Hi, Sarah;
I’ve seen this one which looks to be quite reputable but any advice from
> the psci-com community would be very welcome: https://www.
> academicwriterjobs.com/
>
Admittedly it's not hard to look more reputable than most essay mills, but
a look through the copy buried on that site suggests that's exactly what
they are; they're just a lot more careful about pretending otherwise.
Here's a snip from https://www.academicwriterjobs.com/fair-use-policy/,
after a whole bunch of This Is My Very Serious Face about plagiarism:
Q: If I proceed to give in the work without making any alterations is it
> likely that I could get caught?
> A: Our work is actually 100% original, and , furthermore is written to a
> particular specification, so if it were presented to a university then the
> university would be unable to locate it on a plagiarism scan and moreover,
> none of our work that has been specified by a client is , in fact, common
> knowledge but it has never been uploaded because the work we supply will
> never be uploaded to the web.
Shorter version: "plagiarism is awful and you shouldn't do it, buuuuuut if
you hand in the stuff we sell, it's unlikely to be detected as
plagiarism!". Also the verbatim punctuation errors and structural flaws in
that excerpt, and throughout the rest of the site, plus the complete
absence of any names of the company's management (the ethics page
https://www.academicwriterjobs.com/ethics/ -- which is a legal pretzel in
its own right -- is bylined as by 'Director') don't exactly scream quality
or legitimacy.
As a sometime freelance writer, I'd advise telling your students to avoid
job-clearing websites on principle, and that the only way to find honest
and properly remunerative work is to develop relationships with the sorts
of organisations that need genuine and original research material written
for them. This is hard work in an ever-more-desperate marketplace, but
sadly it's the only way to reliably avoid churning out material for the
lucrative (and seemingly unstoppable) essay-mill industry.
(That said, I don't stand in moral judgement on those who make their living
from essay-mills, many of whom are postgrads and postdocs with debts to pay
off and no other way to pay 'em; I wrote stuff for an assortment of dodgy
businesses when it was the only way to pay the rent, and given the
precarious state of the UK academy, I wouldn't want to rule out my chances
of having to do so again some day soon. Necessity is a hard task-master...
but if you're talking to students about *careers* in *academic* writing,
it's probably best to be honest, and tell them that the only way you get to
do that legitimately is if you manage to get an academic post, or a role
directly supporting such. You can be a freelance research writer,
certainly, but that's never quite the same as academic writing -- almost
every research report I've ever written as a freelance came with the
instruction to "not make it sound too academic", and more often than not
with a pre-determined conclusion to work towards -- and there's no
shortcuts to the good stuff; you gotta get out there and hustle. Either
that, or work for what's basically the Uber of essay mills.)
(Bonus material: the genre fiction writer Nick Mamatas's "confessions of a
term-paper hack" essay is worth a read, if only to give an idea of the
working conditions as they were in the US circa 2008:
https://thesmartset.com/article10100801/ -- Spoilers: he doesn't give much
of a fig for the morality issues, as he's not and never was an academic,
but it's deeply depressing work for many other reasons, and the sort of
thing you'd only want to do if you had literally no other option.)
PGR
--
------------------------------
Paul Graham Raven <http://paulgrahamraven.com/> - postgraduate researcher
in infrastructure futures and theory, University of Sheffield
ORCID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3555-843X
Writer, reviewer, critic; contraPanglossian futurist; third-rate guitarist;
dishevelled mountebank. Epistemological wet-work a speciality.
"As full of good, crooked, crunchy stuff as a cracked walnut." - Bruce
Sterling
"... the futurist Bill Hicks." - @fragmad
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