Essay Writing Services Curb Students’ Growth
In 1954, Roald Dahl wrote a witty story called “The Great Automatic Grammatizator”. It’s a different story compared to the children’s author we all know and love. Adolph Knipe, a computer genius, has always longed to be an author. Envious of the competition in the country, Adolph Knipe sets out to create a writing machine that can compose stories with various styles. Later on, the machine was a success. The user can control the mood of the story, the topic, how many characters and what author style they want to imitate. By clicking a few buttons and controlling switches- BOOM! The story is ready. Anyone can be a successful author using this machine. Not to mention, they can make a lot of money by producing a lot of stories. Technology wasn’t advanced back then, and this revolutionary made-up prototype was only a faraway dream for people who wished to be authors. Somehow, Roald Dahl could partly foresee the future of a world filled with technology. A genius he is!
Fast forward to the 21st century, a world full of technology. Humans are becoming more productive with the surrounding resources. Everything is possible with the right tools. People can find out about an endangered species or mysterious places by going on the web. Even better, people can create solutions that can save thousands of lives, like finding out a cure for preventable diseases or ground-breaking solutions to make living life more efficient. With these reasons, what could be bad about technology?
There’s always a flip side to everything. Technology, in this case, is the trigger point for students to be “idle” because it’s addicting. Kids nowadays just sit down and stare at screens all day: they’re hooked on all kinds of things. Be it playing video games, listening to music, keeping up with the latest gossip (preferably gossip about the Kardashians), wasting their time liking photos on Instagram or stalking people’s Facebook walls (who hasn’t done this, am I right?). Because of the increasing screen time kids have, their parents might have the wrong impressions about them: they might be hooked on an interesting e-Book or doing research. At the end, students will whine that they have no time to study, read and, most importantly, write. Fortunately, some bright people see this as an opportunity to create services for their own benefit with the intention of helping others. This business opportunity is essay writing services. It is unclear when it precisely existed (Roald Dahl might’ve been an inspiration for the person who came up with the idea) but for sure the services are thriving because of the demand to write top-quality papers.
All companies claim they “provide quality services to all their customers, creating all kinds of research papers, essays, assignments and dissertations.” Just like Adolph Knipe’s machine, these services are so convenient. Customers can order online, choose what subject they want to write, what style they want to imitate and the length of their paper. Some services offer their rates (which depend on the words per page) as low as $10, while others name their prices as high as $1000. Dissertations are usually the most expensive type of papers.
The Huffington Post describes the customers’ profiles of these services, the majority being “students who use English as a second language, handling part-time jobs or just simply lazy”.
Yes, technology, at one point, will take over a lot of routine and predictable-type jobs like checkout line cashiers, parking attendants and the customer service in banks to name a few. But for sure, when it comes to writing, no machines can ever beat the greatness of human writing skills. Once we use other people to technically “work” for us, we fool ourselves.
Using essay writing services to give teachers a good impression and to get good grades is a form of cheating. Schools should ban the use of these services and according to Straits Times, Singaporean schools have issued warnings that students who pay these services for their grades will be expelled. This will remind students not to use the easy way out. Writing will need a lot of practice in applying grammar, sentence structure, spelling, punctuation, and most importantly, ideas and creativity.
School will never be the same anymore if majority students use these services to cheat the system and get higher grades. Let’s just hope there aren’t going to be any real-life Adolph Knipes anytime soon. As the great horror author Stephen King said, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” Cheers for originality and creativity.
(Side note: Just in case you were wondering, this was not written with the help of an essay writing service).