Many people have expressed interest in business of essay writing services. I interviewed a professional essay writer at Boom Essays to find out the basics of their custom writing business. As hard as it was for me to stomach the idea that these businesses were everywhere online, writing papers for students at the top Colleges and Universities in the country, I found myself fascinated and delved a little deeper into this strange business.
The writer from essay writing service broke down some basic demographics for me. The vast majority of the writers that work for these essay services are English speaking natives from the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. When a student approaches the service needing a paper written in a foreign language the service contracts a writer from that country to complete it. They added that all of the writers employed has at least a Master's degree with at least 60% of the writers they had interacted with holding a PhD.
The writers are all tested on the whole range of citation and formatting styles before they are even considered for the job. APA, MLA, Harvard and Chicago styles are their bread and butter. All of the essays that they produce are run through plagiarism checkers and run by quality assurance specialists. The job of writing essays seems to have just as many hurdles as any other post-academic career. My source bemoaned, "The hardest thing is to find professional writers in the STEM fields. Those guys can really pull in the big money per page."
The writer explained the process of actually getting an essay written by one of these services,
"At my last job it was all done through email, you got all of the information about the essays sent through as attachments. Things got lost a lot." Most of the professional services now use a web-portal like any other online business. Clients place their order and are given an account on the company's website where they can monitor its status, attach additional documents to be referenced or included and approve or request changes all from a single page. The highest number of orders actually comes through to these services when students have already passed their final exams and are just tidying up their academic affairs, between October and November or in April and May.
When looking online it seems that most of the students trying to find essay writing services search Google for some very odd terms like "Pay for essay," "Do my essay," or "Write my essay." Whether this comes from their discomfort, or the fact that custom essay writing services are still relatively unknown, remains to be seen.
The weirdness certainly doesn't stop there. My source told me about the strangest requests that they had received. "Do my two multiple choice questions for two dollars," was one of their personal favorites although one of the more lucrative ones was definitely, "Write my 200 page dissertation in 2 days for $5,000."
The strangest part, from the essay writer's perspective is that a lot of the work that they do isn't even from students. Content marketers, scientists, entrepreneurs and others use the copywriting services that the same websites provide because they are guaranteed highly educated writers.
Before our final interview was over I finally asked my source about the morality of their current line of business, "What we do get students who are struggling back on their feet. We are helping people. I am not going to let anyone make me feel bad about that."