When did the essay writing service industry trend begin?

Essay writing assignments are a common practice in high school and university. Students are often asked to produce essays that discuss different aspects of a topic or present their opinion on a particular subject.

These essays become progressively longer and harder as students go from their first year of high school to their last year of university. Longer essays are much more time-consuming and require a lot of mental effort. However, not all students have the time or ability to write such essays and may need some help with their coursework.

This is where an essay writing service comes into play. As a separate unit, these companies have been around for a long time, but technological advances since the 1990s have made it easier to enlist their help.

Before the 1990s

The need to receive academic help has always existed. Before the advent of the internet, students used to work with small local companies who recruited a few graduates from universities in the area as writers.

Back then, plagiarism often went unnoticed, and the cheapest essay writing service would usually deliver the same content to different clients without anyone finding out.

The Rise of the Internet

When the internet started to gain momentum in the late 1990s, a lot of professional essay writing services quickly established their online presence. The new web gave them access to much larger markets and allowed them to grow their businesses at a rapid pace.

At that time, electronic commerce was beginning to emerge, and sites like eBay and Amazon were gaining popularity. As people learned that they could buy products and services online, they also looked for internet companies that provided online writing services. Immediately after noticing this demand, writing services rushed to bring their service online.

Online payment platforms such as PayPal expedited customer adoption, and reputation ranking organizations such as the Better Business Bureau started evaluating online businesses.

Furthermore, Content Management Systems (CMS) made it very easy to create a website in a few hours without much technical knowledge. This way, many small service providers were able to take their business online and attract more customers.

Together, these events shaped an online trend and helped the essay writing service industry to start thriving.

Current Developments

The growth trend continued for more than a decade. During this time, professional essay writing services continued to expand and diversify their services. Technological developments also allowed them to better serve their customers.

Most services now offer a one-step write my essay online order process where customers fill a form and give some basic details on the essay they want to be written. They also have access to 24/7 customer service, which helps resolve issues at any time of the day.

However, perhaps the most helpful technology of recent years is plagiarism software.

Plagiarism Software

Plagiarism means using work created by someone else and presenting it as your own work. It is a serious offense in academic circles, and students are often expelled for turning in plagiarized work.

Plagiarism software receives a piece of writing (at least one paragraph) and compares it to an extensive database of previously published works. It uses multiple, highly sophisticated algorithms to measure text similarity. These algorithms are based on artificial intelligence, and they become smarter as they obtain more and more data.

This type of software has made it extremely hard for fraudulent service providers to stay in business. On the other hand, legitimate companies which often provide urgent essay writing services include a similarity report along with their work to prove that the submitted writing is original.

The Future

No one knows what the future holds, but one thing is certain: technology is going to continually transform the writing industry.

Scientists are currently working on natural language generation algorithms that can produce high-quality texts. If these efforts are successful, writing services online will become faster, and students may no longer need to seek help from professional writing experts. They can simply tell an algorithm what they want and have a perfectly written essay in minutes.

We’ll have to wait and see when that dream becomes a reality.

Bottom Line

Essays are a typical form of coursework assignments, and all students have to write a few of them every semester. Professional essay writing services that help students with their tasks have been around for as long as instructors have assigned essays. However, with the advent of the internet, their popularity began to surge and has remained high ever since. The industry, in its current form, is highly dependent on technology, from CMS and customer support to plagiarism software. This dependence on technology is not going to recede in the future. In fact, it may increase as scientists continue to develop smarter text generation algorithms.