The jury is still out on the Pay-per-click Advertising on the Electronic Writer Website. We are certainly not getting rich from it, but at the same time, advertisements of some sort are on EVERY website on the internet. It is almost a legitimacy issue: you are NOT a legitimate website unless you have advertisements running down the column or as a part of your search results.

Although the legitimacy issue is interesting and may be a subject for a future post, the more pressing issue is the time requirement. I am spending an inordinate amount of time managing the ads that are displayed on the site. The service calls them “Competitive Ads” and they give you a way to block your competitors from advertising on your site, but I don’t think of companies who sell essays as my competition. I think of them as my Antithesis!

Apparently, this is a hot market because everyone wants to sell essays. Along the fringes of this market, people are selling essay-writing services. Apparently, there is a market for WRITERS–and, they are somehow able to make it affordable to college students. It makes me a little suspect of the writing, as well as a little suspect of the company. Do you think they are actually able to afford staff writers to create your essay?

There are also single-subject essay selling services: you can purchase all of your essays for law school, for example. This has got to be the most idiotic game to play in law school. In an industry where you are being trained to memorize vast portions of documents and recall them during an argument, the last thing I want to do is purchase someone else’s writing and: skip the training that I need, as well as possibly using your instructor’s paper.

My biggest problem with the essay-selling business is an ethical one. I understand, and actually support a fair market economy and capitalism, but there is a point in which you must ask yourself if you are doing good things for your community. Are you making your world a better place? If you are selling essays to students, you are targeting the same marketplace as the tobacco companies. You motto may as well be, “let’s get them while they are young–before they know any better.” And, most likely, those students haven’t taken a college-level course in ethics.

I am unwilling to paint students as shapeless lumps of intellectual clay, but I will say this: college students are in a transitory place. Most students are leaving the comforts of their home and are confronted with new issues such as: feeding myself, and washing my laundry. These are base-level issues that they most likely did not have to address in their homes. And, while these same students are busy worrying about food, clothing, and shelter for the first time in their lives, there simply may not be enough time left to think about ethical issues and consequences.

If there was a disclaimer that said, “Using a plagiarized essay may get you expelled from your University!” on the Website, would you use the service? I would stop and think about it.

I am not lobbying for government intervention, nor am I lobbying for censure (in any form). In fact, I am building this site as part of a response to these services.

There is something else that needs to be said, and it is to the owners, the inventors, the maintainers, the hosters, the writers and everyone else involved. It is an important question that can cascade to all levels of society, as a matter of fact. This is not my own ethical question. In fact, it was originally posed to me by a Nuclear Containment Engineer.

While we are busy asking “Could we,” what about answering a different question–Should we?