But being a good writer doesn’t necessarily mean that you are smarter or more knowledgeable about things than somebody who is less gifted with words. It does however give you a significant advantage when it comes to getting your point across or to making a good impression.
It is with this in mind that the people behind CustomWritings.com decided to set up business. Their business plan was simple – there was a gap to help turn the knowledge in people’s heads into words on paper. “In short,” says author Lauren Bradshaw, “we wanted to be the competitive advantage for students seeking to make it in the cut throat world of academia.”
Although initially the idea was to help students who were writing in a language that wasn’t their primary one, the concept quickly took off and almost immediately is was proving attractive to students whose home language was English. While initially the team was slightly surprised by this, it soon became apparent that not everyone who was lucky enough to make it to University was blessed with writing skills.
“Our team has the ability to research and write around a range of topics,” says Bradshaw, “but what we are best able to do is to take the words and knowledge that is in your head, distil it and then format it into something credible and impressive and which will convey, in the best possible manner the ideas and arguments that you are wanting to make.”
While his type of service would not have been possible twenty years ago, the rise of the internet and email means that it is possible for the outsourced writing team to be in regular contact with the student. “In the same way that a journalist who interviews a politician writes the politician’s views and not their own, so our team liaise with students to write their work and to ensure that it is original and informed by the views and knowledge of the scholar themselves,” says Bradshaw.
She adds that not just do the team at CustomWritings act as tutors for the students who commission them, they also help to ensure that deadlines are met, and that knowledge is enhanced. Significantly though they also remove a lot of the angst and terror associated with essay writing for people who are not skilled in this area – and according to Bradshaw there are a lot of these people.
“People with dyslexia or attention deficit disorder get genuinely anxious when it comes to writing essays or sitting exams,” she explains. “Our goal is not to spoon feed at all, but we do want to be the difference for our clients in helping them go from a 50 percent paper to a 60. Or getting them over the line from a solid B to an A.
“It is about the little details,” says Bradshaw who points out that to a professor marking hundreds of essays a week, reading a paper that uses apostrophes correctly makes a similar level impression as one that is able to explain emerging feminist influences in Gustav Flaubert’s Madam Bovary.
“We certainly don’t know everything,” says Bradshaw, but we are well grounded in the basics of the written word and we are confident that we can improve almost any paper, be it one written by a first language speaker or somebody less fluent.”