Free Downloadable Essays!
By Peter J. Francis, HGPublishing Editor
Want to buy an essay? Why not, doesn't everyone do it? How about a free essay? Look no further!
Think about it, if you are a college or university student, you've already put out a lot of money for tuition and living expenses. The only thing you get for your money is education and you're missing that by buying an essay. Second, when you graduate and get a job, they are going to expect that you can write reports, do research, analyze written material, begin and complete complex projects and do many of the things with the skills you are supposed to be getting by writing essays. A recent study showed that fewer students were learning critical thinking skills. So come on people! Do you want to be the leaders of tomorrow or the losers of tomorrow?
If you are a high school student, then you are expected to be able to write basic paragraphs and understand written material. It's not rocket science. Even if you do it badly at first, it's the process of learning that that's important. Sure it's work, but it gets easier as you learn. What do you want learn? How to cheat or how to write?
What do you get for free on the internet? Not much. You can probably download a basic essay that might fulfill the requirements of a high school course. Chances are that it won't. And you'll probably get caught. I had a student hand in an essay on "To Kill A Mockingbird" that he downloaded from the internet. It was written better than he had demonstrated in his in-class writing. And it didn't answer the question I had given. It only took me about 30 seconds to take one good phrase from the essay and Google it to find the original essay. That student ended up failing grade 10 for the second time. He could have written a crappy, error filled, pathetic attempt in about a half an hour while watching Family Guy on TV and still passed. Teachers don't have to prove you cheated; they only need to suspect it to ask you to re-write, or otherwise prove you can do the work.
For a perspective on where free essays come from, check out this link: http://www.eslbee.com/plagiarism.htm
An essay on global warming for sale at 123Essays.com begins "Some scientist's have been concerned since 1896 about what might happen if there were 5.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere." What caught my eye was the misused apostrophe in the second word. However, then I realized that these scientists must be very old if they have been concerned since 1896. For $29.95 you can buy an essay with two grammatical errors in the first sentence. What a bargain!
What about custom written college essays? You can pay someone to write your essay. Many will actually use your textbook, or preferred sources and write a unique essay for you. Some will deliberately mimic your writing style, so the jump in quality will not alert a teacher. Well, good luck. You can ask any Enron executive about where you will get with those kind of ethics. Ask yourself not "Why not? Everyone does it," but "What kind of person do I want to be, and what do I want to get out of my education?"
Essay Editing Services
So what about the ethics of paying for essay editing? After all that's the service I'm offering here. Some people might argue that it's not fair to pay to have someone edit your grammar to improve your mark on an essay. But if you look at the learning outcomes for each course, except for first year writing courses, you are supposed to be learning to research and understand complex topics. You better have done that before getting your essay edited, because no editor is going to be doing that for you.
Very few editors will add content to your essay, so if there is nothing there to begin with, at the end of the process, all you have is grammatically correct nothing. As the computer programmers say: "Garbage in: garbage out." But if you've really done your work, an editor can polish it to make it shine.
And what happens when you graduate and get a job? Hopefully, you are paying attention to the changes editors are making to your papers and gaining skill in writing along the way. I have a number of clients who have been submitting essays over the course of their post-secondary education; I see their writing improving essay by essay. I offer suggestions for improvement and they pay attention and their writing improves. But professionals pay editors to improve their writing, too. Many editors work exclusively for private companies, making sure the published materials are as polished as possible. I worked for three years in a major company, editing internal documents written by professionals.
College professors usually mark holistically. That means they read the essay and give you a mark on whether or not you grasp the essential question and whether or not you have done adequate research. If your essay is mired in run-on sentences, poor spelling and sentence fragments, then the meaning is impaired. That's a good reason to hire an editor to edit the paper. It's no different than having your mom look over it, except I probably have better grammar skills than your mom.
Sure, I wrestle with the ethics of helping high school students pass their writing courses. But I don't do anything on-line that I would do for any student who walked into my classroom. It's all teaching to me.
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