Nick Mamatas’s “The Term Paper Artist”, published by an online magazine called The Smart Set, is an article on his own personal experiences of being a professional term paper-writer.
Mamatas always wanted to be a renowned writer of novels and short stories, but settled for working for a term paper mill that wanted writers to write short pieces on business, economics, and literature for quick money. Although he states that it’s his “horrible secret”, he also reassures us that “writing model term papers is above-board and perfectly legal.” These papers can be written on any subject, can be however long one needs it to be, and is made at all levels of education.
Mamatas’s “clients” were generally business administration majors, elementary education majors, and “would-be social workers”. Brokers managed the term paper business. They have to take financial risks by accepting credit card payments and psychological risks by actually talking to the clients.
There are three types of term paper clients. Most of them aren’t very smart. Mamatas nicknamed them the “DUMB CLIENTS”. These are the people who have to buy term papers because they don’t understand what one is. They most likely don’t understand what their class is about either. The second type of client is the “one-timer”. These clients were generally lost on a subject and needed a modest summary of 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.”
The “well-educated professionals who simply lack English-language skills” is the third group. Often, their home countries were engineers, medical professionals, and scientists. So, to get another degree they simply send in their own papers and ask for them to be edited.
Mamatas says that the term paper work is easy, comparing it to “an old dance routine buried in one’s muscle memory”, but that getting the hang of it is tricky. Nick’s friends who tried to get into the business often failed because they “tried to write term papers”. His trick was to only worry about three things and three things only: deadline, page count, and the proper number of sources. The rest is just entertaining yourself. You should have fun with writing the papers, or you will never get through the long nights.
After all these years, Mamatas has discovered why students are so confused on how to write term papers. It’s because they’ve never really read or studied a term paper. They’ve only had a brief description of what it is, and ultimately this is not enough for the student to be able to successfully write their own papers.
No comments:
Post a Comment