We actually offer copywriting through our site! Several of our professors have done copywriting projects, mostly for solopreneurs. In our experience, most businesses either have a huge budget for big-name ad agencies or want Fiverr-level pricing (yet they also want champagne-level results, go figure). That's one reason why we haven't really marketed ourselves specifically as copywriters.

1. First, although we've done all kinds including doctoral, in the UK a dissertation is generally more like a BA capstone.
2. I will say that there are schools, particularly online, where doctoral dissertations are not, ah, held to the same standard as they are in many other institutions.
3. In many cases, our role in a client's dissertation has been to work on writing (primarily editing) whereas the client did the primary research; we've also provided services like research coverage (writing summaries and evals of potential sources to use in lit reviews).
4. In a lot of cases, we've worked on doctoral dissertations as proofreaders, so we generally just did a final round of polishing / formatting.
5. But, yeah, for someone who wanted to hire a ghostwriter for a full, traditional dissertation, it would be a lot like hiring a ghostwriter or assistant for a long time.

We'd happily charge you more.

Hi,

The nice thing about our service (IMO) is that it can generally be whatever people want it to be. Ghostwriter, assistant, tutor, cheerleader, whatever.

Some of our clients are pretty hands-on. Some of them just want revisions...or proofreading...or advice / encouragement. Sometimes they come to us with drafts and outlines. Sometimes they just have hypothetical ideas, as in, "I really like this book we read in a class, this theory interests me, what about this argument?" and sometimes we go back and forth.

Although we've written lots of research proposals, I would suggest you first ask your school or department for examples. That would be free (or, "free" with your tuition, anyway) and presumably, those would have the benefit of really specific comments from your advisors, who would know the context of your eventual proposal really well.

That's another great question. Pragmatically, as in, as a business, we guarantee effectiveness by offering revisions, refunds in certain cases, and we work hard to try and understand what our clients want and need on a general level. Most of the time, they have pretty specific, transaction-oriented goals in mind and that is where our domain expertise comes in handy.

From the writing perspective, a lot of effectiveness has to do with understanding goals and managing expectations. I don't do the wacky aunt crackpot ebooks anymore.

Apparently this post was deleted and we have no idea why :( so I'm not even sure this comment will go through, but I do appreciate your thoughtful questions.

1. Use the rule of 3's. No more than 3 points / ideas overall (if possible), no more than 3 clauses per sentence, try to use 3 examples to support each claim.
2. Write in a goal-oriented way. If you're not sure about what you have written, ask what the sentence, or page, or paragraph, etc., is doing. If you don' t have a good answer, cut it or revise it.
3. Counterintuitive: Don't get so caught up in being "concise" that you sacrifice clarity or effectiveness (or so caught up in being "clear" that you sacrifice effectiveness and concision...etc.); don't forget that the best writing often violates prescriptive rules; don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Often, people are better writers than they give themselves credit for, and worrying about whether a piece of writing fits into the paradigm of "clear, concise, effective" (or any other) can keep you from evaluating whether it truly does - which you can generally learn best by letting it out into the wild.

I started to respond but then I got a lot of other comments and forgot to finish up, apologies !

So I have more to say about how to combat it, and I don't want to rush that response. But here's my answer to your first 2 questions:

Right now, those detectors are absolute trash. Only fools would rely on them and I cringe every time I see a post on Reddit claiming someone has been falsely accused of using them.

But they're getting better. I don't think TurnItIn (itself notable for a lot of false positives) is going to squander that profit opportunity, and as I posted in the r/unemployedprofs subreddit a few weeks ago, TurnItIn is already giving MVP demos of its AI detector to educators.

I also think that humans are becoming quick to recognize AI-generated content.
Especially the humans who care about words and writing and do a lot (or even just a little) reading - I think it was u/ramsesthepigeon who mentioned that its style has become recognizable.

ChatGPT has been out for what, 90 days? 100? By this point, its writing style (or lack thereof) is practically a meme. Like pornography, people know AI writing when they see it. So I think that very, very quickly, humans who have to assess a lot of written content will get better at identifying it, and the detectors will get better, before the AI generator game itself gets better and then we'll be in another round of this AI-vs-humans game for a little while....but even if the tech iterates before the detection tech, I think that people who've learned to identify ChatGPT writing will bring not just their skills in identifying it, but also their (potentially, by that point, reactionary) suspicion to what they read, which will make identifying it easier - even if it is also potentially a minefield of false accusations.

Occasionally. There are lots of junk "peer-reviewed" journals that are basically pay-to-play. Every so often we get requests for full-pipeline research for those journals (I do not personally bid on those so I don't know how they progress). Sometimes we get project requests for helping with edits / proofreading / finalizing formatting and similar for completed research that's about to be submitted, or that journals have asked authors to revise/resubmit. I haven't worked on those tasks personally, but I know we've got a lot of professors who can probably do that in their sleep.

Great question, haha. We've seen a lot more non-traditional students, along with a lot of customers completing some kind of mandated ongoing professional education - particularly nursing and teaching. We get way more grad students using our service than we used to, or at least that's my perspective. We also get a lot more requests for entire courses.

Publish fast, perish young, leave a beautiful corpse.

I'm thinking - this is a great question and I don't want to rush an answer, nor do I want you to think I'm ignoring you.

LOL only if I get residuals when it is inevitably picked up by a streaming service

When we were working as professors, most of us had experiences in which our attempts to "prosecute" students for plagiarism - regardless of evidence or the hours we spent preparing the paperwork and evidence - resulted in things like: being told we were wasting everyone's time, being screamed at by chairs and course supervisors who felt we should be less "rigid" or that any plagiarism at all was a reflection of our poor teaching, being asked if we needed therapy because "maybe you just need to accept that your students are learning from you," abhorrent behavior and / or statements from the accused student(s) that led to more institutional shrugging, non-renewed teaching contracts or other penalties if our "prosecution" of the students resulted in poor evaluations or a number of F's in the course above a certain threshold, and ultimately, few or no consequences for the students.

So, in a sense, working as a professor could also be described as "earning money helping people cheat." The difference, of course, being that adjuncts don't really earn any money.

If you're asking what I wish people asked, then here are some questions I'd love to answer:

• What assignment or assessment design features make our jobs hard to do? (I have read so, so many comments by ✨Employed Professors✨ who insist their assignments are "cheat-proof"...)
• What broad trends have we seen in students / our customers over the last 10+ years?
• What sets us apart in an industry that's otherwise a "wretched hive of scum and villainy" ?

Hi,

Our rates vary - users post a project (posting is always free), then writers bid on it. Generally, our rates start at $30 per page (where a page is about 250-300 words). Crazy deadlines and very challenging content can push the prices up.

Nope, not at all. I have a couple of comments in this post about that, and we have some blogs on our site about it specifically. But the main reasons are:

1. Current AI detection tools suck and I'm sure there will continue to be an arms race between AI and TurnItIn / its ilk, but the rapid growth of AI detection is going to put a real damper on the AI writing services that claim to do what we're doing.
2. Large language models can't really think or reason. They can generate text without errors. They can't make arguments. They can't easily use external sources. It will be a long time before they can do those things, and by that point, the AI detection will be much better and more ingrained.
3. The actual humans who still assess writing are also very good at detecting AI-driven content.

🥇 Take my poor unemployed man's fake gold

Interesting question. At one point in the past, we might have, but the way higher ed has gone - especially in the last several years - perhaps not.

I love this question.

I think of ChatGPT like a Faberge egg (or maybe at least like the original Mechanical Turk). It looks very fancy and valuable, but it's hollow. There is no internal reasoning within it. It is auto-correct on steroids and the things people say about it are frightening. It's not sitting there making algorithmic decisions based on questions like "What is the best way to write a five-paragraph essay on this topic?" or "As a large language model, what is my opinion?" or "What are the best resources to use to make this argument?" ChatGPT is just parsing through its memory of the corpus to which it's been exposed and making calculations based on what words or patterns it's seen previously.

ChatGPT can generate text and we can parse that text and think "Yes, these are definitely words, sentences, and paragraphs." It glitters with banal transitional phrases and its absolute adherence to rubric-driven writing. But if you tap on that facade of error-free, style-free sentences, it falls apart. It's all just filler, as I'm sure you know.

The problematic Venn Diagram is the intersection of expectations for algorithmic writing, under paid / apathetic / burned out educators or readers who just skim and look for writing with features that tick off boxes, and people who either cannot or who choose not to acknowledge the value of critical thinking and writing. That's where the real "magic" of ChatGPT lies: People who don't know good writing when they see it and perceive anything with written language as a horrible burden, who are producing content for an audience that is mostly only able or willing to identify superficial stylistic deficits, and an underlying structure (school, algorithm, whatever) that has created this, I don't know, golden calf of what "good" writing is: Something that can be crammed into five-interval rubrics and graded by AI and that keeps lowering the common denominator down to another level of hell.

So if ChatGPT is a Faberge egg, maybe we're the golden goose (or geese), because we write something that's more than just not incorrect. It isn't algorithmic because writing was never really supposed to be, because writing is supposed to be for humans: Messy, holistic, heuristic humans, not robots that are only capable of skimming for algorithms.

Ah... this is a great question.

As an individual (not speaking on behalf of the company here), I do miss some things about being a professor:

• Those rare moments when my classes got really interested in something and we had a fascinating, invigorating discussion. The times when I learned from my students were best of all.
• I'm an extrovert, so I kind of miss just having a workplace with IRL interactions. There are also some specific colleagues I really miss.
• Maybe this sounds cheesy, but the optimism and energy of The Youth™. There is something infectious (nope, not COVID) about being around a lot of people who still have dreams and ambition and are just getting started ( that includes the many wonderful non-trad students who were in school at some other point in their lives) and generally think they have the world all figured out .
• The number of campus events with free food.

I really do not miss:

• The athletics apparatus. The shit with which I had to put up in the name of that institution, don't even get me started. At least now the athletes can make money.
• The surprising lack of autonomy I had as an instructor. Everything that went wrong was my fault (including the academic integrity reports I had to make, or the reports from a few scary incidents involving immature students); everything that went well was just the Department™ or the course design or the textbook.
• The egos. It might be my experiences, and this may be very different at other institutions, but academia seems to be a permanent state of big fish / small pond syndrome.
• The growth of the customer service mentality. At least at UP, we've stripped away the performance of an educational credential not being a transaction, so it sort of makes sense.
• Simultaneously not having the resources or background skills to bring disadvantaged (non-athlete) students up to the level needed to succeed in my classes AND having to grade on intangibles like "professionalism" that seemed to stack their disadvantage and ultimately result in just weeding out the first-generation or otherwise culturally disadvantaged students.
• The hassle:bucks ratio of the entire experience. Teaching was sub-minimum wage.

On my best days at UP, I interact with students in ways that resemble the ones I wanted to have when I made my terrible life choice to become a professor. My favorite UP clients are the ones who are trying to learn and use the service more like tutoring.

On my worst days, I just try to learn how to code.

Good luck. We definitely feel that struggle. If you like writing, I've heard there are some OK freelance opportunities on sites like SimplyPsychology I am not sure how good their rates are or how true it is they are always seeking good writers, but if that sounds decent to you, it might be worth a shot.

I think the fact that our writers are either happily married or happily single by choice speaks very highly of our dating profile and / or breakup letter abilities!

Just one? Hm... Once a client had me write text messages to their friends and family. I don't mean the tough stuff like "Dear mom, this is why I'm going NC..." I mean, like, birthday messages. With lots of obnoxious back and forth about specific emoji and the relative nuance of "Happy birthday buddy!" While I admired that particular client's apparent fascination with the specificity of language, it was definitely strange.

I personally have revised and edited a handful, but it has been a while. They were all interesting and worthwhile projects, though - stuff I hope got patented or comes on the market.

We'll write almost anything - the way our site works is, users post a project and then the writers bid. So if any of our writers has the time & qualifications to do it and the client likes the price, then we'll take it on. I've personally worked on letters about traffic tickets, written copy for online stores, B-plans (business and birth), content for MOOCs, recommendation letters, and once, a sex diary.