Academia and Ghostwriting Don’t Mix
Every time I look at the writing gigs listed on Craigslist, I see headlines like the following:
- “Publicity & Rewards For AMAZING Admission Essays & Personal Statements”
- “Model Essay Writers Needed”
- “Individuals Needed to Help Students Write and Edit Essays”
- “Do You Love School and Writing?”
- “Looking for help on writing essays for business school applications”
And those are just the ones from the essay factories. The ads posted by students are even less subtle: “Were you a straight-A student?” or “Write my college paper.” To add insult to injury, the students usually want the paper written overnight for little or no pay.
Selling student essays is big business, and the Internet makes cheating of this kind simple for both buyer and seller. Not that it was by any means impossible for students to cheat before the advent of the World Wide Web, but they’re no longer limited to their own classmates as sources of better writing skills.
Craigslist being what it is, a number of people have posted responses to these ads blasting the would-be cheater. (The lower the amount of money offered, the more forceful the response.) Yet someone presumably responds to them often enough to make it worthwhile for the repeat posters.
The Professor’s Perspective
I work as a ghostwriter. In most cases, I’m perfectly happy to write something that someone else gets credit for as long as I receive appropriate payment in exchange for my work.
Before I was a ghostwriter, however, I was a career scholar and a university instructor. That’s why, no matter how good the pay, I won’t write essays for students.
I can be fairly confident that my own students never paid Цифровые диктофоны someone else to write their essays—or at least, if they did, they didn’t get their money’s worth. (Or their beer and pizza’s worth, for that matter.) For one thing, the overall style and quality of the typed or printed papers they handed in matched the style and quality of the essays they wrote on exams where I and others were watching them. For another thing, whenever I had the option, I asked students to choose their own subjects. At the very least I would create a list of several possible themes, each specific enough that it would be difficult to find an already-written paper on the topic available for sale. And since the texts covered and the essay topics differed from year to year, students couldn’t sell successful essays. (It would in any case be a very foolish student who tried to re-use an essay from the previous year’s class of 15 people.)
I did once create a sample essay, however. This was when I was a teaching assistant at the University of Michigan in the early холодильник PYRAMIDA 1990s, and after seeing some of the essays han
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