I just had a new client ask me the same question. Anti-plagiarism software only does one thing: it allows you to check to see whether something "new" was copied from an older source. It has nothing to do with the origin of the older source and nobody checking a new paper for plagiarism cares anything about the original; they only care that the new paper isn't original work. Anyway, there's nothing "wrong" with students letting friends have copies of their old papers to read and it's not your responsibility what they do with it afterwards. Most of the time, anti-plagiarism software only checks to see whether the new work is copied from publicly available sources or matches work previous submitted to their sites. They don't backtrack to the original and send some kind of notice to professors to let them know that someone who wrote a paper for them a year ago might have given it to someone else who tried to submit it for credit. The only possible concern would be where your paper is sold immediately and submitted before yours is checked so that the results show that yours was the one "copied" from the "original."

I don't recall laughing at anybody here recently except you. Obviously, we make more per page on work from private clients without a middleman. Fulltime automobile mechanics sometimes take on freelance weekend work too and it doesn't mean they're not being treated fairly by their employers. I've used "FreelanceWriter" as an online ID a lot longer than I've worked for any essay companies and I don't think there's any confusion that I make a living from both private work and company work. Neither the companies, the clients, nor I have any problem with that; only you.

Why would you ever complete an essay (let alone 2 of them), much less actually send them to the customer before being paid in full? Someone has to take the risk and rely on trustworthiness (especially on the first transaction) and at least writers can provide samples and references from satisfied clients and let prospective clients Google their information; there's no comparable way of trying to check out a client's record of honesty and good faith.

I don't even schedule work on my calendar until it's paid in full. If other prepaid work happens to come in before it's paid, I never turn it down waiting for payment on other inquiries. Customers sometimes say they want work and then just email later saying that they changed their minds or chose a different writer or company. That's fine, but that's exactly why I have a very strict prepayment/scheduling policy ever since the first (and last) time that I ever passed up on another assignment because I'd already blocked off that time based on a verbal agreement after which the customer subsequently changed his mind at the last minute before issuing prepayment.

Also, could someone explain to Americans how the British "standards" system works? I always thought it was just a reference to grades after the fact. Apparently, that's not the case based on your post. What are the respective criteria for the different standards? It's obvious to me that some of my clients are British based on their spelling but they never specify any specific standards.

Stop bragging.

Obviously, writing at a high school freshman level is perfectly natural to you.

If we screw up, we fix it for free. When you write about 1,000 papers a year, you make a few mistakes once in a while. I once wrote a really good 15-pg paper for a client but it was on the wrong topic. Had to write it all over again from scratch. He was eventually able to use both of them and paid me for them both, which was very decent of him because I'd never have known if he hadn't told me. If you screw up in the way you ordered it, we will do our best to fix it, but it's the same as when you decide you'd like another few pages added after the fact: no problem, but you pay for it, obviously.

I once had a business client ask me for a piece of work on CRM stuff. He sent me a white paper on a similar topic full of his notes where he wanted me to do it differently, etc. About a week after it was done we were talking on the phone and he said something that caused me to respond that if he wanted that piece for the purpose he just explained (for the first time), he needed an entirely different piece of writing. He expected me to redo it and I couldn't get him to understand that it was exactly the same as ordering a meal, eating it, and then telling the chef that you're a vegan and expecting him to re-cook an entire meal because the first one wasn't vegan. That's why he's no longer a client.

Basically, with company papers, we get an automatic rewrite notice on our calendar of pending papers anytime the customer submits a rewrite request. If it's a legit request and we forgot something that was in the order or we made some other mistake, we fix it ASAP and submit it to the system. However, that's the case only about 10-20% of the time. Usually, customers think "rewrite" means they can ask us to "fix" stuff when they change their minds about the original order, or when they forgot to include it in the order, or when they chose to violate company TOS and submit the paper for credit and then expect us to "fix" anything pointed out by their professors because they only got an A- or a B or whatever. Sometimes, they ask for rewrites because they say it sounds "too good" and is above their academic level. If you specify in your order that you need a high school freshman level paper (etc), we do try to accommodate, but otherwise, we can't delete those rewrite requests fast enough. Personally, I find that it takes me longer to write in simpler language than to just write stuff the way it comes out of my mind.

Not really. If you have the ability to do this, it really beats going to a regular job.


Some are harder than others and you learn how to steer clear from the ones that could become real pains or you learn to explain to clients why certain papers have to cost more than others even with the same page count. Personally, I don't have to "push" myself at all; quite the opposite: I promise myself that I'm not taking any more papers for the day and then I see another one (or 3) that I just can't pass up and I end up re-adjusting things or skipping my workout or something to get them all done in time. I find it very hard not to take papers that are available and I'm always filling up my calendar on a daily basis. Once in a while, Pheelyks and I have handled one another's overflow too, but that doesn't happen very often and we know the quality won't suffer if we need the backup.

When you do this for a fulltime living, you generally don't work specific days or hours although I suppose one could. I'm almost always working, easily 7 days in a week or 28 days out of a month and at all times of the day and/or night. It's not the kind of job that you can support yourself with doing part time or even in pre-set workdays and 8-hour work blocks: either you do this as a side gig whenever you have time to write or you work constantly to make a living.

Your first clue about which "writers" on this forum not to trust with your work are those who say that they couldn't imagine writing a 10-pg paper in a full day. To anybody who does this well enough to give your customers good results and make a decent living, that's laughable. Pheelyks and I routinely write 4 to 8 essays in a single day totaling 20+ pages and I just wrote a 25-pg MBA paper that I started around 2:00 PM and finished around 2:00 AM, including meals and a few breaks. It's not exactly comfortable or something you want to be doing daily, but if you're a customer, you want writers with that level of skill and not writers who struggle almost as hard as you do writing a single 8-pg paper in a full day.

I can answer that: A draft is something that people who don't write essays for a living assume those of us who do rely on to do our jobs. I've had customers message me asking me to send them the "rough draft" that I used to write their essays. They don't imagine that we just sit down and write their essays the same way they imagine that we spend 3 or 4 days writing a 4-pg essay when we may write 5 of those in a typical day. They don't realize it may be the 20th time we've written the same exact basic essay on a standard college freshman topic either. I get messages all the time from customers asking how their essay "is coming along" days before it's due when I'm about a dozen essays away from even looking at theirs yet. Once in a while, I've had customers ask me to write them a separate draft and essay. We can do that, but it's not our usual process and we'll probably just write the essay and then create a plausible draft after the fact to meet their requirements.

No, because anybody who thinks that's a run-on sentence is clearly an amateur.

As I said, I'm not the one emailing total strangers around here desperately seeking information on the identity of other forum members who insulted me; you are.

I already admitted to that mistake immediately. The point was simply that I don't bother spell-checking or proofreading these posts in general, not that SpellCheck flags homonyms or homophones.

You could always just ask him for a short outline/proposal first and see how that turns out. In general, the only way you can ever really check out the quality of any commercial service or freelancer is by ordering a very short assignment first as a test. Pay for subsequent parts one section at a time until you're satisfied the site or person is both legit and also provides good work. Once you find a good site, stick with the first writer whose work you like and once you find a good freelancer, stick with that person and anybody that person recommends for work outside of that person's areas. In my opinion, you're always safest with sites actually located in the U.S. that accept credit cards for payment because most credit card companies will back you up 100% if you don't get what you paid for.

Yes, but we writers have nothing to do with that; it's not like we get a report on every paper we write confirming that it's 100% original. I'd imagine that writers would only receive a report if a paper got flagged. Thanks for asking.

I've never seen any anti-plagiarism program in action, but I'd imagine that you could just print or store the initial dated report from the first submission by the student in case you ever need to prove it to anybody later.


Unlike some people here, I can admit to an occasional mistake: I've never seen the word in print and never thought about it. As far as our respective English writing skills go, we both work for one of the same essay companies on whose board multiple specific requests for Pheelyks and me appear almost daily. Meanwhile, I've never seen even a single request for you on the board, ever. The company also sends me internal requests to handle papers for employees' friends and families as well as for particularly difficult papers that they don't trust to many other writers. They've told me, very explicitly, that I'm one of their top 4 writers out of more than 100, the other 3 being Pheelyks, InfoCEO, and ResearchPro.

You should probably spend a little more time practicing you own writing so that you can actually make a living doing this and a little less time desperately contacting total stranger via this forum's message system to find out if they know who WB is and reviving ancient threads to gloat that you managed to find a mistake in one of my old posts. I'm not spellchecking this post either, so have at it if that makes you feel a little better about our respective value to the same company.

Actually, I was very careful not to say anything about them besides that they're "100% legit" and I never said any of those other things you falsely attributed to me in quotes and in bold text. My post is right above yours and, as everybody knows, these posts can't be edited more than 15 minutes after being posted originally.

Only an idiot would believe that any "top experts" in any academic field are really writing papers for essay writing companies and only an idiot would make that claim. I don't know anything about that company but I'd suggest that customers completely avoid any advice or recommendations from this poster about anything.

I've been writing for them since 2003. Not "recommending" that you use any site or freelance writer, but they are definitely 100% legit.

If they were any kind of actual customers, they'd have been able to give us the order # and the name of the writer who supposedly wrote the paper. The fact that neither one of them has responded since being asked for the order # pretty much seals it as nonsense. If you go through previous (actual) customer complaints (about any company), you'll see that real customers never have any reservations about coughing up the order # of real problem orders. There's no reason to worry about disclosing the order # since the company involved already has it and that # means absolutely nothing to anybody else and can't be used by anybody for anything that could possibly hurt the customer. If they had any concerns about "retaliation" from the company, the information they already posted would be enough for the company to identify it if this were true and if the company cared to determine who the customer was.

How do you know this if you don't write for them? Anyway:

1. All I really want to see is whether the order # is in the right format to be a real order from that company and whether I recognize the name of the writer. I'm guessing he can't provide one in the right format and number sequence regardless of what the actual order # is.

2. I have my email notifications enabled so I get a system notice of every paper that goes up on the board. Chances are, if the order was recent, I still have the notice for it by that order # in my old mail waiting to be cleared out. All I'd have to do is paste the order # into my aol mail search to pull up that system notice for the order.

The fact that he still hasn't responded with the order # suggests this is a bogus thread authored by a competitor and not a "customer." If his original accusations were true, he'd be entitled to a rewrite or refund and they'd have issued it already.

Peelyks and I both write for the company and we know how they do (and don't) do business.

I have the following order pending right now.

Book Review - History

"paragraph one- identify and summarize the thesis of the book.(why is the author writing? What is the message he is attempting to convey? Why does it matter?

paragraph two- summarize the structure of the book.(What do its chapters contain?
paragraphs three and four- explore the strengths and weaknesses of the arguement.
paragraph five- what does it add to the understanding of world history?"

So far no answer to my question asking whether there's any specific book they want reviewed or if I'm supposed to pick a book on my own. No files and no hint of any book title anywhere in the order.

I have absolutely no idea who WB is we had our own run-ins when I first joined this forum if anybody cares to check some of our very first conversations going back about two years. The only person I know on this forum (besides customers) is Pheelyks; he and I have always openly acknowledged that we write for some of the same companies under the same IDs that we use on here. Unlike most of you, we have absolutely nothing to hide so we didn't change our IDs to post here.

Exactly. All any of us needs is the order # and writer name to confirm that any of this is true. If you don't provide the order # and can't name the writer, this is obviously just a disinformation campaign by another pretend "customer."

I have no connection to admin at all but as a writer, I'd like to just see whether you know the order number and the name of the writer. You can PM me the info if you want. Was this a paper that had your original work as a resource to work on?

No problem. Read more. Post less.

I've just read your whole series of "contributions" to threads and I'd just like to ask you what language do want us to believe anybody actually pays you to "write" in? It can't possibly be English, right?

It might be helpful to explain to customers what we actually see when they place an order:

We have a board that only shows us what you actually type in the order box. If all you type is "Political Science" and "Paper description in faxes," we have no idea what your paper is about (what nations, what century, what issues, etc). We're not likely to commit to writing any paper without knowing what the actual topic is and what's required. Your order will probably stay on the board and not get taken. Most of us have enough work and too many existing time constraints to remember to keep checking the fax board later to check out the faxes for every order that is on the board without a description just to see whether or not it's a topic we want to write. There can be quite a delay between the time you submit a fax and the time it actually goes up on our system. Every week there are papers due in 12 hours whose faxes never even get posted in that time. Sometimes, it's a paper we could have written if we hadn't had to wait for the faxes. When the faxes finally come in, they're nothing but basic instructions on how to write an essay or how to punctuate English properly.

If you want your order taken ASAP and you want to decrease the chances that it will just stay on the board, never get written by anybody, and eventually just get refunded, you need to tell us exactly what your essay is about and what your specifications are in your initial order box. The file-submission function is strictly for sending in additional materials necessary to write the paper; it's not there for you to send in the basic essay topic and specs that you want us to meet.

As Pheelyks said, we do this for a living and when you tell us not to plagiarize or you send us the instructions that your Composition 101 professor gave you to teach you how to write an essay or how to punctuate English, it's annoying; sometimes, if we're already not sure we want to bother taking your paper, that kind of thing can make us just skip your order altogether. You wouldn't go to a car mechanic and tell him where the radiator is or how he should change your oil and if you do, he may just tell you that he's too busy to work on your car because you've already started off your relationship by announcing that you're likely to be a pain in the ass and that you have no respect for the fact that he fixes cars for a living all day everyday. He doesn't need you to tell him how to do his job; same goes for professional writers and customers who treat us as though this is our first ever research paper just because it may be your first college paper.

On some sites there's a drop-down menu for you to request your preferred writer and the order is reserved for us for about 6 hours...then, if we don't take it other writers can see and take it. On other sites it's not reserved by any mechanism besides the honor system and you just have to say "Request for _____" right at the beginning of your order description. We're supposed to respect requests for at least that same time period for rush papers and 24 hours for longer deadlines. Most writers do and the ones who don't get reprimanded and/or fined and admin will take back the order and re-post it for the requested writer if it's brought to their attention. Some of us writers have always watched one another's backs that way and we use email to alert one another to requests that disappear from the board too soon to make sure that we got the ones asking for us. It's always up to us though; I'm not aware of any company that "assigns" work and I'd never work for any that did. I'm not allowed to mention specific sites here, but if you PM me, I can explain which sites that use me have the drop-down reservation mechanism and reserve system and which sites rely on manually typed-out requests and the honor system. Thanks for asking.

I'm not making any recommendations but I do write for them and if you search through some old threads where I've explained how they do business, that should help you figure out whether you think you should trust them with your work.

Are you kidding? Some of these people still don't understand that speaking English is a prerequisite to writing English professionally. We're still a long way from the issue of where they received their formal higher education. Baby steps first, OK?

Chances are whatever work you receive is representative of the writer's ability and style. If you get a poorly written paper, you probably want to find a different writer altogether. If you're dissatisfied in any way by any work you receive from any company or freelancer, about all you can do keep writers honest is complain about it publicly right on this forum. There are many things that are prohibited here, but that's one thing that I'm sure is allowed.


Kicking myself for all the times that student have used Courier in their outlines and essay questions where I changed it all to TNR out of habit. The companies who use me all use 12-pt TNR, but you can always request any other font or style as long as you're willing to pay for any extra work that it requires, such as 10-pt font (same goes for requesting single-spacing, too).

I've never used any of those services but I know all the legit essay companies have their own proprietary versions to check the work. How do you know that you can trust that the commercial plagiarism scanners will honor what the check-box says it does?

That is how most of us probably do it but I can't speak for anybody else. I'd definitely avoid any writer who refuses that arrangement since you're taking the risk and the worst case scenario for them is that you don't use them again based on the first few pages. Any writer who demands full payment for a long project when you're offering to prepay for a sample is probably trying to set you up to rip you off on the whole thing, in my personal opinion.

No problem. If you mean prepay for a few pages at a time and then prepay for the next few pages after the first part is satisfactory, that's fine (at least with me). If you mean pay for only some of the work and then pay for the rest after receiving the entire project, that's no good (at least for me) because we have to take the same risk anytime we do any work without prepayment. If you decide to stiff us on the second part, there's nothing we can do about it and we're out all the time and effort we put into it. Also, we can't keep customers honest by posting about our experiences the way customers can.

That's not workable for writers because if we don't get paid, we're out all that work with little recourse. Even if we're local, it's just not practical or worthwhile to worry about suing in small claims court for a $50 paper or for a few hundred bucks; if we're not local, it would be even less practical to have to travel to remote areas to pursue it. All that does is shift the risk entirely to the writer instead of the student. Someone has to take a risk, at least on the first transaction.

That's why I've always suggested that you limit your risk by placing only a small order with any new company or freelance writer, as a test of honesty and also writing talent. You could also just order an Introduction or an outline for a longer project and just prepay for those few pages before you decide to trust the writer with the entire project. That way, your only exposure is the price of a few pages. I've even had customers pay me for 10 or 20 pages at a time for a 100-pg project, which is fine. If a writer refuses that arrangement, that should be a red flag. You're much less likely to get ripped off by a writer who already provided good work once because most of the scammers don't plan to do any writing after they get your money or they just provide horrible work the first time. I don't think there are too many scammers who specialize in doing good sample work so they can rip you off on bigger projects.

On our end, writing before payment just isn't safe and we wouldn't be able to make a living if we had to take that risk on every project and worry about chasing down payments after the fact. Actually, the only 2 times I've ever been ripped of was by long-term clients who had each used me very regularly for several years. Both times, I'd let them pay me after the work sometimes because they were using me so regularly. They both just stiffed me on their very last assignment and one of them owed me for 2 or 3 papers. Since then, I never start work until payment is received, even for long-term clients, and there are no exceptions. I'd much rather not get the work if a client can't trust me than risk wasting my time working on a paper for nothing.

Trust me, I didn't hide it out of any consideration for him; I didn't want to post it to advertise it for him, since I'd like nothing more than to be able to post my email here publicly for students. As you know, I can't send it via PMs because I lost that privilege many months ago for offering my services via PMs, but you're welcome to the information through email or PMs if my outgoing PMs are ever restored. What is "ACDM"? Surely, he can't be an academon writer, right?

WB isn't the one contacting other forum members asking for information about you. Meanwhile, this is what I received from you on June 15th from your "mistersnailxx@xxxxxxx" email addy.

No problem. You still have the airport men's rooms all to yourself and your clients.


Truly the mark of a dedicated instructor and an objective measure of the quality of students' academic work.

I didn't realize this was a continuation of the same old argument that it's "OK" for ESL writers not to disclose that honestly. Nobody's suggesting that there aren't any good ESL writers; but the client has the right to know. It's stupid to equate that with asking to know the writer's SS# or other private information that has nothing to do with writing skill or style. Most ESL writers still express themselves in English in ways that are different from Americans, even if there's nothing necessarily "wrong" or "bad" in their work, and that's why most American and British students prefer native speakers. It's also why some Brits don't want American writers; they have a right to know too, even if I believe that I can also write like a Brit.

When I was in law school, I did personal fitness training. I never bothered to get "certified" because: (1) there was no such thing when I started doing it and (2) it's a totally bogus certification that is not required by law or standardized in any way, and it's mainly just a profit-generating scam by the self-created "certification" companies. But I never lied about it if a client asked whether I was "certified"; I explained why certification is a joke in that industry and gave them client references to check. Most never cared but some who asked apparently did because they never set up an apppointment after the first phone call. That was their prerogative if they cared. It's exactly the same even with the best ESL writing: clients have a right to know and it's not for you to decide that it "shouldn't" matter to them.

British universities generally have a much higher academic standard. In the U.S., virtually any paper written by an experienced writer would usually qualify for a grade in the A range if it were actually submitted for academic credit. American college-level writing is not that good; if a paper is just written coherently and addresses all the required topics in logical and grammatically correct sentences and it passes the plagiarism scan, it's better than the vast majority of the papers that undergraduate studies professors ever read and it gets an A because it's a breath of fresh air compared to the nonsense they have to read regularly.

Anytime that I see original work or drafts from students, I'm just amazed that many of them are even wasting their parents' money in school because they can't even write a coherent 2-pg freshman-level essay on things like "Compare and Contrast Living in a College Dorm and Commuting to School While Living at Home" let alone produce any kind of serious academic scholarship.

In my opinion, writing assignments in college are a waste of time unless the student is studying for a field that actually requires a lot of writing. Even when they do it themselves, it's basically just reworded from whatever sources they found through the simplest search and reflects virtually no independent critical thought. You can't force students to learn how to write and most of them don't care about ever writing more than emails and text messages.

Beyond high school, "writing" assignments should be optional or options in lieu of exams.

We're not allowed to promote specific websites but I think there's more than enough information in some older threads here that would help you figure out which sites and freelancers are likely trustworthy. That would probably be more productive than asking for specific recommendations. If there's anybody here who seems to sound legit to you, you can also search the forum for all of his or her prior posts. Good luck.

Just for the record, this was originally a thread about freelance writers working independent of essay companies. Nobody was promoting anything or criticizing anybody until you decided to contribute your wisdom to the discussion.


1. Most of my income comes from private clients right now. I still consider the company more stable in the long term and I appreciate my relationship with them very much. I have reason to believe the appreciation is mutual.

2. I already left them on good terms to work full-time for the government for a few years and they reinstated my account immediately when I let them know I was available again, no questions asked. They'd probably not be too upset if I chose to go 100% private and I'm sure they'd let me do as much work as I could for them anytime.

3. No kidding, Sherlock. They know we're competitors just like Pheelyks and I know we're freelance competitors. The companies (obviously) monitor these types of sites to keep track of anybody who defames their business and if there were any conflict about their writers also freelancing, we wouldn't have chosen to use our company IDs as our screen names here, Genius. The companies I write for know that I've referred some work from my freelance customers to them (including some from here). In fact, I make sure to let them know anytime one of my private clients needs work from them because if it ever became apparent in the future that we were sharing the same client, I want to be 100% sure they know the client used me first.

They also know that I compete fairly and that anytime a company client has approached me here or elsewhere, I've declined the offer and explained that I don't poach any of their clients. Every potential client who has not already used their services is fair game. Same goes for my relationship with Pheelyks: we've traded work in our respective areas for our established clients and we've referred brand new clients to one another as well.


4. This has nothing to do with any "standard" in any "industry": Contractual obligations are formed by laws and by contracts. There's no such thing as any non-compete obligation or restriction by default in any "industry" unless it's specified in some contract agreed to by the parties. I'm guessing they probably figured out I freelanced as much as possible by the User ID that I selected for their websites and for this forum.

5. Horrible analogy. It's more like a wedding-band singer whose contract says "You get $___ for every gig you book with us and you're not allowed to steal any of our customers" also working as a freelance vocalist for anybody who needs a singer who isn't already a customer of the band or promoter. If all parties involved also frequented some of the same Internet forums and the singer very openly disclosed exactly who she was, nobody but an idiot would think there could possibly be anything "unethical" about that.

Obviously, I make less money on company papers. On the other hand, they've been a very consistent and reliable source of income for me for almost 7 years and I know they're not going anywhere. Freelance clients come and go and just because I have enough right now doesn't necessarily mean that I'll be able to replace all of them as they graduate. I can't count on them being around month after month, year after year. Even when most of my income comes from private clients, I still consider the company to be my "bread and butter" and my private work to be "supplementary" income.

Publicize away; it only harms the frauds and it helps out customers and those of us writers who aren't rip offs. I've had clients just hire me on faith but I've also had clients first check that my phone # and street address matched up and one even GoogleEarthed my building in addition to checking my ebay reputation and my other email addy that was linked to my PayPal account. He ordered 1 or 2 short essays before giving me his 30-pg dissertation.

I'm just suggesting that if clients are smart about it, they can really reduce (if not eliminate entirely) the risk of getting scammed on Craigslist. When I hired the carpenter, I did the same thing: I googled his name and his business name and his license # and I hired him for a small job before trusting him with anything more substantial.


You're an idiot. Obviously, we earn more for less writing when an essay company doesn't take a fair cut for their role. It varies for me based on time of year, but my freelance work used to be just a small supplement to my company income. After doing this a while, a few satisfied customers led to enough referrals that I have more regular freelance work than I ever thought would be possible. It isn't even necessarily about earning more than I could just writing for the companies (although I definitely have been lately); it's more about having to do less writing for the same income.