A note to PhD students
I work with many students through long thesis projects. They pay for the research, literature searches,design of the study, adequacy of the research questions, chapter design, integration of the research questions in the literature review chapter, and integration of the research questions in the methodology chapter, the grounding of the methodology in appropriate theory, critical insights into the methodology, thesis flow, chapter flow, and the integration of each chapter into the thesis as a whole. Hence, they pay for more than the "writing" - they pay for my time and serious tutoring.
To manage such projects I break them up into units of work: each is charged at a rate of $250 and generally produces between 5 and 10 pages of draft writing, and a selected bibliography, and some structuring. The student pays for each $250 unit before I begin on the next one.
I expect the student to take a serious interest in the project, to answer my questions about the project, and to work carefully through the drafts I provide (and ask questions if anything is not understood). I suggest the student keeps a master file for their own version of the thesis. I provide the support a good university supervisor should provide, but which they are often unable to provide because they are expected to teach too many students. Often students whose first language is not English find this a particular problem.
I write everything myself and the work is totally original. However, that does not mean it will not return positive hits on plagiarism checking software. This is for several reasons: (1) the machine does not know there is a correct way to cite in text, (2) the work has to relate to the literature, which means it has to relate to things that have already been published, (3) plagiarism checkers often identify short parts of sentences which are in common use throughout the internet. Some students become excessively worried about plagiarism. If that is you, read what the better software sites say about how they work and what their score means. Also, try out something that you write yourself and discover that the machine thinks you copied much of it.
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