Are Free Essays Worth The Money

By Author: Wade Knoxville
Total Articles: 18
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Looking for a way to save some time and effort in school? Utilizing free essays may be the answer to your prayers. They provide a way for a student to examine someone else's work to use as a guide in their own studies. However, as with most things that are advertised as being "free", the consumer must be aware of what they are getting for their money or in the case of something for free, the effort in finding quality text on-line. Caveat emptor: "Let the buyer beware" is just as true when money exchanges hands as when you're getting something for free.

Many free essays are available from sites on the Internet that offer sample essays, complete essays as well as services to create custom essays based on your individual requirements. Of course the online essays are of a much lower quality then what would be expected from the paid custom services. A casual glance at the available passages online confirms this as a random sample of the text is full of misspellings, poor grammar, run-on sentences and stumbling text flow. Consider the following passage from a free essay on Edgar Allan Poe from an on-line site: "Poe attendant ...
... college for while, but Jon Allan stopped Paying for his college education because Poe had to many gambling depts". It is possible that the site has deliberately sabotaged the essay, but after examining many of the other samples, it becomes readily apparent that the poor quality of the free essays is widespread, and can be traced back to the source of the samples. The effort involved in capturing the free samples, reformatting, proofreading and editing the text hardly justify the label of "free" for these passages. The time you spend restructuring these passages hardly makes them free.

So we are back to the original question, are the free essays worth the money? The answer to that question is largely dependent upon the student looking for the text. The free essays to give you a large amount of information, are somewhat researched and are in some form of the English language. Beyond these qualities, there is very little that can be said positively about them. The amount of effort to make them presentable must be weighed against the effort to do the work without the help of the online site, and a decision must be made.

Of course, if the decision to use the online free essays is acceptable to the student, another issue must also be heavily considered. The issue of plagiarism and the widespread availability of this text on the web should weigh heavily in your decision to use the text or not. With the increased use of anti-plagiarism software, both on the web and at numerous schools and universities, the possibilities of a positive result when tested against the software are a very real possibility. The consequences of a positive result can mean failure on the paper or at the extreme, expulsion from the school. This outcome could make the free essay quite costly indeed.
Wade Knoxville
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