Been mostly working on my presentation today (among other things). Went down a bit of a rabbit hole looking into an example regarding an essay from a paper mill that a student had put in their preliminary bibliography. Does being from a paper mill make an essay a bad source for an undergraduate research paper? (Well, it's not the best source, but what kind of bad source is it? For instance, how does it compare with a Wikipedia article as a not-ideal source? I have my ideas, but what do you think?)
Anyway, all that led me to read the Wikipedia article about essay mills and eventually to my copy of Edward Waldo Emerson's Emerson in Concord: A Memoir (1888, 1916), in which Emerson the younger reveals that his father and uncle were part of an informal essay mill when they were in college in the early 1800s:
If the Emersons could not get enough writing to do in the ordinary course of work they sometimes took contracts outside. An anecdote told me of [Uncle] Edward by his classmate shows how the brothers eked out their finances.
Mr. John C. Park says: --
"I and some others used to make a little money by writing themes for those who found it harder. The way we used to do was to write out any ideas which occurred to us bearing on the subject, and then, having cut the paper into scraps, to issue it to the various buyers to use in their themes, condensing and improving all the best of it for our own. Well, one morning, ----, your Uncle Edward's chum, came out and stood on Hollis steps and called out, 'Look here, fellows! I've got something to show you. I want you to listen to this and tell me if it's worth fifty cents,' and proceeded to read what Emerson had written for him. You see he had come down in his style to make it possible for the professor to believe that the theme could have emanated from ----, and in his endeavors to do so had written so humbly that ---- himself doubted if it were worth half a dollar." (26)
Early essay mills... Wonder if they were water-powered...
[Update, June 27, 2021: Yikes! I just did a Google Scholar search for an essay mill, UKEssays.com, and found that papers from that site are actually cited in some scholarly articles!?]
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