional writer/editor for the federal government at the time. (Yes, I realize that it's fairly easy and cheap to publish your own book nowadays, but that used to be called "vanity publishing" for a very good reason, and I'm not a vain person.)

I've never given a "discount," per se; but a few years ago, I did (once) charge a lot less than usual to help out someone in a military family who was going through some very hard (tragic) circumstances. Another time, (around 2008 or 2009), I purchased the exact same used IBM laptop on eBay that I was using at the time and had it shipped directly to a client who had indicated that the reason she needed my services was that her house had burned down with her computers, books, class notes, and all but 1 or 2 of her 5 or 6 dogs and cats. It was an essay-company client and that laptop cost me about 3 times the roughly $50 or $60 I received from the company for that 3-pg project. I forget whether I asked for her name and address through the message system or if it was on her source materials (as happens sometimes) and just surprised her with it.

Sometimes, I do charge a little less than normal (only) for the first project, because I know the client doesn't yet even know for sure that I'm legit, let alone why I'm worth the higher end of the price spectrum. I explain all that when I quote the next order and it's pretty rare that I'll lose the client over the price difference between the first and second project, although that happens occasionally. When new (or prospective) clients ask whether I give discounts for repeat customers, I explain that the answer is no, simply because just about every client who uses me once becomes a repeat client, typically, for years.

To apply your exact argument in reverse, this forum is also chock full of threads about customers getting blackmailed by essay-writing companies. I don't imagine a legitimate individual freelance writer would email a student after months (or years) after completion of an order to blackmail him or her, either.

A fair and legitimate comparison would be between un-vetted companies and un-vetted freelance writers or between essay companies and freelance writers with equally-good reputations and long-time presence on forums such as this one. Smiley73 constantly implies that any freelancer is a safer bet than any essay company, which (obviously) is a false, biased, and self-serving position, notwithstanding his claim that he's "not" here to generate any business for himself. Meanwhile, Major routinely does the exact same thing on behalf of essay companies, albeit by a slightly different method: namely, by using statements that are true but only in isolation, because they rely on totally false comparisons, such as by comparing the entire universe of all "individual freelance writers" (only) to "legitimate US/UK-based writing services," which (obviously) represents only a very miniscule subset of the entire universe of all essay companies.

The truth (which both of you actually know yourselves) is that there are totally legitimate and very conscientious, hard-working individual freelance writers and totally legitimate essay companies and that neither of them would ever exploit or blackmail their customers in any way. There are also totally unknown, anonymous freelance writers and fully-licensed, registered essay companies with very professional-looking websites whose entire "business model" is only to rip off their customers in a dozen different ways, including by providing nothing, providing plagiarized material or material written by a totally inept writer, and/or by blackmailing their customers after initial transactions.

In my opinion, this entire forum, prospective customers who come here hoping to learn how to avoid getting ripped off -- and, ironically, each of your respective interests -- would be much better served if you both avoided self-serving rhetorical hyperbole that only ends up scaring prospective customers from using either legit freelance writers or legit companies altogether. As I've suggested many times, there's enough business out there for legitimate essay providers of both varieties to stop disparaging one another and to conduct themselves appropriately as members of the same community of legitimate essay providers and to limit their accusations and pejorative characterizations to the scam artists, some of whom operate as individual writers and some of whom operate as very professional-looking essay companies.

While I haven't been as vocal about it as PV, I've also found it very annoying that someone who registered here just 3 weeks ago has been, essentially, spamming every thread on a daily basis, with 100+ posts to date, so that every single thread's last contribution always displays his name. Same goes for an admitted very recent (still hopeful and unproven) entrant into this field presuming to be doling out advice to customers and well-established writers alike, some of whom have been here for a decade or more, deliberately antagonizing PV in the process and all while simultaneously talking about how "we" are all part of a mutually-supportive community.

It's also annoying to read your passive-aggressive (and not-so-passive) and condescending comments from you referring to clients as "lazy" and "incompetent" and related hypocrisy about your having such high "moral standards" about distinguishing certain types of assignments from those that constitute "cheating." Nobody really believes for a second that you honestly believe that anybody pays $30 or $40+ per page of writing just to use the work as part of his "research" or that he'll actually be citing a custom research paper company (or freelance writer) as a "source" in his academic essay. You know exactly why clients pay a premium for quality academic projects and you know exactly what they do with any projects you provide to them. Your claims to the contrary are no different from all of those meaningless "TOS" disclaimers that the commercial websites include strictly on orders from their attorneys to try to create what lawyers refer to as "plausible deniability" that they knew or should have known exactly what their customers intend to do with their product. I've explained in some detail why I don't have an issue doing this for a living and, also, where I would draw the line morally if it ever came up. You can do this work for a living OR you can rail against academic dishonesty in good faith; but spare everybody from gagging on the hypocrisy of your constant self-serving explanation about how writing essays for students "isn't" cheating the same way taking their tests for them is. If you're OK with it, go ahead and try to earn a living as an academic writer; and if you're not OK with it, just get out of the field; but enough rationalizing about it already while simultaneously claiming some moral high ground.

I chose it simply because it's exactly what I do for a living. When I first joined AOL in 1997, it was already in use by someone named "Kim"; when I checked again about two years later, it had become available, because the person who'd previously owned it apparently decided to give it up.

I used my AOL email as my only ID for a decade with no problems. but created a website in 2009 or 2010 because various undisclosed website owners were investing a lot of energy on this forum telling clients not to trust anybody without a website (and without ever bothering to acknowledge that they knew for a fact that at least one or two of us were totally legit because we used the identical User ID here and email that we used, simultaneously, as high-volume writers for their companies). I don't disagree that emails are much easier to create and change (and, therefore, to be exploited by scammers) than websites; but after having provided their companies with thousands of projects as one of their premier writers, I'd have expected at least an honest acknowledgment in their blanket warnings that there were at least few obvious exceptions to the general rule about not trusting any writer who just used an email address instead of a website (and especially an email address that made absolutely no attempt to hide its connection to a forum ID). That's especially the case considering that I almost lost my membership here around that same time for defending that very company against false accusations by competitors that I knew for a fact to be totally untrue. It would have been much easier (and safer) for me to simply remain quiet here while they fought it out with those competitors instead of defending them (truthfully), both here and elsewhere online, the latter of which was in response to their specific request for me to do register on another site to do so for them.

It's not "prying," but I believe what PV was implying in connection with his comment about research skills is that it doesn't seem necessary, nowadays, to ask whether a book is available online, at least not without checking Amazon first. He also probably figured that it was already very clear from my previous post exactly how I figured out which company writer wrote the book: namely, his last name happened to be the Writer ID that he'd used as his company ID. Those of us who receive a lot of requests for our services on the company boards become familiar with one another's IDs over time. I had no idea that his Writer ID was actually his last name until I noticed it on the book. I also confirmed it with one of the company reps in a brief email about the book last year while I was reading it.

I've always just used "FreelanceWriter" for my writer ID at every essay company, as well as for my user ID on any writing-related forum. They may have changed their rules since then, but the guy who wrote the article (and book) "Shadow Scholar" simply used his last name for his ID at the same company. He published his book under his real name and I immediately recognized it as his old company ID.

The short answer is that most people hate writing and don't plan on having to do much of it ever again after they get their degrees.

The longer answer, in my opinion, and after having written about 8,000 essays for hundreds of students since 2003, is that the main reason so many students use writing services seems to be that academic institutions assign much more writing than is really necessary for most students to become whatever they're going to school to become. Obviously, if someone is hoping to become a professional journalist or to join the academic profession, he needs to perfect his writing and researching skills. On the other hand, if someone plans to become a nurse or an engineer or an IT professional, he really only needs to know how to express himself in writing in the form of memos and emails and other types of writing that don't really require much more than one learns in any undergraduate Writing class. Arguably, there's little reason to require aspiring nurses and engineers and IT professionals to produce "research papers" on the history of their respective fields; and the same goes for requiring students in general elective courses to produce as many essays as they typically assign. The fact that the topic of these assigned writing projects is usually totally up to the student supports the notion that there's nothing that important, substantively, about the topic. Nurses need to learn medicine; engineers need to learn engineering concepts; and IT professionals need to learn about IT systems, not how to write about them. They also need to learn to think critically, especially in relation to their fields; but writing assignments are hardly the best way (or the fifth-best way) to teach critical thinking.

Academic institutions seem to do this partly because of longstanding "traditional" approaches to education and simply because it's a much easier way to churn out graduates with degrees than actually teaching critical thinking to all of them. Consider that if a successful engineer or nurse or IT professional tells you that the last time he was ever required to write 5 or 10 pages on anything was many years ago in college or grad school -- and, much more often than not, that's precisely the case -- then, by definition, those writing exercises were probably unnecessary for that person's education in the first place.

What most undergraduates do to fulfill their assigned writing projects usually barely qualifies as "academic writing" (especially in the US). Typically, they just cobble together the cited thoughts of the authors of their sources or they saturate their essays with a ridiculous number of direct quotes; and either way, they don't add much of their own thoughts or analyses in between. Most undergraduates who aren't preparing to enter fields that require much writing after their graduation worry a lot more about just filling the minimum number of pages assigned and getting done with the assignment than they worry about what they're actually putting together or about learning anything from the experience. As long as all those paraphrased passages and/or block quotes are referenced and whatever isn't cited passes the plagiarism scan, that level of "scholarship" is usually good for a low "B" in most American undergraduate institutions.

I'm not complaining or even criticizing; I'm simply sharing what genuinely seems to me to explain why we can earn a living doing this. In my opinion, if writing were only assigned to students roughly in proportion to how much it might actually benefit their intellectual and professional development and serve their needs, there wouldn't be enough work to support this industry.

Exactly my point. If your disagreement with my response was based entirely on facts known only to you, how do you suppose that anybody else's not knowing those facts reflects a lapse in that person's logic?


Obviously, it wasn't until you mentioned that most of the clients of your company could barely communicate in English that I could possibly have known that my suggestion about communicating with clients to explain what kinds of revisions are fair to expect wouldn't have worked in your situation. No idea how that constitutes a "logical" flaw in your mind.

I also encountered situations where clueless company customers used the "Revision Request" tab just to ask questions after receiving their essays. (Typically, those questions would be along the lines of "who is Ibid?" or "Is this a custom essay like I paid for?") Since the only way to clear that pending revision request from my account was to upload a file, I simple uploaded the original file sent, answered the question in the notes, and included a note for admin informing them what I did and that there was never any actual revision request pending on the order.

Anytime a company customer requested unjustified free revisions (typically for newly-added specs after delivery), I simply explained that the only way to get that revision was to pay for another page (or however many pages were appropriate for the request) and suggested that they contact admin for further assistance with that if necessary. Then, I explained that I was uploading the original file to clear the request off my account or I waited for admin to handle it. Anytime it was a legitimate request, I simply did it immediately without involving admin at all.

On the topic of customers trying to be clever, I've never encountered that as a freelancer, probably because my policies are clearly explained in my FAQs and my clients know exactly what they are (and aren't) entitled to before they ever submit a payment. With company customers, they sometimes ordered and paid for "4 pages" and tried to specify their way into receiving twice the amount of work they paid for by requesting single-spacing. Other times, they paid for a specific due date and then used the notes function to say that they needed the project days earlier than the paid-for due date. In both cases, I simply used the notes function to inform the customer that the company TOS clearly explained that "pages" were double spaced and that the due date was the one paid for and posted; and I informed them that unless they chose to cancel the order, it would be fulfilled exactly as ordered and as per TOS and standard company policy. In those situations, I usually also cc'd admin so they could confirm that understanding with the customer or simply cancel the order if necessary.


Smiley, I'm not offended, but I do need to correct you on something: There was no "problem" with the logic of my previous response. There were facts about the situation that you hadn't mentioned in the post to which I'd responded. No problem; but the appropriate way to phrase that would be "there are some additional facts that you should know about the situation that might change your answer" or "what that answer doesn't account for is..." (or something else similar). I had a perfect score on the Logical Reasoning section of the LSAT, so it's just annoying to have someone incorrectly announce that there was a logical "problem" in my suggestion when there wasn't.

I disagree. There would be nothing remotely "clever" about it. As you know at least as well as I do, prices are partially dependent on the due date requested at the time of payment. If a customer were to select September 10th today and pay for that due date, he could not demand that the project not be written until a few days before that due date, because that would make it a much shorter deadline and, therefore, a different price. What a customer could do is pay today for that project at the rate for a 3-day due date requesting delivery a month from now and then specify in the order that the project isn't actually to be started until 3 days before that due date because his professor is known to change specs at the last minute.

Otherwise, it would be absolutely ridiculous to imagine that any essay company (including yours) would ever entertain a revision demand because the product was delivered earlier than requested unless there was something very specific agreed to about that in the original order description. As you know, at least as well as I do, companies like their writers to take as many orders as we can and a popular writer can typically have 10 or 15 or even 20 different orders scheduled on his company calendar at any given time. We typically might have 4 or 5 or more different projects all scheduled for the same due date. It would be impossible to maintain that volume or even to commit to multiple projects with the same due date if we had to worry about completing our assignments "too soon." Absent specific negotiated terms to the contrary, the only reasonable interpretation of a due date is always "no later than" that due date and the fundamental concept of reasonableness applies to all contracts.

As a freelancer, I have taken projects ordered and paid for weeks before they could be completed, such as where my client sent me a list of 10 essay questions but would not be able to tell me which three essay questions would have to be answered until 24 or 48 hours before the due date several weeks later than the payment. In those cases, they pay for it as a rush project but it's paid and confirmed weeks in advance just to make sure I'll have the time necessary for it already blocked off in advance.

As a company writer for 10+ years, I never had a problem with admin when it came to unjustified revision requests. In the rare event that I missed something in the specs, I simply responded to the client apologizing and provided the revision ASAP without ever involving admin. If the client requested an unjustified revision (and some of those were comically unjustified, such as where the professor added new specs after the project was already delivered to the client earlier than requested), I explained the situation to admin and they handled the client. Usually, it was settled amicably with the client understanding why the requested additional work had to be a paid supplement to the original project.

I agree with this:


I disagree with this:


Only humans are involved here. Even the worst company doesn't use chimpanzees banging away at computers. So even when it comes to poor quality, that is still "human error." I believe the distinction you're trying to make is subjective quality assessment vs. objective error/outright mistakes of the writer (such as leaving out something requested in the specs or using the wrong sources or citation style).

When it comes to objective error or omissions, customers are rightfully entitled to free revisions. If the language or level of writing is inappropriate for the agreed-upon level of work, that qualifies as an objective error, as well. However, after-the-fact editorial preferences or other subjective criticism from clients on issues that weren't specified in the order do not qualify for free revision. They should be handled as fairly-charged paid extra work.

In my experience, most clients absolutely do not understand this distinction unless you explain it to them as policy in advance. Otherwise, you'll get requests such as "Thank you for my essay. It is good but I would like you to expand the section on _____ and also use some more sources for the _____ section." Those would be paid revisions (unless the original specs detailed how long the first section should be and how many sources were to be used for the second section). Conversely, a request such as "I noticed that the essay meets the 2,400-word requirement, but one section is only 500 words and the specs say that each section must be at least 600 words" qualifies as a free revision.

You can save yourself a lot of time, frustration, and potential client disappointment by explaining the difference between subjective editorial opinion and objective error in advance.

I now nothing about the specific website in question. However, it's obvious that the "business model" of many of the companies with the slickest-looking websites is to rip off an endless stream of first-time/last-time victims. They pay totally unqualified "writers" to copy & paste from Wiki or "write" enough pages of ESL gibberish to fill the ordered page count and that's it. Any request for refunds based on the horrible quality (or even outright demonstrated plagiarism) will almost always result in nothing but refusals, an endless runaround, promises of a "discount" on the next totally useless order you pay them for, and/or (eventually) threats to contact your university.

Regardless of what company or writer you use, the only system that really works to limit your risk is to try out the service first, with a short project and to leave yourself a safe cushion on the deadline in case whatever you receive turns out to be unusable. Once you receive a good piece of work from a freelancer, you're probably safe continuing to use that person. The same goes for companies except that it depends on your ability to make sure that all your future projects are completed by the same writer who provided the first piece of work.

Most of us writers have been producing academic papers for many years, even decades. If you're a writer, you will spend several years establishing a good enough reputation and a large enough repeat clientele to earn a fulltime living doing this. There are also large essay companies that invest a lot of money into their businesses and websites. What makes you think that this is an industry in which you can just jump in as an "employer" hiring writers to do all the work for you while you make money off their backs? What, exactly, do they need you, with your very limited experience, to do for them that they couldn't do for themselves without you?

If you use custom-written essays as a guide for writing your own essays, it's not cheating. If you choose to submit a custom-written essay as your own work for a course in which the instructor doesn't already know you and your writing style or ability, there's probably very little risk of getting caught, although you're probably undermining your own educational efforts. If you choose to submit a custom-written essay for a course in which the instructor does already know you and your writing style or ability, you're essentially asking for major problems and accusations of academic dishonesty.

It was a natural fit because practically everybody I ever met is intimidated by the prospect of having to do any kind of substantial writing and it's something that comes naturally and easily to me.

@essaywriting
Interestingly, "rewriting" it from scratch eliminates the self-plagiarism issue in principle, but doesn't necessarily solve the OP's original dilemma about the content being flagged by a scanner. As any high-volume academic writer can tell you, it's entirely possible to write almost the exact same essay accidentally if you've already written about the topic many times before. In fact, it's something we learn to be very careful about, by checking old projects, especially if something we're writing sounds too familiar. It's not much different from the way people often retell stories to their friends almost the exact same way every time. If you were to genuinely rewrite the essay from scratch without even looking at the older essay but express some of the same ideas in very similar ways, the plagiarism scanner has no way of knowing that you didn't just reuse the older content already stored in its database and it would get flagged.

In the context of self-plagiarism, "acknowledgment" means explaining that the work (or a section of it) comes from something you wrote previously.

The issue isn't the identity of the author, but the date (and purpose) of original authorship. In the case of something previously published in a journal, "acknowledgment" means statements such as "As I explained in my 2012 article ... " to disclose that you're quoting or paraphrasing your own previous writing.

In the context of academic self-plagiarism, putting your name on your essay isn't "acknowledging" anything, because (again), the identity of the author isn't the issue.

"Acknowledgment" in that context would require disclosing that "this work currently being submitted for credit is substantially the same and/or was substantially derived from an earlier academic assignment written by the student for a different course."

I'm not lobbying for any specific definition of plagiarism or self-plagiarism; I'm just telling you how self-plagiarism is defined, especially by the honor codes of academic institutions.

Whether or not you think it should be, self-plagiarism is most definitely "a thing."

Why don't you follow that same methodology and just Google "self-plagiarism"?

In any case, you're confusing two separate issues. What you quoted pertains to the notion that plagiarism isn't just about the words used; it's also about the intellectual ideas. So, if you just rewrite someone else's ideas in your words, it's still plagiarism. Your rhetorical comment pertains to the notion of self-plagiarism, which is something specifically defined by the APA and by the honor codes of most academic institutions..

@essaywriter73
Not exactly. Plagiarism includes the intellectual ideas and analyses, not just the words used to express them. If the intellectual content is the same, it's still plagiarism (or self-plagiarism, as the case may be) even if you replace every single word in the piece with a different word.

@writeretti
Sometimes, it also has to do with negotiating and personality. When I first started writing for essay companies about 15 years ago, the very first company to which I applied provided its pay scale. I responded by asking to start at the highest level on the strength of my writing samples and because I had a law degree. The guy in charge agreed to do that as long as my work turned out to be as good as my samples but notified me that this meant I would never receive any pay increase because they'd already started me at the highest rate they ever pay out.

About 5 years later, I established contact with and got to know one of their other writers (through this forum). He was just as good (and as educated) and had been with the company longer than I had, but was still earning only the lowest introductory rate for his work. He also shared with me some of his messages from Admin and I was completely shocked to see the harsh authoritative tone they used with him and how they treated him, essentially ordering him to take projects he didn't want and to provide totally unjustified rewrites for free. The same Admin person had always been very polite and appropriate with me since Day One. This particular writer had a very meek personality and essentially sent out all sorts of signals that he could be pushed around very easily. So, apparently, those kinds of variables can also play a role in determining your pay rate.

According to APA Section 1.10, ("Plagiarism and Self-Plagiarism"), you may not reuse your own writing except in very limited circumstances with appropriate acknowledgment. The honor codes of most colleges and universities that define plagiarism also specifically include (and describe) self-plagiarism.

Exactly. There's plenty of room in this industry for legitimate ESL writers who don't misrepresent their location or ESL status. The fact that so many don't only makes things difficult for those who do. Prospective clients have a right to know whether a writer is ESL or NES. Same goes for British clients who prefer UK-based writers even though some of us American writers have no problem writing UK English. If I want their business, I might explain to them that I have many UK clients and that I know how to write UK English, but I don't contact (or respond to) them using some phony email like "UKFreelancer" and write the email in UK English to get their projects deceitfully.

That's standard at essay companies. Writers with advanced degrees who have already proven themselves by providing work of the highest quality for years get paid more than newer writers without advanced degrees who haven't necessarily proven themselves yet. What's so controversial or surprising to you about that?

@flute
You shouldn't have too much trouble finding a reliable provider if you just use the resources on this forum.

@flute
Nursing is one the main fields supporting this industry, precisely because nursing programs require much more writing than would seem to be necessary to become good at your profession.

@wordsies: Yeah, and just my luck that his handle is easily confused with mine...

@Machelle: It's not very well written and there are some punctuation mistakes, but it's not terrible. If you're an ESL undergraduate, it might be a better match for your English than something written at a higher academic level and/or in perfect English. I'm only commenting on the writing and have no idea whether it's something that's original or something just copied from somewhere else, or something that's already been sold countless times. If it's original writing, it might OK for you.

@essaywriting: If you don't know anything about them besides what they've written about themselves on their public website, how can you determine whether or not they're "legit"? I know nothing about them, but I can tell you that whoever wrote their web copy definitely doesn't speak English as a first language and that the short excerpt from the essay they've chosen to list as "top rated" is both poorly written and also written by someone who speaks English only as a second language.

@Gracious: You've referred to yourself as "the best in the industry" in both of your posts despite the fact that both of your posts are full of grammar and punctuation mistakes. If you can't formulate a simple forum post consisting of a few mistake-free sentences, I guarantee you that you're not "the best" in any industry involving academic writing. Likewise, your misuse of idioms (and articles) makes it fairly obvious that English is not your first language even though you've chosen to represent yourself here as an American writer.

Your post is the first time I've ever heard of them. Right off the bat, I notice that they have a screen called "Our Stats." The first time I checked it, that screen claimed that they have 600 "expert writers," 4,100 "completed assignments," and 1,289 "orders in progress." Curiously, in the few minutes between my first glance and my second while writing this post, those numbers changed to 800 "expert writers" and 2,878 "orders in progress. (I've attached both of those screenshots and the one showing the copyright notice to this post.)

Even if they managed to hire 200 new "expert writers" in the last 10 minutes or so, those numbers don't seem to make sense for several reasons:

1. If they have even just 600 writers, each of them has only written about 7 assignments (total) for them since 2006, because that's how long the copyright notice suggests they've been in business.

2. Without even questioning any of their claimed numbers on its own, they can't possibly be true, because they currently claim to have approximately one-third as many projects "in progress" as the total number of "completed assignments" that the company has provided in 11 years of doing business.

3. I've produced more than twice as many projects by myself in roughly the same amount of time as this company claims its 600-800 writers have ever produced.

So, without knowing anything else about them, something seems very fishy there.

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  First Screenshot
  
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  Second Screenshot
  
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  CopyrightNotice
  

What are you trying to say? Either an idea is yours or it's an idea you read in one of your sources. What kind of "extra research" are you suggesting might help someone better distinguish his own ideas from those of the authors of his sources? Likewise, anytime someone would consider quoting an excerpt from a source, that means he already knows the idea needs a citation whether or not it's excerpted verbatim.

Probably not. Reputable companies don't send out SPAM like the one I just received from them today from a random gmail address:

"Get an "A" grade custom essay in all your academic subjects. We have
helped thousands of students with sample essays that are plagiarism-free
and unique. Our essays are of high quality and we have never failed to
meet client's deadline. we also help in blog writing for websites and
products description as well as writing resumes for clients.
For more information regarding our services, visit"

[Link Omitted]

And there are a few hints that this wasn't written by a native English-speaker.