The Perfect Definition for a Pro-Academic Writer

True. Those of us who have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to do this for a living are just good writers who have acquired sufficient experience over time to expand our range and depth of the areas that we can handle with competence. The two biggest problems in this industry are: (1) companies and writers whose actual intention is to scam customers by providing either nothing or nothing but copy/pasted garbage, and (2) writers (including those working for companies) who might have honest intentions, but lack a realistic sense of how good they are and what kinds of projects they can actually handle with competence. There is no such thing as any formal licensing body for academic writers, which is why prospective customers need websites such as this forum to help them identify qualified honest providers.


I'd suggest that it's not really our degrees that determine our qualifications as writers for several reasons:

(1) Many people who aren't very good writers and who could never do this job have the same degrees that some of the best of us happen to have earned;

(2) At least in my case, writing was something for which I always had a natural talent and about which all of my teachers commented, going back to middle school. As I explained in my profile thread, despite always having been a good writer, I was just as intimidated, as a student, at the prospect of having to write long essays as many of my clients are. In fact, the specific reason that I decided on law school instead of pursuing a graduate degree in a field in which I had more of an interest, such as psychology, was that law schools required comparatively little writing (and no exams except for one final exam at the end of every course); and

(3)If our degrees provided our main "training" for doing this, we wouldn't be able to expand our subject areas of confidence very much beyond whatever our major areas of studies were. Even after I started writing essays for essay companies almost 20 years ago, I avoided longer projects and I only took on projects in a relatively narrow range of subject areas. My confidence grew only gradually as I began writing longer projects and projects in different areas of study than I'd focused on as a student. Today, just for example, I've probably had more Nursing clients (all the way up to Ph.D) than students in any other field, and I've never taken a single nursing class in my life.

As a law student, I worked as a hockey skills instructor for the National Novice Hockey Association (now re-branded as Hockey North America) and as a personal fitness trainer. Nowadays, there are several tiers of hockey coach certifications awarded through USA Hockey; but I don't think there was such a thing back then. There definitely was no such thing as any "certifications" for personal trainers back then; and the situation was actually somewhat similar to the present-day situation with professional academic writers. Many bodybuilders and life-long gym rats who never competed simply printed up business cards and handed them out in gyms to establish a clientele. It was up to prospective clients to figure out for themselves which trainers provided value for their fee and which trainers either knew nothing (because their own success was mainly attributable to genetics and/or steroids) or because they were good self-promoters who didn't actually do very much for their clients besides taking all of them through the exact same workout and counting their reps out loud for them at each piece of equipment.

Finally, certification itself sometimes becomes its own scam run by certification companies, especially when they're in fields that aren't regulated by governmental entities. Nowadays, there are many types of certifications for athletic trainers, and almost all gyms require them for their employees; but that actually illustrates another problem with relying on "certifications." Today, a person who (literally) has never trained a single day in his life can take a 6 or 8-week course that charges $1,000 or more for classes and materials, but that consist of little more than memorizing the names of muscles and exercises and that teach the same CPR that the Red Cross teaches for $20. You can go from knowing nothing about training to still knowing nothing about training, let alone teaching other people how to train, but with a "certification" that allows you to get a job at a commercial gym. You simply cannot learn how to train or train other people from a course, any more than you can learn how to skate from books and lectures. That's why there are now thousands of people wearing shirts that say TRAINER in gyms all across this country who know absolutely nothing of value that they can share with their clients (for $50 or $100 per hour). To date, there's no such thing as any "license" or certification that's actually required, other than whatever certifications gyms and/or their insurance companies choose to recognize.