Term Paper? Essay? Help Is at Hand

The bad kind of bold: a website called Free Essays that offers 32,000 "Free Essays for All Students."

The student who is eager for knowledge can find a paper on any of a huge and sometimes hilarious selection of subjects. For example: "Plagerism" (sic). And a search for papers that deal with personal courage turned up 317 choices, one labelled Values.

Click on PeerPapers on this site and you'll find an archive of 190,000. "Less Work, More Weekend" is the slogan. Browsers are informed that using one of these papers as a guide is not plagiarism, copying it is.

Type in the keyword "honor," and a list of an even 1,000 essays and term papers comes up. One of them begins: "Why do students cheat? This is an age-old question...."

It's even possible to find a paper on "Why I Want to Become a Nurse." Surely, if one wants to be a nurse, one is the authority on why.

...Though I once knew a man whose first writing success was a grade school personal essay on the assignment "Why I Love the Detroit Symphony." He was having trouble writing it. His much-older sister helped him with it a lot. He won a highly-publicized award for the work. His sister asked him if he had any doubts about accepting full credit. He absolutely did not. He went on to become a respected novelist.

I doubt if his story is typical.

A few other ironic topics in the essay libraries:
Apathy
Critical Thinkin (sic)
The Time I Made a Fool of Myself
Are We More Creative Today
How People Learn

And some charmingly specialized ones:
Slime Molds
Raving Is A Lifestyle
Biotreatment Of Wastewater Using Aquatic Invertebrates, Daphnia Magna And Paramecium Caudatum
Pear Culturing in India
Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, Inc.

Visitors are invited to donate papers and to alert headquarters if any papers on the sites are discovered to be of questionable quality.

Custom essays are available starting at $19.95 a page.

Approximately 368,000 google searches were done in April for the phrase "term paper" and over 9 million for "essay."

This rant is making me feel like a back-in-my-day old blowhard. So I'm doing a search for a paper on the hackneyed "old-fart" question: what's the world coming to? All I get was a paper on Mad Cow Disease.

So I look up "hookups" and get an essay: "Is The Traditional Date Dying" It's worth a visit.




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