FAQs
Welcome to our Frequently Asked Questions page.
Most FAQ pages are written once and left to die in darkness. We try to keep this one current, and we date it so you can see for yourself when it was last touched. If the date is old, it is old — we would rather show you that than pretend otherwise.
Last reviewed: 20 August 2026.
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What we do and what we will not do
Do you still work with MBA and other graduate students?
We do. Master's, doctoral, and post-doctoral work is what we do most.
Do you work with undergraduates?
Not any more, with one exception: we still help with graduate and professional school application packages. Everything else we do is pitched at doctoral and post-doctoral levels and priced accordingly, and it would be poor value for undergraduate coursework.
Can you provide stand-alone services, like advice on the data, survey, or analysis process?
Yes. You do not have to hand us a whole thesis. Plenty of clients come to us for one specific problem.
Can you write my paper, or part of it, for me?
No. Not part of it, not a chapter, not a section, not under any circumstances and no matter the deadline. See our Academic Honesty page.
There is a great deal we will do. We will restructure your work, tell you when an argument does not hold and what would fix it, rewrite a passage as a worked example for you to apply elsewhere, build an outline detailed enough that filling it in is largely mechanical, and iterate as many times as it takes. Heavy intervention is not the problem. The line is whether the thinking is yours and whether you understand what is on the page.
Note also that online paper mills exist, their quality is notoriously poor, and their output is frequently plagiarised or machine-generated. Using one is a risk not worth taking under any circumstances.
Do you do ghostwriting?
Yes — for commercial, trade, and self-published books. Never for anything submitted for academic credit, at any level, in any program. Those are different services with a hard wall between them.
What about plagiarism?
Plagiarism is academically dishonest and it is an active risk to your thesis, your degree, and in some cases your career. Detection keeps improving.
We look for it too — on your behalf, with the specific purpose of making sure there is none in any work we coach or edit. Often it is unintentional, or it came from someone or some organization trying to "help" you. Wherever it came from, we can fix it fast and quietly.
We will not continue work on any thesis where a client insists on leaving plagiarised passages in place.
Artificial intelligence
Do you use AI?
Yes, for mechanical work — grammar and punctuation passes, consistency checks, formatting, and flagging citation anomalies for us to verify. And for pattern-finding across material you have already gathered — spotting what recurs, what is missing, where sources disagree. Not judging what any of it means. Every output is reviewed by a person before it reaches you, and a person is accountable for it.
We do not use AI to judge your argument, your methodology, or your research. Those are ours to assess and ours to answer for.
What happens to my material if you put it through an AI tool?
We remove identifying information first — your name, your institution, your supervisor, and identifying research context. That is our procedure regardless of what any provider's terms say.
We currently use commercial providers on paid tiers with the highest privacy settings available to us. We intend to move to models hosted on our own infrastructure as soon as it is practical, which takes third parties out of the picture entirely.
If you would rather no external AI tool touched your work at all, tell us before we start. It takes longer and costs more, because the hours are higher — but we will do it.
I used AI on my draft. Will you still work with me?
Yes, and we will not lecture you about it.
We handle it exactly as we have always handled accidental plagiarism: discreetly, confidentially, and before anyone else sees it. If we find fabricated references, passages you cannot account for, or claims your evidence does not actually support, we will tell you and help you fix it properly — so the work becomes genuinely yours.
Will you help me make AI-generated text undetectable?
No. That is concealment, not repair, and it is the one thing we will not do. We fix problems. We do not hide them.
We will also not deliberately make your writing worse to lower a detector score. You would be damaging something real to game a measurement — see our Scholarly Style page for why that trade is a bad one.
My work got flagged as AI and I did not use it. What now?
This happens, it is more common than most people realize, and it is usually the detector's failure rather than yours. Start with our Navigating AI Detection Paranoia page. Then call us.
Do I need to tell my school that you helped, or that AI was involved?
Institutional policies vary enormously, change often, and are frequently not written down at all. Knowing your program's rules and complying with them is your responsibility — and we will help you find out what they actually are.
Ask us and we will tell you precisely what tools were used on your work. If your program would require you to declare it, tell us and we will work without them.
Why did your basic editing tier disappear?
Two reasons.
By 2020/21 we were doing very little basic editing anyway — mostly we fix structural problems. And basic editing is now something a competent AI model does well. We will happily tell you which models are best right now and even the prompts to use, at no charge. We would rather you spent your money on the part that actually needs us.
There is also a harder reason. Text that has been written or polished by an AI flows smoothly and looks as though it needs only a light pass — and that is now precisely the text that needs the most verification. Do the citations exist? Does the argument belong to you? Is there fabricated content underneath the polish? That is not light work, and it cannot honestly be sold at a light-work rate.
Will good editing make my work more likely to be flagged?
Possibly, and it is worth understanding why.
Detectors measure how predictable text is. Clear, disciplined scholarly prose is highly predictable — that is what clarity means. So well-edited work can look more machine-like to a detector than badly-edited work.
We are not going to make your writing worse to make a detector happier. Instead, we keep and give you the trail — tracked-changes versions, dated drafts, the documented path from your text to the edited text. Keep what we send you. If your work is ever questioned, that record shows a document being improved step by step by identifiable people, starting from your own draft.
How we work
Will multiple people work on my thesis?
We run on a sherpa system, and your sherpa is assigned to you permanently.
Not for a project. Not for a chapter. For your degree — and beyond.
And for as long afterwards as you want to keep working with us.
Sherpas are supported by specialists, and which ones varies with what your work needs — to our standards, and in a timely fashion. Those support specialists are our unsung heroes.
And many do.
A career in flight turns out to need things a doctoral candidate never thinks to want. A discreet sounding board with no stake in your office politics. An analyst who answers only to you. A ghost writer for the book, the op-ed, or the board paper you have no time to write yourself — never for academic credit, but everywhere else, freely.
The people who stay with us longest are rarely the ones who were in the most trouble. They are the ones who discovered it was useful to have someone outside the building who knows their work and owes nothing to anybody else in it.
Your sherpa is your contact throughout, whatever the work. They are responsible for making sure you are satisfied, and they coordinate any specialists your project needs: statistics, formatting, particular kinds of editing, references. Whoever else touches the work, it passes through them before it reaches you.
Your sherpa's time is billed, because it is your project being worked on — coordinating it, reviewing whether specialist work actually serves your argument, and thinking about it alongside you. The founder's review is not billed. He spot-checks work routinely and reads thoroughly when a dissertation has serious problems or when either your sherpa or you have flagged something. That is us checking our own standard, and you should not pay for it. See our Clear Pricing page.
What that buys you is context you never have to rebuild. Your research. Your Chair. Your program's requirements. What your committee has already objected to, and why. The methodology argument you had in month nine. You will never explain your project to a stranger twice.
Over a degree that potentially runs for years, they also come to know how you think, how you write when you are rushed, what you are strong at, and what you find hard. That is not a service feature — it is simply what a long working relationship produces.
It is also why coming back later costs you almost nothing in setup. When you return after graduation with a board report, a journal article, a grant application, or business writing for your own firm, there is no briefing to do. They already know your voice. You describe the task and they begin.
If your sherpa ever has to hand over — people do move on — you will meet the new one and be handed over properly before anything changes. You will not find a stranger on your file one morning.
You will also always have the founder's email and mobile number, so that concerns, suggestions, or complaints can go straight to the person ultimately responsible for everything. We do listen. Do not hesitate to call.
How do you turn work around so quickly?
Where a project needs it, we pair people on opposite clocks so that work continues while you sleep. We have run this way for many years and it is not new to us.
Pairs are stable rather than rotating — the same people work your file throughout, which is what keeps the writing consistent. Some work passes across a shift cleanly, like verifying references or checking formatting. Structural work and anything that affects your voice stays with one pair of hands.
Do I have to sign a contract?
No. We do not use service contracts, and we think locking clients into editing or coaching arrangements is unethical.
You will sign one thing when we take you on: a confirmation that you have read our Terms & Conditions, which go to every new client as part of onboarding. That is an acknowledgment, not a commitment — it does not oblige you to buy anything from us, and it does not oblige us to take your project.
There is no minimum, no retainer, no term, and no notice period. When your bill is paid, you can walk away at any time, for any reason or none.
We do not even ask for a deposit to get started. We will do up to four hours of work on nothing but your word. If what comes back is not what you wanted, those four hours are the full extent of your commitment.
Money
Do you offer credits or discounts?
Several. The two that affect everyday billing most are a 5% military discount — for those serving, veterans, and military families — and prepaid blocks from $1,000 at 5%, 6% at $2,500. See our Clear Pricing page for credits as well, including referrals and testimonials.
Can discounts be stacked?
Yes. If you qualify for more than one, they stack, and the military discount is always applied first. Credits are applied after both.
Do you provide financing?
Not at present, though we continue to look at third-party options. We take all major credit cards.
What are your terms?
We will do up to four person-hours of work before billing, and we will not go beyond four hours unpaid.
Invoices are due on receipt, and work is released once payment reaches us.
If a genuine emergency means you need work released before a payment has cleared, contact us with evidence of payment and we will do what we can.
I need help badly but cannot pay.
Our founder is not comfortable with people in genuine need walking away from a dissertation that is incomplete for lack of the resources to finish, and being left in significant debt with no counterbalancing doctorate.
If you are such a case, we make no promises — but it is worth a conversation with our founder. That conversation is not billable.
Confidentiality
Do you keep things private?
Yes, absolutely and permanently. We do not share information with anyone without your consent. We do not sell or rent our mailing list.
This matters most for the things people are least comfortable discussing: work that has been rejected, deadlines missed, plagiarism that was accidental, AI use that got away from you, and the state you were in when you first got in touch. People come to us at difficult moments. What happens here stays here.
Everyone who works on your project is under the same written obligation, and it continues after they leave us.
An implicit NDA applies to all client work. Our Terms & Conditions go to every new client as part of onboarding, and they cover that. If you need a separate written one for any purpose, we will provide it.
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