Essay Buying Guide

Before You Buy an Essay

Buying an essay can be a useful way to gain valuable help with your writing skills and can be a great tool for improving learning. However, you should never buy an essay to simply submit as your own: not only will this reduce your own learning, but even worse, this would be classed as academic plagiarism. We recommend that if you are planning on buying an essay, you should first try to find the help and support you need from your own university or lecturer. However, if you find that you can't get help and you are struggling with writing academic essays, then buying an essay as a model answer may be the right course for you.

Essay Buying Checklist

Once you have decided to buy an essay - and before starting any kind of order process - you should follow the checklist below to ensure that you have considered all the implications before entering into any kind of contract or making payment:

• 1. Make sure you know what your essay question or title is;
• 2. Ensure you have read the marking rubric or scheme to understand what is required from you to achieve the grade are aiming for;
• 3. Fully understand your budget before making any payments;
• 4. Get together any supporting information from your course that can help the writer to produce the most relevant model answer for your needs;
• 5. Make sure you have fully read and understood your university's policy on academic integrity and have read the fair-use-policy and terms and conditions of whichever service provider you choose.

When you are happy that you have all the information you need to proceed with buying an essay, then it's important to spend some time researching the companies available to see if they fit your needs. The section below on "staying safe" should help you avoid some of the most common pitfalls when buying your first essay.

Costs for Buying an Essay

When comparing the costs of buying an essay, it is important to understand that there is a very clear distinction between prices for a suitably qualified academic writer, and the prices advertised by a company who are using unqualified writers who may simply be copying content from the web or handbooks. The table below should help to filter out those companies that are not offering credible services:

The prices above marked in red signify warnings that the prices advertised simply do not reflect the costs involved with hiring a professional and suitably qualified academic writer. Either the cost is too low for any credible writer to be working for, or the cost is abnormally high and represents a very high price for academic work. Prices marked in green reflect a good spread of charges made by credible companies.

Why Buy an Essay?

Writing an academic essay is an acquired skill; no-one is born knowing how to write an essay, and if you have not been taught the correct way to write and reference academically, then you may be facing a daunting task. Buying an essay as a model answer can help to illustrate the correct way to academically write and reference, and because the work is written to your specific instructions, it is easy for you to see how the model answer applies to your specific essay question. Typically, a student will only need to buy one or two model essays before they understand how to write and reference work themselves.

Once you have the skills, you can begin to create your own work from scratch. If you are worried about submitting the work, then using a Marking / Proofreading Service first can highlight areas of improvement without the embarrassment of receiving negative feedback from your lecturer. Typically, costs for marking services are far lower than the cost of buying an essay.

Advantages of Buying an Essay

Many students who have bought an essay have found that having a well-written and referenced piece of work, written on a specific topic, can help them to understand how to approach writing an essay themselves. Many people learn best by following an example, and the way that essay writing skills are taught in universities don't necessarily work well for them.

Another advantage of buying an essay is that you get to learn from another professional whose time is dedicated to you, unlike at a university where you may never get any one-on-one time with your lecturer.

Disadvantages of Buying an Essay

The biggest disadvantage of buying an essay is missing out on real understanding if you do not re-write the work yourself. Simply handing in a bought essay as your own gives you no benefit: you do not learn the subject matter, you aren't aware of the sources that are referenced, and in the end, you devalue yourself as a future employee. Doing so is also dishonest and is classed as academic misconduct, which can have serious consequences for you in your academic career.

Another disadvantage of buying an essay over writing your own original work is the cost; after all, professionally written essays require time and expertise to prepare, and these skills come at a cost.

Finally, universities have wildly differing policies on students buying essays: even if the work has been completely re-written and referenced, your university may still see the act of buying an essay as a lack of academic integrity. It is important to be sure about where your institution stands on this practice.

Buying Safely

Recognising a Legitimate Writing Company

Legitimate companies have a number of identifying features that make them stand out from the crowd. From displaying a geographic phone number to appearing on Google StreetView, there are numerous factors that should reassure you that you are dealing with a reputable company before you make decide to buy an essay from them.

Understanding the Terminology

There are various types of companies and individuals that provide custom-written essays. The type of supplier you choose depends on your reasons for buying an essay. The three most common types of supplier providing custom written essays are:

• Essay Mill - The term "essay mill" refers to a company that sells essays in bulk. Usually, these type of companies re-sell the same work to multiple students, with much of the work being sourced directly from the web or printed materials. Over recent years, the term has been used to describe any type of organisation selling academic work, no matter how the work is produced. The term is now used primarily as a slur by the press to describe companies who they believe help students to gain an unfair advantage.
• Essay Writing Service - Unlike "essay mills", an "essay writing service" produces bespoke (or custom) essays for large numbers of individual students. These types of organisation typically have a large infrastructure and specialise in producing high-quality work that has been double-checked by professional proof-readers and quality checkers.
• Ghostwriter - This term refers to individuals who write work for another person with the intention of that work being submitted as the purchaser's own work. Using a ghostwriter is almost always considered to be academic dishonesty, as the intention is to disguise the ghostwritten work as your own.

Company Trustworthiness Checklist

Using UKEssays as an example, here are some suggested checks you can make on a company before purchasing any work from them:

• 1. Check that the postcode for the company is genuine (to do this, you can just Google it). Any reputable company will have a valid postcode for their own offices (watch out for postcodes that list hundreds of companies at the same address - these are usually 'shell' or fake companies). You can also look up postcodes and company names on Google maps and look at the Street View; this often gives away fake companies which are registered to residential addresses or empty plots of land.
  
• 2. Check the company on Companies House - every website in the UK is required by law to have their contact details, including company name and registration, clearly shown at the bottom of each page. If a site does not have these details, then we would recommend caution.
  
  
  Check a Company at Companies House
• 3. Check to see if the company has been mentioned by any well-known media outlets or news publishers - a quick search of Google News should be able to tell you this. You can see just some of the news coverage for UKEssays here: >The BBC , >The Guardian , >The Telegraph, Times Higher Education (subscription only)
  Despite the fact that the press rarely cover the subject of essay writing favourably, you can still see the names of those companies who are being talked about.
• 4. Call the company on the phone - see if you are speaking to someone who understands the education system and isn't just a telephone answering service. You can call UKEssays to discuss any matter relating to our services on 0115 966 7955 from the UK or +44 966 7955 from overseas.

  "Remember - when you call to buy an essay, the customer service person you speak to should be knowledgeable, friendly and willing to help. If they aren't, then you should consider if you really want to buy from that company."

• 5. Before you make any payment for your work, make sure that the provider processes payments through a reputable payment processor like SagePay, WorldPay, Alipay or WeChat Pay. Companies using unknown payment processors are best avoided.

After You have Bought an Essay

How to Use The Work

So, you have ordered your bespoke essay, made your payment, and now you have received your work. Many students now wonder how to use the purchased essay correctly, and how to ensure they are not committing academic plagiarism. Although rules vary from one university to another, we believe that by following some simple steps, you can make sure that your finished work is entirely your own and that you have gained the maximum amount of knowledge and insight from the essay that you bought.

Bought Essay Checklist

• 1. Thoroughly read through the essay and see how it ties in with your original essay title or question.
• 2. Look up each reference in the reference list and read the texts to see how they relate to the content of the essay.
• 3. Begin writing your own version of the essay, using what you have learned in points 1 and 2 to inform your writing.
• 4. Ensure that your newly re-written work ties in with the information provided in the references supplied in the essay you bought.
• 5. Submit your final self-written essay to a marking and proofreading service to see if you have correctly applied what you learned in the previous steps.
• 6. If necessary, revise your work based on the results of the proofreading and take pride in the fact that you have both learned how to write an academic essay and gained valuable knowledge of the subject you are writing about.

More information on using the essay that you have purchased can be found in our Fair Use Policy, which describes in-depth how to use the services of an essay writing company correctly.
Fair Use Policy

Essay Buying FAQs

Question: Is buying essays online safe?
Answer: Like any other kind of transaction, there is always a risk involved in buying from a company that you don't know. We recommend reading the "Stay Safe" section of this guide to learn how you can protect yourself when making your essay purchase.

Question: Can you pay someone to write an essay?
Answer: There is no law in any country that prevents an individual from buying an essay. There are, however, specific laws in certain countries which apply to academic essays purchased with the specific intention of passing them off as the purchaser's own work. Any legitimate essay writing service will verify with the customer that any essay they buy is not to be passed off or handed in as their own work. More information on how a bought essay should be used can be found in the "After You have Bought an Essay" section of this guide.

Question: Why is writing essays so hard?
Answer: An academic essay is a piece of writing unlike any other kind of written work. A large amount of the work involved in writing an academic essay revolves around correctly referencing authoritative sources; because of this, a student needs to be specifically taught how to write and reference essays in a very particular way. If a student misses these lessons, or doesn't quite understand what has been taught, then writing essays can quickly become an unforgiving and time-consuming task that can detract from the overall learning of a given subject.

Buy Your Essay from UKEssays

To see how a professional essay writing service can help you learn the skills required to write great academic essays, take a look at the service section of our website: