Hello Essay: An Ethical Approach to Editing
by Dev Sheth | published Oct. 1st, 2014
Essays are important. An essay acts as a reflection of the writer, and is responsible for making the reader value the writer’s opinion. Application essays help decide if a student goes to college. Academic essays ensure the student stays there. A make-or-break situation like this can make students desperate and cause them to seek help, but there is a thin line between help and plagiarism – and often students confuse them and suffer the consequences. Hello Essay is looking to change that.
An online service that provides students with expert advice on their essays, Hello Essay has a strict code of ethics that conforms to academic integrity policies across the world. Offering a variety of services for academic writing, from application essays to personal statements, academic essays to reports and research papers, Hello Essay seeks to prevent students from executing plagiarism. The service offers a safe alternative in the form of expert advice from academics and former admissions officers, to name a few options. With the diversity of their backgrounds, students can choose the individual that suits their requirements and tune their written work according to that individual's advice.
Hello Essay offers services in four packages – Standard, Premium, Rush Standard and Rush Premium. The Standard version reviews the essay and evaluates it according to a variety of metrics, including proofreading and fixing formatting errors. The Premium version makes suggestions to enhance flow and presentation, and provides tips to make the essay more clear and effective. The Rush versions offer an average turnaround time of 4-12 hours, as opposed to 40-48 hours for the Standard and Premium versions. Perhaps the most attractive feature is the Hello Assessment, which rates the essay while pinpointing its strengths and weaknesses.
With a clean user interface, Hello Essay is easy to use and clear in what it stands for. Undoubtedly, it should prove to be a great resource for all students, but may prove particularly useful to students whose native language is not English. That can be a primary obstruction on the road to a good essay, and is often responsible for students employing unfair means in an attempt to get their views across to readers. Having been in close contact with international students, and being one myself, I know a few students who require assistance conversing in English. I can only imagine the sort of complications that must arise when they need to express themselves in a language that, due to circumstance, does not come naturally to them.
Sometimes it may not even be someone who has trouble with English; people may end up requiring help for something they normally would be able to deal with quite efficiently on their own. Case in point: the trouble Parth Panchal, a masters student in Telecommunications Engineering at RIT, went through when working on his application essay. He says, “I found myself stuck trying to find a logical approach to make the transition from my undergrad academics to describing my work experience. I sought guidance from an advisor, expecting suggestions, but received modifications to my original content instead. Fortunately, I was aware of academic plagiarism policies at RIT, and disposed of the edits, working on the essay until I came up with a solution myself.” What will please the academic community the most about Hello Essay is the comprehensive ethical code it follows. By refusing to write or rewrite essays, it differentiates itself from so-called essay mills and makes sure the student is able to express himself freely by limiting its own services to evaluation and advice.
Hello Essay is seeking to help this class of students. Keeping the simplicity and effectiveness of their services in mind, they should definitely be successful.