The shit blog of Paul Chris Jones

For years I've worked as an essay writer. This job involves writing essays for students who can't or don't want to write the essays themselves.

The first essay

It all started when some guy contacted me out of the blue:

Hey

I saw your ad on kijiji

Can you write essays

I need an essay about Mactbeth

What ad? I only had one advert on the internet, and it was an advert for my services as an English tutor. So I don't know where he got the idea that I could write essays.

I checked to see if somehow, perhaps while drunk, I had created an online ad saying I wrote essays for money. But I hadn't.

But I needed the money. So I agreed to do it.

Writing the essay honestly wasn't all that hard. Writing essays was just about the only thing I was good at at school. I had it finished in a few hours.

A few days later, I met up with the guy to give him the essay and collect the money.

We met in a Tim Horton's coffee shop. He was a scruffy-looking guy in his late teens. He looked like he hadn't slept for a week.

"Hey" I said.

"Hey" he said.

I handed him the essay. He skim-read the first page and then said, "Looks good. How much was it again?"

"50 dollars?" I asked.

He checked his pockets. After a lot of searching, he eventually pulled out four crumpled Canadian ten-dollar bills, and a few American dollar notes.

"Thanks for this man," he said, getting up from the table. "You're a lifesaver."

Then we said goodbye and left.

The second essay

I realised I could write essays as a job. So I made an advert on Kijiji:

Essay writing services - $8 per 100 words

Need an essay? I'm Paul Jones, and I'm an essay writer. Hire me to write your assignments, essays, and homework!

I charge just 8 cents per word.

Call me on 613-555-0177 or send me an email.

Hope to hear from you soon!

Paul Jones

But I heard nothing. Not for a long while. Until, one day, when my phone rang.

"Hello?" I said.

"Hi," said a guy on the other end. "I saw your ad on the internet."

"Oh right." Which ad had he seen? I'd been busy and now I had four adverts online: an advert for English teaching, an advert for essay writing, an advert for proofreading, and an advert for my private Photoshop lessons. (I didn't actually know how to use Photoshop, let alone teach it, but I figured I could learn as I went along.) "Which ad was it?" I asked.

"The, uh, one for essay writing," he said. "I have this essay, and uh, normally I could do it myself, but it's due today, at 6 pm? And I don't have time to do it. Do you think you could help?"

Write an essay in one day?

"How many pages is it?" I asked.

"Oh, not many. Just fifteen. It's easy."

Fifteen pages? Fifteen pages in one day?

"So can you do it?" he asked.

"Sure?" I said.

So I spent the whole day working on the essay.

The essay was about the drop in value of the Canadian dollar and its effect on the Canadian economy. The topic was relevant to my own life because I'd seen the Canadian dollar fall in value, and watched the value of my savings fall correspondingly.

I had to write convincingly about things like “final consumption expenditure”, "short run aggregate supply", and "the Keynesian Aggregate Expenditure model". This was a little tricky as I had never heard of any of these terms before and also, I'm an idiot.

Luckily, I had an ace in my sleeve: YouTube. For any topic, chances are an Indian has made a YouTube video about it. You can search for anything, and in less than ten seconds, you can have an Indian man explain the topic to you. So I watched Indian YouTube videos and wrote the essay as I watched. It all went well, except for halfway through the day, when I realised I'd completely got everything wrong and had to fix everything.

But to my surprise, by the end of the day, the essay was finished. It wasn't great, it wasn't good, but it would get a passing grade. Probably. I was proud of it.

The guy was happy too. I met him in the evening. He handed me an envelope thick with bills.

As he drove away, I looked in the envelope and pulled out bills in amazement. A handful of twenty-dollar bills. It had been a long time since I'd seen so much money. Seen money at all, for that matter. I stared at the notes. Queen Elizabeth II stared back at me. She was smiling. I was smiling too.

More essays

That month, I only wrote that one essay and made $280.

But the second month, I wrote five essays and made $350.

And the fourth month, I wrote twelve essays and made $680.

I was making more and more money.

And I must have been doing a good job because I got repeat customers.

I wrote seventeen essays for a girl called Maria. Maria was in high school and she wanted to be a hairdresser. But to get into hairdressing school, she first had to graduate high school. And to graduate high school, she had to write essays on topics like public attitudes toward food additives, obesity in Native Americans, Peter Singer's views on poverty, aquifer pollution, and Bangladesh. What kind of system requires people to write essays about obesity and Bangladesh just to become a hairdresser? A broken system, that's what. Anyway, I wrote all her essays.

I wrote twenty-one essays for a kid called Joey. Like Maria, he was a teenager in college. He seemed to be studying a bit of everything. Or technically I was studying everything because I was doing all the work for him. For Joey, I wrote essays about non-renewable energy, the effect of alcohol on student grades (unsurprisingly, alcohol makes students' grades go down), the 2004 film Troy, the legalisation of cannabis (always a popular topic among students), women at the Olympics, Freud’s explanation of day-dreams, the efficacy of Tribulus Terrestris as an aphrodisiac (it's not effective so don't bother trying it).

AIDS

My clients were as varied as the topics I was writing about. One client, for example, was a gay Chinese immigrant called Zhen.

One day, I met with Zhen to discuss an essay. But he seemed distracted and upset.

"Do you think it's normal?" Zhen said. "It's not normal. He didn't tell me. He didn't tell me under the day after."

I had no idea what he was talking about. So I asked him to explain.

"Yesterday I met a guy on Craigslist, and well, last night I went to his house, and we.... well, you know... And then today, he called me up and told me he has AIDS. Is that normal? He should have told me before."

Now I understood: there was a very real chance that Zhen had contracted AIDS from his hook-up the night before.

I didn't know what to say. "Have you seen a doctor?" I asked finally.

"Well, yeah, I have. Well, I mean, I will, later today. First I had to meet with you and show you this essay I need."

Zhen, for all I know, could have died from AIDS by now.

The mom

Another day, my phone rang. I picked it up.

"Hello?" I said.

"Hi, I saw your ad on Craigslist?" It was a woman's voice.

"Oh right," I said. (I'm bad at basic human interaction.)

"Wel, it's my son, you see. He needs an essay for high school."

Wait did she say her son needs an essay? Her son. Her son needs an essay. Her son.

"He doesn't have time to write it himself, you see," she continued. "He's very busy."

Busy doing what? Running a multinational business empire? Managing a global drug trafficking business? He's only a teenager, for Christ's sake!

"Of course," I said.

"He could write it himself," she carried on. "He's a smart kid. He just doesn't have the time."

"Of course, of course," I said. "Could you email me the details?"

So she emailed me the details. She also wrote, "Please do not use an extended vocabulary as it's my son's first year of high school."

So I wrote the essay - 350 words, in French, about a French play - for $40. The mom was happy with my work and hired me to write two more essays for her son.

Vlad and the Master's thesis

I had another client called Vlad. Now, when you hear a name like Vlad, you suspect he's going to be a vampire. And when I met him, he did have pale skin. But that's just because he took lots of drugs. Lots of drugs. Vlad had come to Canada to study sociology but instead, he'd ended up doing drugs and getting several months behind on his studies.

So he hired me to write his Master's thesis for him. I charged Vlad $1,000, a sum he was happy to pay.

The thesis was my biggest project yet. It had to be 15,000 words and to a slightly better quality than the crap college essays I'd written so far.

It took me a week to write that thesis. By the end, my back ached horribly and my wrists were shiny and red from resting them on the laptop for so long.

But I'd finished the thesis. I'd actually written a Master's thesis! I was a genius.

But Vlad called me again a week later. "I got some bad news, man," he said. "My supervisor's not happy with the thesis."

"What?" I said. "Why?"

"It's the references."

"What about the references?" I said.

"The references, they're all websites. We can't use websites. The sources are supposed to be books and journal articles."

Shit. He was right. But in my defence, the topic had been so narrow and specific that I'd found literally nothing in academic sources. That's why I'd had to use websites.

"My supervisor's such a bitch. But don't worry, man," said Vlad. "It's my fault. I gave you a topic that was too specific. I'll give you an easier topic to write about."

I didn't like where this was going.

"You mean you want me to write another thesis?" I asked.

"Yeah, if you could," said Vlad. "I'll pay another $1,000 of course."

So Vlad paid me another $1,000 to write him a second thesis. A second 15,000-word Master's thesis.

It took me a week to finish it. I don't have many memories of that week, perhaps because my brain has blocked out the trauma. I remember sitting on the sofa with my laptop every day. By the end, I felt numb and shell-shocked like a soldier returning home from war. My right finger twitched involuntarily as if clicking a computer mouse.

When I met Vlad in the cafe to give him his second thesis, he said, "You look tired, man. You look worse than me!" I hoped I didn't look worse than him. He was a drug addict.

Anyway, there's a happy ending: Vlad passed his Master's degree! He's out there now, practising Sociology. Yay! (?)

Naif

I also wrote essays for a guy called Naif Al-Enazi. Naif was a bit more together than Vlad; whereas Vlad was a drug addict, Naif was the head of General Surgery at a large hospital. He was taking courses in the US and Canada, but he didn't have time to do the work, (or couldn't do it), so he handed it all over to me. I did 27 (twenty-seven!) projects for Naif, including PowerPoint presentations, a book chapter, journal articles, and a Master's thesis (another Master's thesis! And it was for the same university as Vlad's, too - McGill University. It makes me wonder if any students of McGill University ever do their own work.). I didn't care what the work was; as long as Naif paid me for it, I did it.

Several of the articles I wrote for Naif were published by journals. You can find my work in journals like Advances in Obesity, Weight Management & Control and The Saudi Journal of Obesity. There's a textbook out there too, containing things I wrote. It's being sold for 145 euro.

Did no-one ever wonder how Naif, who could only write short emails in broken English ("Thank you, Its nice one"), could somehow produce entire book chapters in perfect English? Apparently, no one ever questioned it. As long as Naif paid for his course, as long as the money went around, then no one cares where the words come from, I guess. Certainly, no one at McGill university cared.

There was one time when Naif didn't pay me. He owed me $993 for various projects. Three months went by, and still no payment. I sent emails to Naif reminding him about the money he owed me, but nothing. He never replied.

So I wrote him this email:

Hi Naif,

I writing this email to ask again about the outstanding payment of $993.04. Just a warning that if you don't pay, then I will have to tell the Surgical Education Research Fellowship, the Saudi Journal of Obesity, the American Association of Bariatric Surgeons, etc. that it was me who wrote the essays and articles.

Regards,

Paul

Miraculously, Naif replied just a few hours later:

Why u r saying that!!!! I dont like threatening voice

BTW, The amount transferred 2 days ago

You should not talk to me in this way .

The amount was not "transferred 2 days ago" as Naif claimed. My account was still empty. But, three days later, he sent the money. And he was wrote:

Paul

plz let me if you get t!! tnx

Naif had ignored me for three months, but after I sent him just one threatening email, he paid me in three days. It was like magic.

By the way, Naif got me to write a Master's thesis for his brother too, Fawaz AlEnazi. Yes, for his brother. Cheating academically must be a family business. Maybe all his aunts, uncles, cousins and second cousins have all hired essay writers to get them Master's degrees. If you ever go to a doctor and see the name AlEnazi on the bronze plaque outside the door, run away.

Alexandra Lato

In February 2016, a woman called Alexandra Lato sent me this email:

hi i would need a short 600 word concise essay about a 20 page article. I would need it by wednesday at midnight. Do you think you could do it? I can send you all of the details and guidelines as well as the article.

I asked for $80, as it involved quite a bit of reading. She replied:

Sure no problem I could pay you Friday is that ok

So I finished the essay. I sent it to her. She was happy with it. (I later found out the teacher was happy with it too - he said "Great first paper" and gave her a B.) So at this point, Alex should pay me, right?

No. Instead of paying me on Friday, as she promised, she sent me this:

I plan on using your services until the month of April (I believe i have three other essays due, similar to this). I am getting a huge check from the government in April, so would it be okay with you if I paid you once for the total of all essays you write for me?

I told her no, that wouldn't be okay. I asked her if we could meet up in person on Friday so she could pay me in cash.

She wrote:

I was called i to work Friday, so I won't be able to meet up. How about next week? Say around mid-week? My work schedule is sometimes a little hectic, but don't worry, I promise we'll meet up

We did not meet up. Instead, somehow, I continued writing essays for her, despite not receiving any payment. I guess I'm an idiot.

April came and went. Now, if you were observant, you might remember that Alex was supposed to get a "huge check" from the government in April that would allow her to finally pay me. Well, I heard nothing from Alex. So I wrote her an email asking if she had received her tax refund yet.:

She repield:

Hi paul,

I didn't receive it yet

Soon after, she sent this:

Hey paul!!!

I need you to answer asap!!!

Could you do a last thing for me? It's quite long and has to be given to me by Thursday 10pm but I'll pay you well.

If u can do that I can have the FULL payment for everything to you by the 15th of May (I get paid then)

It was a 3,000-word essay about the emergence of nationalism under colonial rule in Africa. Stupidly, I agreed to write it, despite the fact she hadn't yet paid me a single cent yet for the four other essays I'd already written for her.

So I wrote the essay and sent it to her. Now I was getting nervous. Now she owed me $460 for five essays and she still hadn't paid anything yet. I was hoping she'd live up to her promise to send the full payment by the 15th of May.

But no. Instead, she wrote:

I don't have the full amount right now. I can pay my bank transfers is 3 payments if that's okay with you. I'm really tight on my budget right now but I will pay you I promise. I'm not that kind of person!

Just when I thought I'd never see any money, a miracle happened: on June 1st, 103 days after she'd first contacted me, Alex sent me $100 via a bank transfer. I finally had some money from her. I'd just had to wait 14 weeks to get it.

Alex promised "ill send the next soon". But time went by and I heard nothing from her. So I sent her an email:

Hi Alex,

Just wondering about the $360 still owed?

Paul

More time passed. Still nothing.

Finally, tired of waiting, I sent this to her:

Hi Alex,

Since you didn't reply to my last email, I take it you're not interested in paying me the rest. If I don't receive the rest of the payment ($360) then I'll tell your university that it was me who wrote the essays.

Paul

Alex's reply

That very same day, as if by magic, Alex sent a reply:

Hi Paul,

You need to calm down, I was going to reply to you tonight or tomorrow.

Reply to me tonight or tomorrow? I doubt that. She'd been ignoring me for over a month. She was probably planning to never write to me again. Anyway, her email continued:

I haven't had a lot of time to reply or for anything for that matter due to personal matters.

I will pay you, because I respect you, and I don't want to be an asshole. I can wire some money to you by the end of this week, but that's about it for now.

Email #2

Eight minutes later - eight minutes later - she sent this:

Paul,

I sent you 200.00$ thats all I can afford right now.

Please wait till August for the rest.

Thank you

Somehow, during eight minutes, she'd suddenly found $200 to send me. It was a miracle, akin to the The Miracle on 34th Street. I wonder where the money had come from? Maybe it had magically materialised out of thin air.

Email #3

But then wait - what's this? Just sixteen minutes later, another email from Alex arrived in my inbox:

I did two different transfers from two different bank accounts one for 200$ and one for 160$

please confirm that you received both.

So in sixteen minutes she'd raised another $160. Amazing. I don't know how she did it. (Though in my imagination, she frantically called her mom and dad and asked to borrow some money.)

I had waited months for the money. But once I threatened to tell her school that she'd cheated, she paid me the same day. It's amazing how quickly she could pay me when she was motivated.

Do I like writing essays?

I believe that writing essays is one of the most soul-destroying jobs there is. Here are ten reasons why writing essays for a living sucks.

1) It's unethical

First of all, the work is unethical. You're helping someone cheat. It's as simple as that.

Your work doesn't benefit society. In fact, you're damaging society because you're helping devious people to gain qualifications without doing the actual work. You're making the world a worse place. You won't get job satisfaction.

2) Someone else takes credit for your work

Second, someone else is taking credit for work you've done. Imagine you're Michaelangelo painting the Sistene chapel and, just when you finish applying the correct hue to Jesus's nipple, someone comes over and claims they painted that ceiling, and they take the paintbrush out of your hand and kick you outside into the gutter. Imagine that.

3) My work is ultimately for nothing

Third, only one person will read what you wrote: the professor. No one else knows what you wrote, apart from the student (if they bothered to read the essay before handing it in).

What you're writing isn't going to make a difference in the world. It won't change minds. It won't enlighten anyone. It won't bring people to arms. While other people are writing articles and books that will inspire others, you're just writing something only one person will ever read.

And the students don't care what you write. They only care that it gets a good grade. In fact, they probably can't even tell a good essay from a bad one. To a lot of students, a good essay is just one that has a nice cover. (I really did have one student who was amazed by the cover I'd designed.)

And a lot of the time you won't even know what the professor thought of your essay. The students don't tend to pass on feedback to me. When they do, it's usually negative, like "You used too many bullet points here" or "You failed to read the instructions properly" or "You can't write".

Then there's the situation where you finish an essay, and it actually turned out well, and you're proud of it. You've actually written something good, or at least, half-decent. Handing over an essay like that feels sad. It's sad to see it go. It's like waving goodbye to a child at a train station. You'll never get any credit for it, nor will anyone read it apart from the professor. So what was the point? Apart from getting money.

4) I got paid surprisingly little

Fourth, I didn't even earn much money. Sometimes I was working for less than minimum wage.

Stupidly, I charged the same basic rate of 7 cents per word regardless of how difficult the work was. So it was 7 cents a word for a high school essay and 7 cents a word for a Master's thesis. I'd slave away for weeks on a thesis when I could have finished dozens of high school essays instead.

A Master's thesis is 15,000 words, so a 7 cents a word, I earned just $1,050. For something that took me three weeks to write. I've since learned that other essay writers charge around $5,000 to write a Master's thesis. Fuck.

5) Stress

Fifth, writing essays is bad for your mental health. I could feel my stress rising every time I pumped out one of those essays. My heart beating harder in my chest as my blood pressure rose. It wasn't the grade I was worried about. If the essay gets an F, I don't care. What was stressful was knowing that I was ball-and-chained to my computer, unable to leave until I had completed that day's assignment.

Also, the clients often contacted me with panicky messages, "Did you start yet?" "Did you finish yet?", "I'm panicking!" Of course, this adds to my own stress.

All the stress and pressure gave me nightmares. Yes, nightmares about essays. I would dream that I was back at university, and in the dream, I had missed the deadline for an important assignment. I would wake up with my heart pounding, about to run to the laptop to start writing the essay, but then I'd remember I'd graduated from university ten years ago.

6) Lack of social interation

Sixth, you're sitting by yourself all day, in front of a computer screen. There's no workplace banter. There are no workplace romances (unless you count me and my right hand.) It's unhealthy. Humans are social and need people to talk to.

7) It's tiring

Seventh, when you've finished the essay, and you're exhausted, but you're feeling sweet relief that the task is finally over, the student inevitably says, "This shouldn't be like this" and you have to work on it again.

8) I do a bad job

Eighth, I'm bad at writing so I can't even take pride in doing a good job. I often write shit. Nor do I do proper research. With the money the students pay me, I don't have time to do proper research. I just type some search words in Google Scholar and use the first results that pop up. What I write might be bullshit and I have no way of knowing because I have no time to check.

9) It's bad for you physically

Ninth, essay writing is bad for your body. Sitting down all day gave me back pain. Using the computer all day gave me RSI.

10) Some of the students are ungrateful shits

Most of the students I wrote essays for were thankful for my help. Some of them were even overjoyed. One girl gave me a "Thank You!" greetings card and I've still kept it to this day.

But then there were other students. There were students who resented me. Everything I wrote, they cast a critical and doubtful eye over before handing over the money. They probably thought I was trying to scam them by giving them pages of nonsense. I wished I had been scamming them because it would have saved me countless hours writing the essays. But I didn't think of that idea at the time, unfortunately

11) I don't like writing essays

Here's an eleventh, extra reason why essay writing sucks: essays are hard to write. Writing one is horrible. Every student I've ever known, including myself, has always left essays to the last minute. Why? Because we don't want to do them! Think about it: if essays were fun to write, then people would be writing them for fun, as a hobby. But do you see people writing essays for fun? I don't.

I think this actually should be the number one reason why my essay writing job sucked. Writing essays is hard. Even though it looks like I'm just sitting on a chair, it's actually hard work. I'd rather break rocks in a prison chain gang than write essays.

The good side of essay writing

Okay, writing essays for a living is not all bad. I got to learn about new topics. I got to read interesting material that I wouldn't have otherwise read. The work challenged me to think deeply about subjects, to be critical of evidence. The irony is that the students were supposed to be thinking deeply, not me.

But you can't even learn much from writing essays all day. Because you don't have time to go into topics in detail. The client only pays you a pittance so you only have time for a superficial, surface scan of the material. You want to get each essay done as fast as possible because you're being paid a lump sum, not by the hour. Just type, type, type and give it to the student paying me.

Other stuff

I once finished an essay for one guy, and he asked me if I could change the dates in the references for him. The dates of access were all too near the deadline and he wanted them spaced more apart. This was something he could easily have done himself. He just had to literally delete a few numbers and type some new numbers. But instead, he found it easier to call me and ask me to do it.

Then sometimes I had students who promised me a bonus when I finished the essay or if the essay got a good grade. But I never received the bonus. Whether that was due to forgetfulness or just shitty behaviour, I don't know. Or perhaps due to the fact I didn't get them a good grade.

I'll admit that writing essays wasn't an ethical job. I was not only helping kids cheat, but I was also undermining the education system.

Do you think I wanted to write essays? Do you think I somehow enjoyed it? Dealing with whiny college kids, anxiety-inducing deadlines, back pain and RSI? Do you think I liked students hounding me all the time, asking me when their essay would be finished? How I wish I'd been able to do something else, like frolic in fountains or dance naked in fields with butterflies!

But I had no choice. I didn't want to write essays, but I had to: for the money. It's the same reason a prostitute gets out of bed every morning to suck dicks: for the money. She doesn't want a dick in her mouth. She'd prefer something wholesome like All-Bran cereal. But does she have a choice? Have a choice she does not. She has to suck dicks: for the money. Just like I had to write essays: for the money.

But essay writing was a job I could do and I could do it well. Some people are good at drawing. Other people are good at acting. I was good at writing essays. Or fairly good at it, anyway. It was my calling.

Anyway, I don't do that anymore. Thank Christ.