Page 65 - SpringBoard_Writing_Workshop_Grade8_Flipbook

Writing Workshop 5 (continued)
My Notes
The second type of client is the one-timer. A chemistry major trapped in a poetry class thanks to the vagaries of schedule and distribution requirements, or worse, the poet trapped in a chemistry class. These clients were generally lost and really did simply need a decent summary of their class readings — I once boiled the 1000-page New Testament Theology by Donald Guthrie into a 30-page précis over the course of a weekend for a quick $600.
Others are stuck on their personal statements for college applications, and turn
to their parents, who then turn to a term paper mill. One mother unashamedly summarized her boy and his goals like so: “[My son] is a very kind hearted young
man. One who will make a difference in whatever he does. Barely can go unnoticed because of his vivacious character, happiness, and joy in life. He is very much in tune with his fortune and often helps the less fortunate.” The kid planned to be a pre-med major if accepted, but was applying to a competitive college as a Women’s Studies major because Mother was “told the chances of him getting into [prominent college] under less desirable subjects (as opposed to Business) was better.” Finally, she explained to me the family philosophy — “Since our family places great emphasis on education, [boy] fully accepts that the only guarantee for a good and stable future can be only achieved through outstanding education.”
The third group is perhaps the most tragic: They are well-educated professionals who simply lack English-language skills. Often they come from the former Soviet Union, and in their home countries were engineers, medical professionals, and scientists. In the United States, they drive cabs and have to pretend to care about “Gothicism” in “A Rose For Emily” for the sake of another degree. For the most part, these clients actually send in their own papers and they get an edit from a native speaker. Sometimes they even pinch-hit for the brokers, doing papers on graduate-level physics and nursing themselves.
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.
Term paper work is also extremely easy, once you get the hang of it. It’s like an old dance routine buried in one’s muscle memory. You hear the tune — say, “Unlike the ancient Greek tragic playwrights, Shakespeare likes to insert humor in his tragedies” — and your body does the rest automatically. I’d just scan Google or databases like Questia. com for a few quotes from primary and secondary sources, create an argument based on whatever popped up from my search, write the introduction and underline the thesis statement, then fill in the empty spaces between quotes with whatever came to mind.
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. DUMB CLIENTS make up much of the trade. They have no idea whether or not Ophelia committed suicide or was secretly offed by Gertrude, but they know how to count to seven if they ordered seven pages.
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
16 SpringBoard® Writing Workshop with Grammar Activities Grade 8
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