Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Three Easy Tricks To Help Students Brainstorm Better

Getting an essay question can be stressful, especially when you don’t know much about the topic. It can be hard to think of an original, interesting idea you can use to show how much you’ve learned in class. That’s where brainstorming comes in. The word “brainstorming” was invented in the 1930s by advertising executive Alex Faickney Osborn, but the concept of trying to think of a large number of ideas in order to pick the best one goes back much farther than that.

When you get stuck trying to think of ideas, there are a few simple tricks you can use to help you get creative.

1. Free-Association. Look at the essay question and write down the first five words that spring to mind. These need to be nouns and need to be related to the topic, so “retarded” and “stupid” don’t count! Do any of your words spark ideas? Are there connections? Can you combine your words into a more complex, interesting topic?

2. Background Research. Try plugging concepts from the essay question into Google or Wikipedia. See what you find. Actually read the article and see if anything strikes you as especially interesting or noteworthy. If so, think about whether that would make a good topic. (Note: use Wikipedia to generate ideas, but don’t use it as a source for your paper.)

3. Build on What You Know. If you already know something about the topic, think about areas you want to know more about. Try to think about how the essay topic relates to you and your experience. Writing an essay is always more fun when you’re actively engaged with the material.

Trying out a few of these tips and tricks on your next essay can help you produce more creative and engaging essays—and just possibly earn you higher grades!

Friday, January 11, 2008

We Still Focus on Quality and Customer Service Even When Offshore Term Paper Companies Focus Mainly on Price

Doing business in an industry that is wrought with fly by night services looking to cash in on students who need help without a care for the results is difficult especially when you’re competing with invisible companies. In this case the invisible companies are countless offshore companies who purport to do business out of the United States to show credibility or perhaps it can be to mask the fact they’re offshore (they show toll free numbers, fax numbers and Addresses that are either not real or really PO Boxes). Even though we have our detractors and opposition since we started our mandate is clear: to provide the best quality in any type of document from term papers to theses to dissertations.

Due to their anonymity they market their services as completely bogus services encouraging students to go against the academic code (they suggest it in different ways) handing in stuff they shouldn’t be. These businesses don’t have the students’ best interest in mind and also don’t care about running their business above board. I can see similarities of how these practices are very common in offshore companies especially when customer service matters (everyone can relate to calling a phone company and hearing an offshore employee trying to help but getting nowhere except frustration) That’s the difference between North American term paper companies and offshore term paper companies. Most of these companies rely on the premise that by offering the lowest price everything else even how it’s produced is an afterthought.

When we were competing against other North American services it was clear that students had a choice they could make where you can compare apples to apples. Since the inundation in our industry of services from Pakistan, Ukraine, Philipines (just to name a few of the culprits’ locations) I feel they’ve just come and muddied the waters and cause more confusion, normally competition means that consumers win but in this case the only one who wins is the offshore company who is essentially in my opinion “fleecing” customers by providing substandard work all the while pretending they’re actually helping. Providing super low prices is where it starts, ends and it goes downhill from there. Here are just a few of the ways these offshore companies can be snuffed out and identified:

1. No legitimate place of business in North America where you can walk in and complain or order rather in person. They focus on having many sites and relying on customers naivete. An American address may be posted but at best it’s a post box where they get their mail.

2. An absolute absurdly low price that no qualified North American Native English Speaker and Writer would work for (this ain’t a car factory where you can systemize something) it will always be a creative and a clear communicative process.

3. A company that dumps what customers order into an “work pool” where any writer who feels they can deliver it on time can pick it up and write it. Besides being less than qualified to work for a legitimate top North American service they’ll entrust a customers order to just about anyone on their roster. Remember, their focus is the bottom line and not the consumer. Matching up writer specialties with client needs is what we do best.

4. When you complain about either one of their papers being plagiarized or of being shoddy in quality you’ll get a variety of answers like:

1. They’ll get another writer to do it (How can you trust them given the ideas and words are not worth the paper their written on in our opinion).

2. They’ll even go absurdly as far as saying that it’s only supposed to be a model paper to alleviate any excuse from their hands.

3. They’ll also point out that the quality truly depends on the writer so just because we got a bad paper this time in redoing it doesn’t mean we’ll get a bad paper (in the end we did get a second paper and it was bad) I don’t know a customer that wants to play Russian roulette with their academic help … that reasoning is absolutely stupid if you ask me.

5. Their papers were plagiarized but then I told myself: what do you expect from a writer who probably didn’t go to school in our academic system or is in way over their head. It’s difficult for writers to write the type of work we do, let alone someone who may not command the English language as highly as their own clients may.

We either ended up getting our refund or getting them to redo some papers but we received the same low quality product. In the end we felt “fleeced”.

These are just a few points I’m mentioning but realistically these offshore companies purporting to run as American companies destroy the credibility of our industry. Ask a graduate or doctoral student yourself who isn’t a writer if they’d work for $2 or $3 a page – don’t expect to receive a friendly response. Customers order from their service and get a low quality product but by the time they come to us they expect to pay the same low price the irresponsible term paper writing service charged them but receive the high quality we offer our clients. We feel that’s comparing apple to oranges.

Some clear points to watch on their site that identify these offshore term paper sites:

  1. Their prices are anywhere from $7 a page to $14 a page for custom writing
  2. Their site is full of spelling and grammatical errors
  3. They’re site may contain testimonials from fake people (it’s obvious)
  4. They’re site encourages students in different ways to submit the work they order for marks
  5. When you call you these services you get eastern block accents or south asian accents (if you don’t know what these sound like just remember the last time you called your cell phone company or cable company for repairs and ended up frustrated).

How can you protect yourself from ordering from one of these offshore services? It’s simple, go to essayfraud.org to check to see if the site your planning on ordering from is on their watch list. If you suspect it is still an offshore company we suggest you submit it to essayfraud.org to protect other students from these offshore companies. I’d hate to lose business to a competitor but I’d prefer to lose it to a North American service than to an offshore company.

When you order from ThePaperExperts.com you get accountability, you can speak to a manager if you’re not happy with the service you received or the paper in any way. We work hard to resolve any and every matter. If you want to place your order over the phone you can do so by calling our toll free number 1-888-774-9994 or email our staff at support@tpehome.com. No matter what you compare always remember you must compare apples to apples so as to compare services fairly rather than cherry pick one item and completely disregard another.