Date: Thu, 21 Apr 2005 13:40:21 -0000 From: "writinglance" Subject: NEW FREELANCE PROJECTS on Directfreelance.com 4/21/2005

Dear Freelancers!

Recent Projects:

4/21/2005 - #21192 Foucault Philosophy Term Paper ...Article/News/Press Release Writing/Editing I need a writer to write a 25-page term paper (double-spaced) on Foucault''s philosophy. I have an article that contains all the ideas that are needed to write this paper. However, those ideas need to be re-written so this term-paper is original. Please provide quote me a flat-fee to for this service.

I subscribe to a fairly good Yahoo group called Work For Writers that sends out job opportunities for freelance writers, as a way of both finding new markets for my work and maintaining my own newsletter for writers and journalism students looking for work, The Handy Job Hunter for Writers. But this week there's been a spate of job listings coming in from student plagiarists looking to hire professionals to write their papers for them, like the listing above.

Subscribers to this list have been expressing their outrage and strongly recommending that others don't take those jobs. But some are defending the practice as legitimate "Work-for-Hire." "Work-for-Hire" is common in the freelance writing game -- it's what you do when you are contracted to write a single document for a company, who generally tells you what to write, claims all rights to what you've written, and almost always removes the writer's byline (replacing it with their own). It's the lowest job on the food chain for the freelancer, but for many it is unfortunately a necessary way to supplement income so they can pay their bills.

In most cases "Work-for-Hire" is legitimate, but being hired to commit a fraud in the classroom is obviously unethical (and illegal, though I've yet to hear of a school convicting a student with "fraud" for plagiarism). But it appears to be a widely growing trend. I recall seeing an interview with a person who makes a VERY good living writing papers for college students on the ABC special report, Cheating Crisis in America's Schools...and that writer was netting more money for a single term paper than most writers get for writing a department for a magazine. Nate Kushner's weblog got a lot of attention recently, when he "outed" a student who approached him via instant messaging, trying to negotiate rates for writing a paper on Hindu religion. And, obviously, term paper mills are still thriving businesses.

I've written here before about how teachers can try to prevent plagiarism in the classroom, but today I'm marvelling over the irony that I am BOTH a teacher who gets papers from students AND a freelance writer who is receiving solicitations for writing them for students. (If I were truly entrepreneurial, I would design a paper so difficult that students would be likely to turn to professionals for "work for hire," then take their job offers under a pseudonym, and write the papers myself -- which would not only net me some easy $ but also make them oh so very easy to grade. Hah!)

But seriously: this reminds me of the importance of teaching ethics when training students in the "business side" of writing. Whereas most college classes only focus on the aesthetics of creative writing, the various formats of business documents, or the effective methods of research, the ethical application of these skills needs to be emphasized just as much. Not just in terms of source citation -- but also distribution and publication of one's work. I have seen a number of advanced courses in creative writing and "how to" articles which emphasize the goal of making money -- and with good reason, because there are a lot of markets for writers out there that pay a pittance or nothing at all, preying on the writer's ego and the desire to see one's name in print. But they tend to go over the top in their advocacy for "guerilla marketing" and trading on your skills in a quest for a buck.

Oh, and what would Foucault say about that job listing at the top of this entry? He'd probably chuckle at the way a commercial worldview has blinded all who are a party to the exchange, and point back to his article on the "Author-Function" (aka "What is an Author?"). I'd like to imagine that the student writer who is soliciting a freelancer's "work-for-hire" is doing so as a sly and canny form of research about Foucault's essay on literature as property -- as proof positive that an author's name is a social construct that is necessary only to make the creator accountable for acts of discursive transgression -- but I somehow doubt it.

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