Nick Mamatas Will Write You a Six Page Term Paper...If You Have 600 Dollars

It's 1:57 AM and you're still awake because you have a term paper due in six hours. You know that you'll never finish your six page paper on "magical realism in Latin American fiction", and the stark realization that you're going to fail your literature class is beginning to set in. You're in the agonizing process of ripping your hair out fistful by fistful until you have a thought. "What if I could pay someone to do this for me?" Well, Nick Mamatas would have written it for you.

Once (and some would argue still) an aspiring writer, he took a job writing term papers for cash. It's tough to put his motivation for taking the job better than him. "Need $100 by Friday to keep the lights on? No sweat. Plenty of kids need 10 pages on Hamlet by Thursday." It was quick, easy money. Wait, did I say easy? Well yes, according to Nick, writing term papers isn't just good for quick cash, but it's also very simple. The trick is that you don't try to write an actual paper, you simply extend the length of the information and topic to fit whatever length paper the client wanted.

When speaking about his girlfriend trying to write one, he commented "She tried to write a paper, instead of filling five pages." He outlines the steps he would take and even brags about an instance when a friend of his was trying to write a term paper on an obscure subject (magical realism in Latin American fiction to be precise), and had to give up after working on it for hours. Nick claims "She was still weeping, chain-smoking cigarettes, and shouting at me at 2 a.m.  I took 20 minutes and finished the paper, mostly by extending sentences until all the paragraphs ended with an orphaned word on a line of its own."

The other trick he utilized to make writing paper after paper more interesting was humor. "In business papers, I'd often cite Marxist sources. When given an open topic assignment on ethics, I'd write on the ethics of buying term papers, and even include the broker's Web site as a source." He even went as far as to embarrass his clients in certain situations, such as "Whenever papers needed to refer to a client's own life experiences, I'd give the student various sexual hang-ups."

He tries to justify selling term papers, but I'm not buying. He claims that students "are being cheated by the schools that take tuition and give nothing in exchange." He attempts to give this occupation a quality of nobility, but if we go off of his argument that money-grubbing schools are cheating students, then we also need to look at the fact that he would charge 100 dollars a page for term papers. He tries to lessen the stigma of his former job by claiming that schools are ripping students off, but then he charges students exorbitant fees himself.

Nick Mamatas tried unsuccessfully to be cool. He's a little-known author who thought that writing an article about his former life of ripping students off would be captivating. Sure, perhaps he truly helped students by writing papers for them, and maybe they would gladly pay what they paid again. Not to mention that Nick didn't set the going rate for his services. He didn't create the industry. At the same time though, he cannot and should not be absolved from his sins. What he did was certainly not something to be proud of, and it's most assuredly not something that is looked upon favorably by others.

Nick Mamatas attempts to set himself apart by saying, "I doubt many experts spent most of a decade writing between one and five term papers a day on virtually every subject." and he succeeds, but not in the way he wanted. He succeeded by surrendering his integrity. He offers a view into the taboo underworld of selling grades to students, but nobody thinks he is cool for it, and I certainly cannot name one work written by him, besides the article I'm commenting on of course (The Term Paper Artist).