Good grief, son. Did you expect your writer to read your mind? "Partially" your fault? You owe these people an apology.

I've always tried to match A. J. Liebling's claim that, "I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better."

Although I can't provide any details, I'm probably most proud of a one-hour assignment that paid me $500 and helped a client secure a good-paying job (I wouldn't do this again -- not because of the morality involved [pish-posh] but because of the stress).

Some samples from this site:

We provide your with solutions of your assignment as per your need and requirement.

We understand the gravity of plagiarism and the way it can harm student grade, therefore, we prefer staying away from it.

Acquire Top Expert's help

Hence, for us there is no such problem for which we no solution available at our disposal.

For us plagiarism is a term that we are not familiar to.

We believe in building long term relationships with our customers and hence for us ensuring timely delivery of work is our foremost delivery .

There's MUCH more of this drivel but that should be warning enough for anyone.

Here's a typical staff meeting from the era:

Gather 'round, young'uns, and I'll tell you a story that you'll find hard to believe. There was a time in this country when students in need of research papers roamed the plains in the tens of millions year round. You could buy a piece of pie, a cup of coffee, a double-feature and a good used car for a nickel and TurnItIn wasn't even a twinkle in the eyes of the four UC Berkeley students who designed it as a peer-review application. Yessir, those were the days. Now go fetch Grandpa another glass of bourbon.

I agree with everything dd says (except 2 [challenging but still possible], 5 [many of my clients call me "sir" and treat me better than my family] and 6 [likewise the company I've worked with for the past 17 years]) and yet this is still the best job in the world -- at least for me.

p.s. I've only seen their television commercials so I can't speak to the quality of education they received and I don't recall receiving any work from an ITT student over the past 19 years or so, but it seems they have been poorly served. I don't think ITT was accredited and doubt these 40,000 students will even receive any transferable credits. Maybe they'll all enroll in Walden or Phoenix and we'll reap the benefits.

There were a couple of red flags involved in your transaction with this company that should have sent you scurrying the other way, including:

1. "they give me 100% assurance that my dissertation will come out to be the BEST dissertation in the class" (as you noted, this was impossible);

2. "they said that if in case I didn't get 70% or above marks they will refund 50% of the money" (since unscrupulous students can report they received any grade they want without proof, this promise was clearly false and intended only to persuade you to make another installment payment).

The lowly comma can become VERY important* when misused as in:

"Eats, shoots and leaves."**

__________________

*Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Why, Commas Really Do Make a Difference! (2006) by Lynne Truss

**One version of the joke (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eats,_Shoots_%26_Leaves) goes as follows:

A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and proceeds to fire it at the other patrons.

"Why?" asks the confused, surviving waiter amidst the carnage, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"Well, I'm a panda," he says. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry in the manual and, sure enough, finds an explanation. "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

You have to provide a suitable receptacle for a clean-catch specimen.

I'm embarrassed to admit it, but when I bought a new Dell around 2002 (can't remember exactly but it was three computers ago), the line spacing was set to "At Least" (I don't know if this option is still available) and I assumed it was double spacing (it looked close) and I never bothered to change it until 6 months later when I discovered my error. I had been providing about 350-400 words per page all that time and what was particularly galling was the essay service I was working for then (no longer in business) never told me and I later learned they changed my TNR to Courier, increasing their page count even further. The moral: "At Least" is not double spaced.

I don't work for Questia but I've promoted them for years for this very reason. Questia's writing center offers the following features:

Find a topic
Craft a thesis statement
Write an outline
Research credible books and articles
Keep it all organized

You can also find exclusive scholarly resources that are not available through EBSCO at Questia. This service pays for itself every time I use it.

According to a thoughtful article in Word Counter Blog (wordcounter net /blog/2015/09/18/10655_how-many-pages-is-2000-words.html):

"For those who need a general rule of thumb, a typical page which has 1-inch margins and is typed in 12 point font with standard spacing elements will be approximately 500 words when typed single spaced. For assignments that require double spacing, it would take approximately 250 words to fill the page."

The article goes on to note that because of the large variation in the number of words per page due to different word usage patterns (i.e., longer words take up more space and shorter words increase the word count), many papers are assigned by word count instead of a set number of pages.

Although I would never go back, I realize now that I miss typewriters. I don't miss having to manually center things, the P.I.T.A. error corrections with an eraser* and piece of cardboard (especially with half a dozen carbon copies) or the stuck keys, but I do miss the sounds of manual keys being struck, slamming the carriage back at the end of a line in a manly fashion (this was especially gratifying) and the hearing the carriage return bell which signaled progress.

It turns out that others feel this way as well. For instance, one blogger, "Manoj," tells us that, "There's something about the sound that a typewriter makes, when you, type-write; a kind of a... therapeutic value associated with the sounds of those keystrokes." A number of apps have been developed to make your keyboard sound like a typewriter, including:

Noisy Typer: fffff.at/noisy-typer-a-typewriter-for-your-laptop/

Typewriter Keyboard: alphaomega.software.free.fr/typewriterkeyboard/Typewriter%20Keyboard.html

among others listed at indefiniteloop.com/blog/resource/typewriter-keyboard-make-your-keyboard-sound-like-a-typewriter.html

I think I'll give these a try.

___________________

While attending a multi-service stenography school at Ft. Ben Harrison, Indiana (I don't think this place is even there anymore), our 84-year-old typing teacher, Mrs. Johnson, assured us that we could erase anything -- even a period. It turns out this is not true.

And... here's the story.

After being sent to Bangkok on temporary duty to learn how to use an IBM Mag Card I in 1970 and being warned by my commander to not "blow off these classes and spend your time sightseeing," my wife and I spent our time sightseeing Bangkok* after I spent one morning at IBM Headquarters learning how to use this system. No sweat. I never had a chance to demonstrate my newly acquired skills because the Thais stole the typewriter (but not the console - duh) the day after we received it. Things got a little more complicated after that. At my next post, they learned I was one of the few people in the U.S. Army trained on this machine, but the IBM Mag Card I was far different from the less user-friendly versions that would be foisted upon us soon -- most especially proportionately spacing.

According to the Wikipedia entry: "In 1972, the 'Mag Card Executive' was offered. Like IBM's earlier typebar-based 'Executive' models this offered proportional spacing, based on multiples of a 1/60" unit size. Unlike the various 'Selectric Composer'* models, there was no provision for setting the machine to vary the letter and word spacing to create justified copy."

For those of you born after 1980 and have never seen anyone actually use a typewriter (and as mentioned above), this typewriter was an innovation by Satan himself. Just try backspacing to correct a mistake (something most of you have never experienced with non-digital mechanisms) and watch the machine randomly select how many spaces. It was impossible but you had to try to persevere with the tools you had available -- so I tried. "Multiples of 1/60 unit size" my ass -- this machine was evil.

__________________

* This was GREAT!
** I owned one of these as well - next story!

Well, this EssayScam post (essayscam.org/clean-text/) made me feel old(er):

"Are you old enough to have learned how to type on a manual or electric typewriter? Probably not. They've become tools of the past, replaced by dedicated word processing equipment, then personal computers."


:

For those of you who are spoiled by the enormous variety of typefaces and sizes readily available today in any word processing program, this machine was obsolete before it was invented. It was, though, state-of-the-art during its day. According to the Wikipedia entry for this unique machine, "In 1966, IBM released the Selectric Composer. This highly modified (and much more expensive) Selectric produced camera-ready justified copy using proportional fonts in a variety of font styles from 8 points to 14 points." An IBM Selectric Composer is depicted in the figure below.



In 1977, I purchased a used Composer with about a dozen different typing elements commonly referred to as "balls" which replaced the standard keys in use at the time. Given my experiences with IBM's proportional-spaced predecessors, you'd think I know better but alas, I had faith in the technology. In truth, though, using this machine was tantamount to operating a Daguerreotype: "Material prepared on a properly adjusted machine by a skillful operator and printed onto baryta (barium sulfate-coated) paper would take an expert to tell... [that it] was not the product of a Linotype or Monotype machine." Big deal. Wait 10 years and everything changed and the "skillful operators" soon found themselves out of work. Progress, but at a cost.


I stand corrected. Sitting here thinking about drones (it happens), I wondered why they couldn't be made large enough to carry humans and lo and behold, that's exactly what researchers are doing now. See: youtube.com/watch?v=VfcZsyhUJ48 and cnn.com/videos/cnnmoney/2016/01/18/ehang-human-drone-prototype.cnn among others. Back in the 1960s, we all knew that marijuana would be legal and there would be flying cars someday, but I never thought I'd live to see either (the fall of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Soviet Union either, for that matter)..

Writers2beware is the expert here, but I found this:

Expert-editing.org brief analysis report (weblisting.freetemplatespot.com/expert-editing.org):

We analyzed expert-editing.org and discovered that it has a low Alexa rank which suggests that this site is not yet very popular and gets a poor traffic, at the same time, its Google PR remains at a basic level which most likely identifies a lack of credible sites linking to Expert Editing. Its reputation is unidentified as its safety factors are not yet rated by users.

On the other hand, the quality of fake names is improving. I call them "valued clients" because I'm not a hypocrite.

Thanks for that clarification. This makes a little more sense now, but I've also noticed some of my posts moved to different threads where they no longer make any sense taken out of context (especially given their limited sense to begin with). It's like playing virtual whack-a-mole -- where's it gonna pop up next?

Although the words suggest the mother tongue, this doesn't make any sense. What are you trying to say?

It would be useful for students to have an app that automatically applies these criteria to essay sites to provide them with optimal choices. It sounds do-able...

The above, my friends, is why we have jobs.

This is spurious advice. My clients receive the copyright to their paid work product so I don't own my previous work and it would be unethical to use this work product as samples. With respect to the telephone number issue, I can count the number of clients I've talked to on the telephone over the past 18 years on one hand and still have enough fingers left to dial the pizza place. In addition, clients don't need to "keep checking the progress" if they hire dependable academic writers..

The legality of essay writing services depends on the jurisdiction, but legality does not necessarily equate to legitimacy. After seeing the exhaustive lists of fraudulent term paper companies above and elsewhere, it is reasonable to suggest that a good rule of thumb is to assume any site is suspect until is passes due diligence muster. The exhaustive vetting process provided by writers2beware (I can't find it right now -- if the mods know, please link here) is a useful starting point.

Fun with anagrams: Shane O'Conner = Oh, Ensnare Con

Brrrrr. According to Wikipedia: "Bouvet Island is an uninhabited subantarctic high island and dependency of Norway located in the South Atlantic Ocean. It lies at the southern end of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and is the most remote island in the world."

This has been my experience as well and I had planned on using Dragon mostly for quotations from print materials that weren't available in digital form until I became sufficiently expert with the technique to use it for composition (just like in the commercials!). Strangely, my younger daughter was able to get more accurate results from the version that I trained with my voice (still far from perfect though).

While speech recognition software still needs some work, text-to-speech has become much better. For example, the service provided by Text-to-Speech Reader at ttsreader can speak in UK or US English (fairly convincing) as well as French, Spanish, Italian, German, Japanese, Korean (I think) and Mandarin (I think) at different rates. This application can be used to listen to a book while you're driving (in case of an accident, you didn't hear this from me).

You can always describe your work as an "educational consultant," but I think you're worried about something that will never happen.

I agree. Moreover, from a strictly pragmatic perspective, freelance academic writing is a good business model. Although it is not as scalable as the strategy used by Tom Cruise in "Risky Business," the appeal to business college recruiters would likely be the same:

Bill Rutherford, Princeton Admissions (BR): I believe we had an interview scheduled. ... if this is inconvenient for you...

Joel Goodson (Tom Cruise) (JG): No, sir. It's fine.

BR: I understand that you would like to attend Princeton.

JG: Yes, sir, very much.

BR: Well, fine. ... And you wish to major in? Business?

JG: Business. Yes.

BR: [Reviewing transcript] Well, Joel, this is very respectable. You've done some very solid work here... but it isn't quite lvy League, is it?

JG: You know, Bill... there's one thing I've learned in all my years. Sometimes you have to say, 'WTF.'
...
BR: Princeton can use a guy like Joel.

Although using deceptive tactics such as larger fonts is just wrong, the words-per-page issue is a little more complicated. I've counted the words on several pages from some of my recent assignments and they average 278, and this doesn't include pages with lists or figures. In some cases, a "10-page paper" comes out to 12 pages (or more) by the time I satisfy the word count. This isn't a problem, especially, but I question the 300-word minimum per page guarantee. I doubt that I use more longer words instead of a slew of short ones compared to other writers, and I've always felt that 250-275 words per page was a more reasonable guarantee. Any other writers have an average words per page to report?

Many spies report experiencing this same reaction to their work.

Although I'm completely reconciled with the former, you're right on the money with respect to the latter. The "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" nature of this industry was what I wanted to address head-on with an association of freelance academic writers, but there doesn't seem to be a groundswell of support in here.

This is one of the advantages of ordering during the slower summer months.

Several years ago, we experienced a microburst that carried a sign from a church four blocks away to our front yard, knocked over trees that were decades old (one knocked over our backyard fence and unleashed the neighbor's vicious dogs into our yard), tore off roofs in our neighborhood and generally devastated a 2-block square area of our city. Our power was out for 4 days and I was scrambling to communicate with my clients the whole time. They say dogs are man's best friend, but I'm here to tell you it's electricity...

You can't ask more than that. Glad you're back.

"Quacks are a part of our culture, and we all fall prey to them. Who among us can say, for sure, that even our own personal physicians are honest and competent?" -- Hunter S. Thompson

I think we need a couple more profile types:

1. Unleaded

2. Grand ***-Bah

The one time I charged by the hour (I can't provide details about the project), a long-time but desperate client offered me $500 for one hour and felt I undercharged by the time I finished. Talk about pressure ...

The only issue I found with EFA was that one of the members "reports the freelance editors listed there are not vetted" ( pred-ed.com/peesle.ht). I've joined as a guest member but haven't had time to explore the site but I'll let you know what I find.

Update:

While the guest membership for the EFA is severely restricted, I've found some information about this association that seems to support its credibility. They have about 3,000 paid members more or less and receive around 400 job listings each year. The association maintains a Facebook page and LinkedIn account that are restricted to paid members only (they are also on Twitter as EFA International). Paid members also receive some nominal discounts on health and dental insurance, a subscription to an online freelancing magazine, a 50% discount on ZipCar annual memberships and discounted usage rates, online educational programs and publications and a few other freelancer-specific bennies including networking opportunities.

I'm not convinced that this is enough bang for the buck. I'd probably be more interested in joining as a paid member if there were more job listings (but the 400 they post may be highly lucrative).

The hourly rate is reasonable but I agree the charge per word is beyond the range of what most academic writers can charge. I'm assuming (a) they don't have many of these jobs and (b) the jobs they do have available are for commercial or trade publications (I'll let you know if I join).

Good find, Major. This association essentially negates the need for the IAFAW (but not the journal). Their stated goal is precisely what I had in mind for the IAFAW: "The EFA's goal has always been to raise the professional status of its members and to make freelancing more rewarding."

The EFA has been operated entirely by volunteers since is founding in 1970. Their membership fees are fairly steep ($145 per year or $260 for 2 years) but this association also posts good-paying freelance writing jobs for its paid members. In addition, they offer dental and health plans for their members, some educational resources, and online socialization opportunities such as "Scrabble Night!" (I like Scrabble) and "Twitter Freelance Friday." I don't see any indication that they publish an association magazine or journal but members receive a subscription to the online journal Vocabula Review, a bimonthly newsletter and other publications.

I think I'll sign up.

That's certainly been my experience in this industry as well, Major. Fortunately, despite what the "death clock"* says, I expect to be around for a few more years and I intend to devote some of them to this project.

There's some valuable guidance available from [pkp.sfu.ca/files/OJS_Project_Report_Shapiro.pdf] Dr. Lorna Shapiro concerning establishing an online peer-reviewed journal, and she emphasizes that it can be expensive and time-consuming, even for a modest publication. As with most enterprises, though, most of the real expense involved is paid staff, something we may be able to avoid with volunteers until it becomes popular enough to sell advertising and/or subscriptions.

I realize that this is an ambitious idea, but I think it's time we came together to agree on a few basic ground rules in the form of association bylaws that can improve our credibility. I'm open to suggestions. An online publication would also provide an opportunity for association members to publish something on their own concerning topics of their own interest rather than continue watching their clients receive credit for journal articles they have written on topics in which they may have no personal interest other than getting paid.

_______________
* The "death clock" says I died on March 15, 2000

The reporter told me he used to work in this industry himself when he was in college so I expect a balanced report.