Dear Paul,
Many thanks for your comprehensive reply. I also received a response off-line which basically backs up what you are saying. I will take your advice and recommend to the postdocs that they try to approach academic publishing houses directly after they’ve built up some experience and a portfolio or have a reference to support them so that they can offer their services directly. Also, ABSW is invaluable as a membership organisation to support freelancer writers. I definitely had in mind writing for journals (eg news/conference digests) and proof reading accepted papers/copy editing rather than writing or improving essays.
This has been a very useful insight for me and perhaps the wider psci-com community too.
Best wishes.
Sarah
From: psci-com: on public engagement with science [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Paul G Raven
Sent: 16 April 2018 15:40
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [PSCI-COM] academic writing - freelance
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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