On the dream of being a real, live, honest-to-gosh “writer.”
Writing model term papers is above-board and perfectly legal. Thanks to the First Amendment, it’s protected speech, right up there with neo-Nazi rallies, tobacco company press releases, and those “9/11 Was An Inside Job” bumper stickers. It’s custom-made Cliff Notes. Virtually any subject, almost any length, all levels of education [...]
DUMB CLIENTS predominate. They should not be in college. They must buy model papers simply because they do not understand what a term paper is, much less anything going on in their assignments [...]
Term paper writing was never good money, but it was certainly fast money. For a freelancer, where any moment of slack time is unpaid time, term papers are just too tempting. Need $100 by Friday to keep the lights on? No sweat. Plenty of kids need 10 pages on Hamlet by Thursday. Finals week is a gold mine. More than once the phone rang at midnight and the broker had an assignment. Six pages by 6 a.m. — the kid needs three hours to rewrite and hand in the paper by 9 or he won’t graduate. “Cool,” I’d say. “A hundred bucks a page.” I’d get it, too, and when I didn’t get it, I slept well anyway. Even DUMB CLIENTS could figure out that they’d be better off spending $600 on the model paper instead of $2,500 to repeat a course. Back in the days when a pulse and pay stub was sufficient to qualify for a mortgage, term papers — along with gigs for dot.com-era business magazines — helped me buy my first house.
Getting the hang of it is tricky, though. Over the years, several of my friends wanted in on the term paper racket, and most of them couldn’t handle it. They generally made the same fundamental error — they tried to write term papers. In the paper mill biz, the paper isn’t important. The deadline, page count, and number of sources are. [...]
I had a girlfriend who had been an attorney and a journalist, and she wanted to try a paper. I gave her a five-page job on leash laws in dog parks, and she came home that evening with over 50 pages of print outs, all articles and citations. She sat down to write. Three hours later she was rolling on the floor and crying. She tried to write a paper, instead of filling five pages. Another friend of mine spent hours trying to put together an eight-page paper on magical realism in Latin American fiction. At midnight she declared that it was impossible to write that many pages on books she had never read. She was still weeping, chain-smoking cigarettes, and shouting at me at 2 a.m. I took 20 minutes and finished the paper.
Link to The Smart Set via the Mental Floss Blog
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