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This dissertation writing service saved my life

This dissertation writing service saved my life. I had no time to finish the my dissertation and the deadline was approaching, like a shark. My writer wrote a perfectly coherent piece, that helped me pass the project successfully. A confidential, amazing service. Love it. Now I know they have Essay Writers in UK and offer proofreading service too, I will be using them again.

Date of experience : January 06, 2024

Very good law essay writing service. Reliable essay writing service

This law essay writing service has saved my life. I had no time to finish my law essay and my deadline was approaching like a shark. I have been impressed by the attention to detail and thorough referencing using OSCOLA style. I believe they have the best law writers UK based. Scrolling through their website, I can see that they offer nursing essay writing service and other academic writing assistance. I would be coming back to them for sure.

Date of experience : August 31, 2022

A wide range of services are offered by…

A wide range of services are offered by New Essays to help you with your Uni. I had an essay from them in July and have recently received my dissertation proposal in Criminology. Both my orders have been good with proposal requiring amendments but they revised it with no fuss. I will be knocking this website again for my full dissertation writing service in a few weeks time. A trustworthy essay writing service new essays is. Keep it up guys.

Date of experience : February 14, 2023

The research they did was impeccable

My literature review was rejected several times by my supervisor. I gave up and started looking for help. After visiting this website several times decided to order from New Essays. I was not disappointed. The research they did was impeccable and the sources cited were brilliant. My supervisor kept on telling me that my literature review has to be critical and I must be able to show that I have read, and have a good grasp of, the main published work concerning my topic. I thought I was doing it that way but looking at this super work from New Essays has made me realise what crit ical evaluation actually means. Thank you NE. I owe you guys.

Date of experience : November 01, 2022

Excellent dissertation and essay help service

The writer has crafted a well researched dissertation proposal for me. I am pleased with the work. I was very worried as my research area is new but they have fufilled everything in a very previse manner. I am glad to have found new this UK based reliable essay and dissertation writing service. Thank you so much new essays.

Date of experience : December 01, 2022

A competent team of eminent researchers

The very thought of the marketing assignment made me feel butterflies in the stomach and as I was going through this anxiety, I heard about New Essays from a friend that they have a competent team of eminent researchers. With their timely help, I was able to successfully get through my assignment and hand it in well on time. I am thankful to my friend and new essays for this and now I feel so relaxed. Just got to wait for my grade which I am sure would be very good.

Date of experience : October 01, 2022

I have been delighted by the speed of response, quality and professionalism of New Essays. Right from my initial contact and throughout the dissertation process they have consistently delivered - ofte

I have been delighted by the speed of response, quality and professionalism of New Essays. Right from my initial contact and throughout the dissertation process they have consistently delivered - often beating the timescales . New Essays team is responsive, professional and great sounding board . I can't recommend them highly enough.

Date of experience : September 22, 2023

The best dissertation writing company in the UK

The best dissertation writing company in the UK in my view. They help you with the topic, proposal followed by full dissertation. They kept me fully involved in the process by sending the work in parts/individual chapters and took my supervisor’s feedbacks on board as required. My tutor is was very pleased with the work in all my meetings. She did give me feedbacks but that’s what her job was. All her comments were well looked after by New Essays. I am very pleased with the completed 15k word dissertation. I am expecting Distinction - fingers crossed. My advice to potential customers would be to order well in time to be able to get the work in parts. If you go on a short notice, they will deliver all work in one go as writer won’t have time to start -stop. I ordered 7 weeks prior to my submission. Hope this helps. All the best friends. Pat

Date of experience : May 06, 2022

Amazing service

Quality: The quality of the essay was far beyond my initial expectations. Clearly the writer knew the material. I believe he/she is a professional academic with access to a lot of sources, because he made reference to psychological material that was only released 2 years ago. The depth of research and the vast amount of resources use in my Research Paper exceeded my hopes.
 Support: I had no communication problems with the customer service representatives, they replied to all my emails very quickly and the way they do it simply superb, they clearly uderstand how stressful it can get when you have ordered the work for the first time. Phone support is also handy. I called them yesterday for a friend and they were very helpful.
 Order process: Simple order form with no login or registration - hate the sign ups thing. I got my work completed by the agreed deadline. It was good because I gave myself a few days to read it. Everything was pretty great and I didn't have to request revisions.

Date of experience : November 22, 2022

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The Best Reviewed Essay Collections of 2021

Featuring joan didion, rachel kushner, hanif abdurraqib, ann patchett, jenny diski, and more.

Well, friends, another grim and grueling plague year is drawing to a close, and that can mean only one thing: it’s time to put on our Book Marks stats hats and tabulate the best reviewed books of the past twelve months.

Yes, using reviews drawn from more than 150 publications, over the next two weeks we’ll be revealing the most critically-acclaimed books of 2021, in the categories of (deep breath): Memoir and Biography ; Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror ; Short Story Collections ; Essay Collections; Poetry; Mystery and Crime; Graphic Literature; Literature in Translation; General Fiction; and General Nonfiction.

Today’s installment: Essay Collections .

Brought to you by Book Marks , Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for books.”

1. These Precious Days by Ann Patchett (Harper)

21 Rave • 3 Positive • 1 Mixed Read Ann Patchett on creating the work space you need, here

“… excellent … Patchett has a talent for friendship and celebrates many of those friends here. She writes with pure love for her mother, and with humor and some good-natured exasperation at Karl, who is such a great character he warrants a book of his own. Patchett’s account of his feigned offer to buy a woman’s newly adopted baby when she expresses unwarranted doubts is priceless … The days that Patchett refers to are precious indeed, but her writing is anything but. She describes deftly, with a line or a look, and I considered the absence of paragraphs freighted with adjectives to be a mercy. I don’t care about the hue of the sky or the shade of the couch. That’s not writing; it’s decorating. Or hiding. Patchett’s heart, smarts and 40 years of craft create an economy that delivers her perfectly understated stories emotionally whole. Her writing style is most gloriously her own.”

–Alex Witchel ( The New York Times Book Review )

2. Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion (Knopf)

14 Rave • 12 Positive • 6 Mixed Read an excerpt from Let Me Tell You What I Mean here

“In five decades’ worth of essays, reportage and criticism, Didion has documented the charade implicit in how things are, in a first-person, observational style that is not sacrosanct but common-sensical. Seeing as a way of extrapolating hypocrisy, disingenuousness and doubt, she’ll notice the hydrangeas are plastic and mention it once, in passing, sorting the scene. Her gaze, like a sentry on the page, permanently trained on what is being disguised … The essays in Let Me Tell You What I Mean are at once funny and touching, roving and no-nonsense. They are about humiliation and about notions of rightness … Didion’s pen is like a periscope onto the creative mind—and, as this collection demonstrates, it always has been. These essays offer a direct line to what’s in the offing.”

–Durga Chew-Bose ( The New York Times Book Review )

3. Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Viking)

12 Rave • 13 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Orwell’s Roses here

“… on its simplest level, a tribute by one fine essayist of the political left to another of an earlier generation. But as with any of Solnit’s books, such a description would be reductive: the great pleasure of reading her is spending time with her mind, its digressions and juxtapositions, its unexpected connections. Only a few contemporary writers have the ability to start almost anywhere and lead the reader on paths that, while apparently meandering, compel unfailingly and feel, by the end, cosmically connected … Somehow, Solnit’s references to Ross Gay, Michael Pollan, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Peter Coyote (to name but a few) feel perfectly at home in the narrative; just as later chapters about an eighteenth-century portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds and a visit to the heart of the Colombian rose-growing industry seem inevitable and indispensable … The book provides a captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker … And, movingly, she takes the time to find the traces of Orwell the gardener and lover of beauty in his political novels, and in his insistence on the value and pleasure of things .”

–Claire Messud ( Harper’s )

4. Girlhood by Melissa Febos (Bloomsbury)

16 Rave • 5 Positive • 1 Mixed Read an excerpt from Girlhood here

“Every once in a while, a book comes along that feels so definitive, so necessary, that not only do you want to tell everyone to read it now, but you also find yourself wanting to go back in time and tell your younger self that you will one day get to read something that will make your life make sense. Melissa Febos’s fierce nonfiction collection, Girlhood , might just be that book. Febos is one of our most passionate and profound essayists … Girlhood …offers us exquisite, ferocious language for embracing self-pleasure and self-love. It’s a book that women will wish they had when they were younger, and that they’ll rejoice in having now … Febos is a balletic memoirist whose capacious gaze can take in so many seemingly disparate things and unfurl them in a graceful, cohesive way … Intellectual and erotic, engaging and empowering[.]”

–Michelle Hart ( Oprah Daily )

5. Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told by Jenny Diski (Bloomsbury)

14 Rave • 7 Positive

“[Diski’s] reputation as an original, witty and cant-free thinker on the way we live now should be given a significant boost. Her prose is elegant and amused, as if to counter her native melancholia and includes frequent dips into memorable images … Like the ideal artist Henry James conjured up, on whom nothing is lost, Diski notices everything that comes her way … She is discerning about serious topics (madness and death) as well as less fraught material, such as fashion … in truth Diski’s first-person voice is like no other, selectively intimate but not overbearingly egotistic, like, say, Norman Mailer’s. It bears some resemblance to Joan Didion’s, if Didion were less skittish and insistently stylish and generated more warmth. What they have in common is their innate skepticism and the way they ask questions that wouldn’t occur to anyone else … Suffice it to say that our culture, enmeshed as it is in carefully arranged snapshots of real life, needs Jenny Diski, who, by her own admission, ‘never owned a camera, never taken one on holiday.’” It is all but impossible not to warm up to a writer who observes herself so keenly … I, in turn, wish there were more people around who thought like Diski. The world would be a more generous, less shallow and infinitely more intriguing place.”

–Daphne Merkin ( The New York Times Book Review )

6. The Hard Crowd: Essays 2000-2020 by Rachel Kushner (Scribner)

12 Rave • 7 Positive Listen to an interview with Rachel Kushner here

“Whether she’s writing about Jeff Koons, prison abolition or a Palestinian refugee camp in Jerusalem, [Kushner’s] interested in appearances, and in the deeper currents a surface detail might betray … Her writing is magnetised by outlaw sensibility, hard lives lived at a slant, art made in conditions of ferment and unrest, though she rarely serves a platter that isn’t style-mag ready … She makes a pretty convincing case for a political dimension to Jeff Koons’s vacuities and mirrored surfaces, engages repeatedly with the Italian avant garde and writes best of all about an artist friend whose death undoes a spell of nihilism … It’s not just that Kushner is looking back on the distant city of youth; more that she’s the sole survivor of a wild crowd done down by prison, drugs, untimely death … What she remembers is a whole world, but does the act of immortalising it in language also drain it of its power,’neon, in pink, red, and warm white, bleeding into the fog’? She’s mining a rich seam of specificity, her writing charged by the dangers she ran up against. And then there’s the frank pleasure of her sentences, often shorn of definite articles or odd words, so they rev and bucket along … That New Journalism style, live hard and keep your eyes open, has long since given way to the millennial cult of the personal essay, with its performance of pain, its earnest display of wounds received and lessons learned. But Kushner brings it all flooding back. Even if I’m skeptical of its dazzle, I’m glad to taste something this sharp, this smart.”

–Olivia Laing ( The Guardian )

7. The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century by Amia Srinivasan (FSG)

12 Rave • 7 Positive • 5 Mixed • 1 Pan

“[A] quietly dazzling new essay collection … This is, needless to say, fraught terrain, and Srinivasan treads it with determination and skill … These essays are works of both criticism and imagination. Srinivasan refuses to resort to straw men; she will lay out even the most specious argument clearly and carefully, demonstrating its emotional power, even if her ultimate intention is to dismantle it … This, then, is a book that explicitly addresses intersectionality, even if Srinivasan is dissatisfied with the common—and reductive—understanding of the term … Srinivasan has written a compassionate book. She has also written a challenging one … Srinivasan proposes the kind of education enacted in this brilliant, rigorous book. She coaxes our imaginations out of the well-worn grooves of the existing order.”

–Jennifer Szalai ( The New York Times )

8. A Little Devil in America by Hanif Abdurraqib (Random House)

13 Rave • 4 Positive Listen to an interview with Hanif Abdurraqib here

“[A] wide, deep, and discerning inquest into the Beauty of Blackness as enacted on stages and screens, in unanimity and discord, on public airwaves and in intimate spaces … has brought to pop criticism and cultural history not just a poet’s lyricism and imagery but also a scholar’s rigor, a novelist’s sense of character and place, and a punk-rocker’s impulse to dislodge conventional wisdom from its moorings until something shakes loose and is exposed to audiences too lethargic to think or even react differently … Abdurraqib cherishes this power to enlarge oneself within or beyond real or imagined restrictions … Abdurraqib reminds readers of the massive viewing audience’s shock and awe over seeing one of the world’s biggest pop icons appearing midfield at this least radical of American rituals … Something about the seemingly insatiable hunger Abdurraqib shows for cultural transaction, paradoxical mischief, and Beauty in Blackness tells me he’ll get to such matters soon enough.”

–Gene Seymour ( Bookforum )

9. On Animals by Susan Orlean (Avid Reader Press)

11 Rave • 6 Positive • 1 Mixed Listen to an interview with Susan Orlean here

“I very much enjoyed Orlean’s perspective in these original, perceptive, and clever essays showcasing the sometimes strange, sometimes sick, sometimes tender relationships between people and animals … whether Orlean is writing about one couple’s quest to find their lost dog, the lives of working donkeys of the Fez medina in Morocco, or a man who rescues lions (and happily allows even full grown males to gently chew his head), her pages are crammed with quirky characters, telling details, and flabbergasting facts … Readers will find these pages full of astonishments … Orlean excels as a reporter…Such thorough reporting made me long for updates on some of these stories … But even this criticism only testifies to the delight of each of the urbane and vivid stories in this collection. Even though Orlean claims the animals she writes about remain enigmas, she makes us care about their fates. Readers will continue to think about these dogs and donkeys, tigers and lions, chickens and pigeons long after we close the book’s covers. I hope most of them are still well.”

–Sy Montgomery ( The Boston Globe )

10. Graceland, at Last: Notes on Hope and Heartache from the American South  by Margaret Renkl (Milkweed Editions)

9 Rave • 5 Positive Read Margaret Renkl on finding ideas everywhere, here

“Renkl’s sense of joyful belonging to the South, a region too often dismissed on both coasts in crude stereotypes and bad jokes, co-exists with her intense desire for Southerners who face prejudice or poverty finally to be embraced and supported … Renkl at her most tender and most fierce … Renkl’s gift, just as it was in her first book Late Migrations , is to make fascinating for others what is closest to her heart … Any initial sense of emotional whiplash faded as as I proceeded across the six sections and realized that the book is largely organized around one concept, that of fair and loving treatment for all—regardless of race, class, sex, gender or species … What rises in me after reading her essays is Lewis’ famous urging to get in good trouble to make the world fairer and better. Many people in the South are doing just that—and through her beautiful writing, Renkl is among them.”

–Barbara J. King ( NPR )

Our System:

RAVE = 5 points • POSITIVE = 3 points • MIXED = 1 point • PAN = -5 points

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Christopher Null

The Write Stuff: 4 College Admissions Essay Editing Services Reviewed

Looking for good news about the college admissions process these days? You won't find much of it. Not only has the cost of attending college doubled on average since the 1980s, but also it's gotten considerably harder to get in. The majority of colleges in America have witnessed a plummeting acceptance rate as the number of student applications has exploded. Fifty years ago you had a 20 percent shot at getting into Harvard (all things equal, of course). Now the Crimson's acceptance rate is about 5 percent. In the last 10 years alone, the acceptance rate at many major universities has been cut in half . It's almost enough to make a kid consider trying out for the rowing team .

As if applicants didn't have enough to stress about, colleges have been making it more onerous to apply—requiring additional interviews, recommendations, and SAT Subject Tests. But the most burdensome of them all is an old standby: the application essay.

Essay requirements vary widely from school to school. The 150-plus members of the Coalition for College (which includes Harvard and Vanderbilt) requires a single 500-word essay selected from prompts such as "Describe a time when you made a meaningful contribution to others in which the greater good was your focus. Discuss the challenges and rewards of making your contribution." Those with eyes on the University of California system must write a whopping four essays, with prompts such as "Describe how you have taken advantage of a significant educational opportunity or worked to overcome an educational barrier you have faced."

Students can reuse essays with other colleges if the prompts are similar enough—or if the schools happen to be members of the same application partnership—but you'd be surprised how seldom this occurs. My daughter found that out the hard way, when she learned that she'd have to write 12 separate essays to cover just five schools.

What's a kid to do who doesn't have parents who both work full-time as writers and editors? Just run their essay through Microsoft grammar check and hope for the best? Good luck. The acceptance rate at the University of Chicago has dropped 81 percent in the last 12 years. It doesn't take a Rhodes scholar to know that if you don't put your best foot forward, you may as well not even bother.

All of this led me to the curious world of online editing services. While you can hire a consultant to help guide your child through this overwhelming maze, these consultants are expensive and much of their work involves managing the complex application process, figuring out which colleges are a good fit, and brainstorming essay topics. If you just need help whipping an already written essay into better shape, an online editor might be a better (and much cheaper) fit.

To be sure, some of these services are exorbitantly expensive. Services like EssayEdge and TopAdmit can run you close to $200 for editing a single essay of fewer than 400 words. I've seen prices as high as $379 after various upsells. Word for word, that's more than what my editor at WIRED makes. (Hi, Mike!)

The good news is there are plenty of more affordable options available. I tested four of them, all reasonably priced and seemingly legitimate. Most of these services charge based on a combination of the word count of the original essay and the turnaround time required. I used the same raw essay from my daughter as a test piece for each of the four services, and requested the slowest turnaround time each of them offered to minimize the cost. I submitted her 383-word raw essay at the same time to each of the services, on a Wednesday afternoon. I gave all the services minimal guidance with my submission, noting only (when prompted) that this was a college application essay. All four of the services allow you to upload a Microsoft Word document and receive a red-lined and comment-filled Word document in return.

By Aarian Marshall

By Carlton Reid

By Justin Pot

When I received the revised essays, I reviewed them along with my wife (also a professional writer) and my daughter, the author. The reviews were done blind, without indicating the source of any of the edits, and we all rated each essay on a 1 to 10 scale. I also threw in a copy that I roughly edited. For the sake of comparison, the raw essay scored an average of 4.8, while my edit garnered a 6.9.

Here's what the various services cost, and how well they performed.

Note: When you buy something using the retail links in our stories, we may earn a small affiliate commission. Read more about how this works.

Total price: $13.91, 48-hour turnaround promised. Edit received within 24 hours.

Scribendi offers seven different turnaround time tiers, but its 72-hour and one-week turnarounds were the same price as the 48-hour turnaround. A four-hour turnaround was quoted at $28.53. Scribendi returned both a changes-tracked version of the document and a "clean" version with all edits accepted. Scribendi's edit was not just the fastest, it was incredibly thorough—almost nitpicky—with 16 comments or prompts to the writer suggesting avenues for additional content or revisions that were beyond the scope of a simple edit. Oddly, the final edit didn't resonate with readers, who largely felt it was somewhat awkward and clunky in its overall flow. That said, the editor's notes and the service's overall speed were a big plusses.

Readers' rating: 5.0

Total price: $13.90, three-day turnaround promised. Edit received after two days.

Elite Editing has an Advanced Editing service for $40, but the $13.90 plan I chose offers only "basic editing," which doesn't include "suggested rewrites to eliminate awkward phrasing, repetition, passive voice, etc." and "taking into account your original assignment." Three days is the standard turnaround; one-day turnaround for the Basic Editing plan would have cost $19.90. The site crashed when I checked out, but my payment and submission both went through successfully. As promised, Elite's edit was indeed basic. Its editor made the fewest changes of any of the services and left only three comments, one of which was about whether the use of indentations and double-spacing was appropriate. While Elite's edits were correct, they weren't terribly deep—although that was enough to propel it to a second-place finish from the readers.

Readers' rating: 5.7

Total price: $15.32, five-day turnaround promised. Edit received after four days.

Wordvice has eight different pricing tiers, with rates as low as 4 cents per word for a seven-day turnaround, though that tier was limited to materials longer than 3,000 words. The five-day turnaround tier was only marginally more expensive. When I received Wordvice's edited document, I was offered an upsell for a "second look" (basically another edit) for 30 percent off. Wordvice's embedded commentary was nearly as thorough as Scribendi's, though Wordvice was less obsessive over grammar and more focused on overall clarity. Turns out that was the right move: Wordvice's edit was the overall favorite of the quartet, and the finished draft reads cleanly and clearly.

Readers' rating: 6.3

Total price: $31.33, seven-day turnaround promised. Edit received after four days.

Scribbr initially quoted a price of $25.36, but I shelled out an extra $6 for both the "structure check" and "clarity check" options, despite not really understanding what those were. Prices include a 2 percent surcharge for using a credit card. For those in a hurry, 24-hour turnaround doubles the price. Scribbr seems more focused on editing academic coursework essays than admissions essays, with a relatively formal structure applied to its edits (removing contractions completely, for example). Editor's commentary was sparse, though on target. This draft was the most divisive of the services, earning high marks from my wife but very low marks from my daughter, who thought it stripped the writing of her voice.

Readers' rating: 5.3

Any good college essay has to end with a conclusion, so here are a few takeaways. First, all of the services sent back essays that were, on average, felt to be an improvement over the original draft, with all of them catching numerous spelling and grammatical errors—so students with no professional editing help may do well to consider them, especially given how affordable these services are. That said, also remember that when you engage with an editing service, you're really engaging with a single (anonymous) editor who you won't ever meet or be able to interact with. That editor won't have any level of understanding of the writer's personality beyond what's on the page, and quality will necessarily vary from one editor to another, even within a given editing service.

Further still, remember that editing quality is always going to be subjective, just like any piece of writing. Except for this story, of course. It's amazing.

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4 Best Essay Writing Services in 2022 – A Comparative Study

If we are all asked to narrate how school life is, we all would probably have the same answer— “No free time!”. This isn’t a surprise to us; we all know how hectic academia can get.

The tiring classes, difficult courses, tons of assignments, etc. are few of the many reasons why students don’t have free time. Moreover, lack of discipline only makes matters worse for students who can’t afford to resist the temptation to engage in other unproductive activities. Thus, finding time for essay writing gets even more difficult.

In this article, we will discuss the features of essay writing services and their benefits to researchers.

Table of Contents

What are Essay Writing Services?

Essay Writing Service simply means to outsource your essay writing to a person or a group of people. These people or sometimes an agency will write your paper based on your request.

The demand for online freelancing jobs has skyrocketed in recent years. Students can outsource their writing projects now without breaking the bank! Though these services are intended for professionals, like businesses and universities alike, but the affordable service charges have led many students in need of an extra hand with their studies. Students hire freelancers who write essays on behalf of them.

4 Essay Writing Services You Need in University

We have compiled a list of the best essay writing services you need in the university to free up some time.

1. PaperHelp

Since its creation in 2008, PaperHelp has gone on to win the hearts of many university students by helping them with great write ups. Students most prefer PaperHelp since it has a friendly user interface.

The website is quite easy to use; with three steps, you can ace any essay assignment or competition you need their service for. The user interface isn’t just great for computers but phones as well.

To ensure they render the best service to you, they recruit only writers with impeccable grammar, writing skills, and worthy experience.

Additionally, they create special packages for all students who refer their friends to the site. For every person you refer, you get 10% of the money they pay, and they also get 10% of the fee.

Price: $10-$20 per one page prepared in 14 days

Types of Services: Essays, custom papers, rewriting, assignment help, research papers, coursework help, personal statements, term papers, etc

Website: https://www.paperhelp.org/

2. WriteMyEssay

Another great agency that has the love of university at heart. WriteMyEssay offers student pay after service, which means “no upfront payment.”

If you are still wondering why such a young agency like WriteMyEssay has a 4.7/5 rating on TrustPilot, then you know why.

The 24/7 customer service WriteMyEssay provides is second to none, plus you have access to their VIP services which make you order for your essays to be written within a short time. This will attract a few more bucks, though.

Types of Services: Essays, research papers, reports, term papers, speeches, etc

Price: $10-$24 per one page prepared in 14 days

Website: https://writemyessay.me/

3. CheapPaperWriting

While the agency’s name might seem like bait due to the price of their services, they indeed offer cheap services like personal chat with writers in case you need revision.

Also, they do not offer VIP services as they treat all their customers equally, and with due diligence. They try as much as possible to offer the best services since they only hire native speakers, so you need not worry about the quality of your work.

In case of any unpleasant service rendered by their employees, you get a full or partial refund, but of course, terms and conditions apply. So, do well to read the important information on the site.

Types of Services: Essays, term papers, resumes, PPTs, dissertations, courseworks, case study, homework help, etc

Website: https://cheappaperwriting.com/

4. EvolutionWriters

The world keeps evolving, and EvolutionWriters keep evolving with it. All thanks to the wonderful services they offer. EvolutionWriters boasts of over 100,000 happy users.

EvolutionWriters hires based on experience, so they have a lot of good academic writers for your jobs. Keeping users happy isn’t a joke; they offer great discounts. You can get a job done for as low as $10 and also request a refund if you’re not pleased with my service.

EvolutionWriters also offer VIP customer service for their users. So, in case you need an urgent clarification.

Types of Services: Essays, custom papers, term papers, thesis papers, research papers, resumes, etc

Price: $10-$23 per one page prepared in 14 days

Website: https://evolutionwriters.com/

Why Should You Use Essay Writing Service?

It’s no secret that writing is a fundamental skill for success in academia. It can make or break your grades-up to 80% of the grade depending on what type paper you’re working with (essay vs research). Some students have turned to “essay writing services” in order to get their work done. With the increase in tuition and other expenses, many find it difficult maintain their grades without help from essay writing services that provide ready-made papers for them at low costs.

What are the Benefits of Using Essay Writing Services?

• It saves time:

Students have busy schedules and they want to use their time wisely. Essay writers can help them save valuable hours by completing assignments in a timely manner. Students have busy schedules and might not always find the right balance between responsibilities, spending quality one-on-one moments with friends while still completing complex tasks at school. Essay writers are perfect because you can get your paper written in just one day instead of three!

• It does research

When it comes to essay writing, there is a common misconception that students must do all the work themselves. The best services will actually encourage you take some of these tasks off your plate by doing research for them and then sharing what they find with their paper writer! While at the same time, you should ensure that you’re using the right file sharing tools to get the essay back and forth during the process of collaboration.

• It helps improve your skills

Collaborating with a college paper writing service not only ensures that you receive top quality work, but also allows for collaboration. You can get tips and tricks from your writer during the process of editing as well! It helps improve your skills by collaborating and learning from an experienced writer. Your online essay writer will share tips to make sure everything is perfect for both parties involved in the process; furthermore, they can offer feedback or suggestions when needed!

The use of freelance academic writers will not only create time for you but will also make you learn since the majority of the essay writing websites render services like that.

Also, students need to go easy on themselves; the use of freelance academic writers is legitimate and not in any way illegal. It can be likened to parents helping their children.

Lastly, you should use the only reliable websites to avoid submitting plagiarized work in school and read and understand your work to prepare for questions in class.

The article “4 Best Essay Writing Services in 2022” offers a comprehensive comparative study, helping readers make informed decisions when choosing professional essay writing services. The detailed analysis of each service, including factors like pricing, quality, customer support, and delivery, provides valuable insights. This article serves as a reliable resource for individuals seeking reputable and trustworthy essay writing assistance.

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15 Essays To Read Again in 2022

A list of our staff’s favorite essays from the past year that they did not commission themselves, or that they think cover a topic that deserves a second look.

As we prepare for 2022, we wanted to share with you a list of our staff’s favorite essays from the past year that they did NOT commission themselves or that they think cover a topic that deserves a second look.

Why I Stopped Writing About Syria, by Asser Khattab

Riada Asimovic Akyol, Contributing Editor

Among so many informative, eloquent pieces published in New Lines this year, this one I think I will actually never forget. It hit so many buttons and allowed so many people to be seen like never before. I caught myself nodding so many times while reading it, and I know a lot of people from the Balkans could understand what Asser was sharing. Others could learn with humility. The way he wrote about growing up “surrounded by people who have never experienced the joy of peaceful tranquility,” thinking that was the normal , and both the vulnerability and confidence with which he wrote about different challenges, as well as his human and professional yearnings and aspirations, were powerful and inspiring. Many conversations in open, and behind closed doors, will from now on be held, with employers, between employees, among friends, across the borders thanks to Asser’s piece. I am thankful for New Lines for publishing it.

How Arabs Have Failed Their Language, by Hossam Abouzahr

Kevin Blankinship, Contributing Editor

After the requisite boilerplate about how hard it is to choose favorites, about how every essay adds something to knowledge, etc., let me say that his is the piece I liked most from 2021. The reason is that it surprised me. It surprised me not because it was new to me: As an Arabic professor, I’ve heard who knows how many catfights about “diglossia,” namely high versus low (colloquial) varieties of Greek, Chinese, Serbian and other languages. What surprised me was how fresh the wounds are. For a quarrel looping back a thousand years, when Arab linguists tried to check “pollution” from non-native speakers, especially Persians, by setting up rules of grammar, I was stunned to see how much it agitates today. Abouzahr’s essay came out and so did the partisans. Formal Arabic is the Arabic of Islam, some said: the Arabic of the Qur’an, of classical poetry. But, said others, colloquial Arabic is the Arabic of hearth and home, of jokes and secrets, of friendship. Could it not, I thought as I watched the skirmish, be both? In the spirit of Christmas, isn’t there room for all the Arabics at the inn? A naïve thought that softens the majesty, the Whitman-like container of multitudes and, what’s more, one that misses how real language is used by real people and how it can’t be everything to everyone. Oh, well, let the fight go on, then.

The ISIS War Crime Iraqi Turkmen Won’t Talk About, by Hollie McKay

Courtney Dobson, Senior Editor

In this essay, Hollie McKay reports on women in Iraq who have been “disappeared” by the Islamic State group, the group’s use of rape as a weapon of war and how minority communities struggle to heal and come to terms with the stigma associated with sexual violence. It is a haunting piece, but McKay masterfully conveys the anguish and pain that comes with sexual violence, not just for the victim, but also for their loved ones trying to help. “Through the gap in the door flap,” McKay writes, “I noticed that scores of men and boys had lined up outside, maintaining a respectful distance from the distraught women but with curiosity etched into their sun-kissed faces. They wanted to be involved somehow, to be part of the healing process, to remind us that men were not the enemy — twisted men were the enemy. These were the fathers and brothers and sons, the nephews and neighbors.” McKay’s essay resonates for communicating the universal need for support, connection and justice, while also laying bare why these don’t come easily. Published a few months after New Lines launched, this essay left a deep impression on me.

How I Escaped China’s War on Uyghurs, by Tahir Hamut Izgil

Rasha Elass, Editorial Director

When we launched New Lines we wanted to cover themes and stories from beyond the geographic Middle East. The oppression of the Uyghurs in China struck me as an underreported story in mainstream media because it hardly featured first-person voices from the Uyghur community. So I got to work and found Tahir Hamut Izgil, a Uyghur poet who tells a story with moving prose and nuance. His essay about the chilling effect of a document that the Chinese authorities require members of the Uyghur community to fill out is both simple and profound, capturing a Kafkaesque reality that is often lost in the daily coverage of foreign affairs. Months after we translated and published Izgil’s essay, other media outlets followed suit. To us this is a triumph, evidence that we are already creating new lines in international reporting.

F ull essay

A Castle in the Air: Trekking the Secret Mountain Paths of Yemen, by Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Anthony Elghossain, Contributing Editor

Mountain men tell their stories. In Yemen, some folks speak of “an ancient city” atop a mountain. “What,” asks Tim Mackintosh-Smith after hearing them, “is really at the top of Jabal Balq?” To answer this question, he quests through myth, memory and the mind for a “castle in the air.” Is it a place? Maybe. Is it a journey? Yes. Having always gotten along with and been fascinated by folks in the mountains and hills, I was interested in reading this piece as soon as it was in our pipeline. And I loved how our writer came back for some “unfinished business.” Writing is about the quest. So, too, is life. Our writer captured those truths in this piece.

After America: Inside the Taliban’s New Emirate, by Fazelminallah Qazizai

Hassan Hassan, Editor in Chief

My choice of a favorite essay is to illustrate part of why we established  New Lines  in the first place. It was a dispatch by Fazelminallah Qazizai from a Taliban-held area, published four months before the Taliban would take over the country as fast as their trucks could drive through towns and provinces. If you read that story, nothing about what happened in the summer would come as a shock to you. After the Taliban’s takeover, it was easy for journalists to go through their old notes and write compelling stories about what they had witnessed in the months and years before, to make sense of what unfolded. It is harder to do that before the event, and Qazazai did just that. He also did it really well. The piece should be a template in how dispatches should be done. Qazazai was not parachuted into the country to come back with a piece from there. He is an Afghan journalist who actually knows the terrain, the society and history, and who goes to a Taliban area and eloquently captures and reconstructs the situation there.

The Key to Understanding Iran Is Poetry, by Muhammad Ali Mojaradi

Tam Hussein, Contributing Editor

Muhammad Ali Mojaradi in his essay is right: The key to understanding Iran is poetry. In Shiraz and Isfahan you see beggars recite Hafez and children hawking for money with birds picking couplets from small envelopes trying to tell your fortune. Perhaps it’s just Frank Miller’s “300” or the politics of the region that makes its peoples appear to have a culture built on hate and cruelty. But that is far from the truth. It has ambiguity built in, abundant variations on love, mysticism and much, much more. It just gave me an appreciation as to how all-encompassing Persianate culture is, including Iran, central Asia, Afghanistan and the subcontinent.

The Wandering Alawite, by Adnan Younes

Faysal Itani, Associate Editor

This was, as far as I’m aware, the best if not the only piece by a constituent of Syria’s mass murderer about his and his coreligionists’ implication in Bashar al-Assad’s crimes. I think it took tremendous intellectual courage to reflect on what drew Syria’s Alawites to support this regime, but it also posed an uncomfortable challenge to readers who understandably deplore any and all support for the war criminal Assad. It was difficult to write and difficult to read, because of its ability to humanize and contextualize horrible choices by Assad’s supporters and detractors alike. It was a tragic story in the most literal and compelling way.

A Multigenerational American Story of Immigration and Return, by Rasha Elass

Ola Salem, Managing Editor

A topic we often visit at New Lines is identity. Over the past year, we’ve run a number of first-person pieces looking at how environment and ancestry have shaped writers’ identity and how the answer is usually far more complex than a quick answer to the question, “Where are you from?” One story I found to be particularly fascinating was Rasha Elass’s piece in which she wrote about her Syrian great-grandfather who moved to America, carved a life for himself and later created a family of his own, only later to uproot his children and move back to Syria and face an attack from the French.

Gone to Waste: the ‘CVE’ Industry After 9/11, by Lydia Wilson

Chris Sands, South Asia Editor

The legacy of 9/11 has dominated my life and career. As a journalist for local newspapers in the U.K. in the weeks and months after the attacks, I saw and heard the racist backlash against British Muslims. Later, as a young reporter in the Middle East, I witnessed the daily indignities Palestinians suffer under Israeli occupation. But it was while living in Afghanistan for almost a decade that I came to understand the true folly of the countering violent extremism industry — a money-making enterprise perpetuated by governments, international NGOs and private companies in the guise of curbing Islamic militancy. Lydia Wilson’s article brilliantly details how this house of cards was built to ignore the social ills and legitimate political grievances that lie at the root of what was once called the “war on terror.”

The Bandit Warlords of Nigeria, by James Barnett

Kareem Shaheen, Middle East and Newsletters Editor

One of the things I was looking forward to the most when we started New Lines was giving the space to writers to explore stories that haven’t been told in the mainstream media. Too often, the rich tapestry of our lives and societies are obscured rather than illuminated. This piece is a fascinating investigation into an untold story that has long been neglected in favor of the “sexier” stories of Boko Haram extremists in Nigeria. It is about the farmer-herder conflict that has cost tens of thousands of lives, has been exacerbated by climate change and is destabilizing important parts of Africa’s most populous country. The color and fascinating exchanges in the piece, chronicled through Barnett’s exclusive access to the bandit warlords, make this unique investigation shine.

Where the Russian Gulag Once Thrived, Life Remains Isolated, by Owen Matthews

Michael Weiss, News Director

Believe it or not, one of our best essays this year grew out of the field research journal for a forthcoming spy novel. Owen Mathews spent 10 days touring the remains of the Gulag Archipelago — the slave-labor camps Stalin built to punish to send his enemies (and quite a lot of his friends) in the Russian Arctic. Whole communities and cities sprung up around these grim “colonies” of the 20th century, which helped industrialize the Soviet Union at the price of around 6 million souls. As one might expect, this architecture of atrocity has been left to rot or freeze or be swallowed up by the taiga. Matthews, an accomplished historian and biographer, travels to parts unknown and unremembered with an eye for detail and — no small trick given the circumstances — a sense of humor.

How an Email Sting Operation Unearthed a Pro-Assad Conspiracy—and Russia’s Role in It, by Michael Weiss and Jett Goldsmith

Brian Whitaker, Contributing Editor

A moment of light relief in the weird world of conspiracy theorists. Paul McKeigue is a university professor who denies the Assad regime’s chemical attacks in Syria and claims that those who died in them were executed by rebel fighters in a gas chamber. He got the gas chamber idea from an American who had a dream about it after eating anchovy pizza shortly before going to bed. McKeigue considers himself a smart guy, so when a mysterious emailer contacted him using the name “Ivan,” he assumed “Ivan” was working for Russian intelligence and began passing him information – mainly about people who disagreed with his conspiracy theories. But “Ivan” was neither Russian nor an intelligence agent – the professor had been caught in a sting.

An Elegy for Afghanistan, by Habib Zahori

Lydia Wilson, Contributing Editor

The piece is everything I want an essay to be: personal, informative and visceral, communicating a raw experience while simultaneously expressing far bigger themes about humanity and war. We published it at a time when all eyes were on Afghanistan, after the Taliban took control once coalition forces had withdrawn. For me it’s pieces like this that really cut through the immense amount that was being published at that time on this subject; it was so well written and based on so much personal and intimate knowledge. And his love for Afghanistan – and the heartbreak of that love — came through powerfully.

In Search of African Arabic, by Vaughn Rasberry

Faisal Al Yafai, Executive Editor

It was always going to be difficult to choose one essay over the others, and many of the choices of the team could easily have been my first picks. But Vaughn Rasberry’s essay on the influence of the Arabic language in Africa stands out for me because it explores such a rarely considered subject.

Rasberry believes, as I do, that African histories cannot be told without understanding the role of Arabic in shaping the political, social and literary environments of many of the countries and civilisations of the continent. The flip side is also true: that the Arab world cannot understand itself without reference to the African continent.

As Rasberry points out, there is a vast corpus of literature in African countries written in Arabic, much of it under-explored – some, no doubt, still undiscovered. Hidden histories of the African continent and the Arab world are in those texts, waiting to be sought out. Without it, both regions will only know half of their own stories.

South Africa’s ‘Born Frees’ Are Disillusioned With Democracy

If carthage is destroyed, it won’t be at the hands of mark zuckerberg, a sliver of hope on the deadly route to the canary islands, the rise of a distinctly african speculative fiction, remembering sergei parajanov, the bard of the caucasus, against tyranny: two stories told in pictures warn us to fight on, sign up to our newsletter.

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You’re a unique person, with unique experiences and ambitions, but how do you best show this in a response to an essay prompt? With Full Essay Coaching, your expert Admissions Consultant will guide you from beginning to end and make sure your strongest attributes come through clearly and concisely.

This is a great option for the Common App personal statement, reach schools, and other high-stakes situations.

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Our matching process is carefully designed and consistently leads to successful consultant and student matches; as a result, reassignment is virtually never necessary. However, if the need for a reassignment arises, we are happy to accommodate such a request.

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The flexibility and availability offered to me by my selected tutor as well as her willingness to work with me until we perfected the things needed for my college journey. I would Highly recommend prepscholar to anyone looking for help or improvement in high school.

I really liked the personalized support for my essays and how my consultant took the time to understand me as a person to know how to best reflect myself in my essay. She was also very understanding when I needed more time to work on the draft before another round of revisions

Many of the people that reviewed my essay told me the same thing: show don’t tell. However, they never explained what they meant or how to accomplish that. Lily was really nice and helpful in demonstrating what I needed to change instead of just saying it needed improvement. She was also really nice!

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Prepscholar’s personalized approach to the admissions process is invaluable. Eric’s “show, don’t tell” philosophy is practical and proven. Allen and the Prepscholar team embody this essential value with their own degrees and educational accolades. I trust them with my collegiate future. I would suggest that anyone needing guidance through the admissions process do the same.

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14 Best College Essay Services for 2024 (40 Services Reviewed)

Research conducted by Emily Kierkegaard , PhD, and expert-reviewed by Kevin Wong, PrepMaven Co-founder

Not sure which college application essay coaching and editing service is the best? We compared the top 40 services, created in-depth reviews for 14 of them, and narrowed it down to the 4 best that will help guide you through the process of writing amazing college application essays.

What is the Best College Essay Service?

• PrepMaven  – best college application essay service overall
• College Essay Mentor  – best for individual consultants
• The College Essay Guy  – best for unlimited essay assistance
• College Vine  – best of the big platforms

The best of the rest:

Individual essay consultants:

• College Essay Editor  – small editing team
• Allison Karpf  – former English teacher helping students
• Your College Vision  – former journalist with more affordable rates
• The College Guru  – good on paper but unresponsive
• Sofia Zapiola – budget-friendly application assistance

Mid-size teams:

• Lotus Learning  – focus on health sciences

Large platforms:

• Study Point  – larger platform with mystery editors
• Ivy Select  – larger platform with mystery editors
• Empowerly  – larger platform with mystery editors
• BeMo  – expensive and aggressive with wrong expertise

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Best College Application Essay Services in 2024

#1 – prepmaven.

Our Verdict — Best College Essay Assistance Overall Price: $79–349/hour (minimum $510 package) PrepMaven’s one-on-one college essay assistance is the best option overall. Founded by brothers and Princeton grads Greg and Kevin, almost all of PrepMaven’s essay coaches have Ivy-League experience, primarily from Princeton and Harvard. All essay coaches also undergo a thorough training program in PrepMaven’s methods, developed by professional writers with deep understanding of the college admissions process, for helping students to discover the most compelling stories for their essays. Unlike other services, PrepMaven offers college essay assistance at several different price points. At the most accessible rate, students can work with current Ivy-League undergraduates who specialize in writing and have recently aced the college application process. At higher rates, students can work with coaches who are both Ivy-League grads and professional writers (screenwriters, journalists, editors) with many years of experience helping students to craft compelling essays. Interested students can even work directly with founders Greg and Kevin, who have over 15 years of experience helping students through the entire essay-writing process. PrepMaven’s services combine many of the best features of other good options into one, and it’s hard to beat their experience.

Sign up for PrepMaven’s college essay help now

Any student wanting college essay help, at any point in the process, with a range of budgets.

At a glance:

• Cost: $79–349/hour (minimum $510 package)
• Writing coach qualifications: Princeton graduates and professional writers (or current Princeton students); all trained

What we like:

• Ivy League experience —most of their writing coaches are Princeton grads or current students, with some from Harvard and other Ivies
• Different pricing options to meet different families’ circumstances
• More flexible and greater capacity to take on new students compared to individual consultants

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#2 – College Essay Mentor

Our Verdict — Best of the Individual Consultants Price: unknown but high Some college essay consulting services consist of just one expert. Of these individual essay consultants, Chris Hunt at College Essay Mentor is our favorite. He combines writing experience as a journalist for the Economist and the Wall Street Journal with personal experience as a graduate of Dartmouth. However, he only works with a small number of students each year, and students need to apply to work with him — he only accepts students with top grades and test scores who are already strong applicants for top schools. Chris offers the option for one-time written feedback, but this only gives big-picture generalizations. (And written-only feedback is always limited.) In order for help with the essay process, students need to purchase a complete essay package.

Students with top grades and test scores who want to work with a one-person business, who have a sizable budget, and who are ready to get started early.

• Cost: $210 for a one-time written essay feedback (big picture only), then $110 per draft feedback; pricing for essay process packages unknown
• Essay coach qualifications: professional journalist, Dartmouth grad
• Professional writing experience as a journalist
• Extensive experience working with college applicants
• Partners with Debra Felix, former Director of Admissions at Columbia, for full application review

What we don’t like:

• One-on-one work is limited to very high-achieving students, who need to apply with a resume : “I limit my one-on-one work to students who I believe will be strong applicants to elite universities. As a rule, this means having high grades in challenging classes, a test score of ACT 34+ or SAT 1500+, and substantial activities outside of the classroom.”
• Works with a limited number of students (60 per year), so often no availability
• All-or-nothing packages don’t allow students to work with Chris for just a few hours or for part of the essay-writing process
• Secretive about pricing (he’ll only give pricing details once he’s reviewed the student’s resume and agreed to work with them), but we expect the minimum cost of working one-on-one to be several thousand dollars

#3 – The College Essay Guy

Our Verdict — Best for Unlimited Essay Assistance Price: $4900 for application to 3 schools, $8050 for application for 10 schools We’re fans of Ethan Sawyer, the original “college essay guy”— his book, College Essay Essentials , is a great guide to the essay-writing process. Ethan doesn’t work directly with many students these days, but he now has a team of consultants who help students follow his principles. Their assistance is really all-or-nothing — they prefer to work with students from the very beginning of the process, and their minimum package is $4900, which includes assistance with essays for three schools. If students are applying to ten schools (a more realistic number for students aiming at competitive colleges), the fee is a hefty $7400.

Students who want unlimited help through the entire process, who have a sizable budget.

• Cost: $4900 (supplemental essays for 3 schools) – $7400 (supplemental essays for 10 schools)
• Essay coach qualifications: mix of Ivy grads and former teachers, some writers/screenwriters; all trained
• Great free resources about the essay-writing process
• Their Matchlighters Scholars Program gives back to the community by providing admissions consulting for select qualifying students
• All-or-nothing packages have a high minimum fee and don’t work for students who want just a few hours of feedback or help with just part of the process

#4 – College Vine

Our Verdict — Best of the Big Platforms Price: $140–180/hour There are plenty of large platforms with large stables of part-time tutors and coaches available to work with students. Of these big platforms, we think CollegeVine has the best offerings. Compared to other large companies, CollegeVine provides more information about their tutors, and students can pick individual tutors to work with from their roster. However, this model is really just a way of finding individual tutors to hire. Tutors don’t receive any training and don’t share a common approach, so it’s a mixed bag. Their rates are fairly high for part-time tutors who don’t have specific expertise and training in college essay consulting. Because CollegeVine is really just a marketplace where individual tutors can find students, the quality and price will vary widely.

Students who want to work with a big company, or those who want a quick session or two to go over their essays.

• Cost: Typically $140–180/hour
• Essay coach qualifications: no specific qualifications, but a few are Ivy League graduates
• Possible to select individual editors to work with from their roster.
• Easy to schedule ad-hoc sessions with a tutor through the website.
• No training or common approach for tutors
• Editors are part-time , with no option to work with full-time college admissions experts
• Relatively expensive for this level of expertise

College Essay Editing Alternatives (that Didn’t Make the Cut)

Individual essay consultants, #5 – college essay editor.

Our Verdict — Small Editing Team Price: Roughly $5,950 for applications to 10 schools College Essay Editor comprises two graduates of Stanford. This means that they have personal experience applying to highly competitive schools. One member of the team also has a college counseling certification, which is a good background for college essays. Based on their website, they appear to focus on the editing and proofreading phase of the essay-writing process. This can be helpful to students, but we recommend working with a service who can help students to uncover their values and brainstorm really great material that allows them to really shine—and if this doesn’t happen at the beginning of the process, it’s much harder to add in later on.

• Cost: $195/1000 words for proofreading, $495/1000 words for 3 rounds of editing and proofreading, or $595/1000 words for unlimited rounds of editing and proofreading; for the purposes of comparison, complete applications to 10 competitive colleges would be around 9,650 words, or $5950.
• Writing coach qualifications: Stanford graduates, one of whom has college counseling certification
• Editors are graduates of Stanford University , and one is a member of NACAC, the national association of college counselors
• They focus on editing and proofreading only , not on the crucial earlier steps of brainstorming and strategy
• Small team with very limited availability
• All asynchronous editing so you won’t be able to cultivate a real relationship with your essay coach.

#6 – Allison Karpf

Our Verdict — Former English Teacher Helping Students Price: $385/hour or $3850 package for application to one school Another option for students looking to hire an individual consultant is Allison Karpf. Allison is a former high school English teacher and a graduate of UC Berkeley who also holds a Masters of Education from Stanford. Her rates are definitely on the higher side, especially for someone who doesn’t have a professional writing background, but she does have extensive experience working with students to craft their essays.

• Cost:  $385/hour or $3850 unlimited counseling (includes supplemental essays for one college)
• Essay coach qualifications: former high school English teacher; Berkeley grad, Stanford MEd
• Lots of experience helping students improve their college essays
• Very quick to respond to client requests
• No professional writing experience or Ivy-Plus undergraduate experience
• High rates relative to other options
• Limited availability , since she works alone

#7 – Your College Vision

Our Verdict: Former Journalist with More Affordable Rates Price: $180/hour, or packages starting from $3500 Laurie Lande is another individual consultant who helps students through the essay-writing process. She comes recommended by other consultants like Chris from College Essay Mentor . Laurie did not herself attend a highly competitive school, so she doesn’t have that personal experience of going through the selective admissions process, but she does have a professional writing background as a journalist for the Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong.

• Cost: $180/hour or packages starting at $3500
• Essay coach qualifications: journalism background
• Affordable pricing , relative to other options
• Not a graduate of a highly selective school

#8 – The College Guru

Our Verdict — Good on Paper but Unresponsive Price: unknown Yet another individual essay consultant is Geanine Thompson from The College Guru. Geanine attended Dartmouth as an undergraduate and also holds an MBA from Duke. She also has a professional writing background as an assistant book editor at Berkley Publishing Group. Like Greg and Kevin at PrepMaven , she combines experience in the business world and at Wall Street firms with experience in education.

• Cost: unknown
• Essay coach qualifications: former assistant book editor; Dartmouth grad, Duke MBA
• Dartmouth graduate and former book editor
• Not responsive to emails and client requests

#9 – Sofia Zapiola

Our Verdict — A budget-friendly, personal essay editor. Price: $80/hour Yet another individual essay consultant is Sofia Zapiola, who offers a mix of essay editing and college application counseling services.

• Cost: $80/hour
• Essay coach qualifications: M.A. from Harvard; certificate in College Counseling from UC San Diego.
• Individual approach, budget-friendly rates, commitment to working within families’ budgets.
• Very few testimonials, so it’s difficult to evaluate how effective she is.

Mid-size Teams

#10 – lotus learning.

Our Verdict — Expensive for Tutor Background Price: $165/hour Founded by a Harvard grad who is a former teacher and veteran of the publishing industry, Lotus learning offers college essay help in the Boston area. They have a small team of tutors, mostly recent grads from good but not Ivy-Plus colleges, and mostly with focus in health sciences.

• Cost: $165/hour (minimum 8 hours)
• Essay coach qualifications: tutors are recent grads, but not Ivy-Plus schools
• Reasonable pricing with flexible packages
• Essay editors aren’t graduates of Ivy-Plus schools and don’t have professional writing experience

Large platforms

#11 – study point.

Our Verdict — Larger Platform with Mystery Editors Price: Rates Between $60 and $120/hr Study Point is a larger essay editing service. They claim to have several decades of experience helping students to craft their college essays, but they do not give information about who their essay coaches are and what qualifications they might have.

• Cost: $60-120/hr, depending on tutor experience
• Essay coach qualifications: unknown
• Larger company with several decades of experience
• Unclear who the essay coaches are
• Lack of statistics about their results

#12 – Ivy Select

Our Verdict — Larger Platform with Mystery Editors Price: unknown Ivy Select makes a lot of big promises on their website about having the best college essay consultants in the business, but they offer no information on who these consultants are, or on their backgrounds. They also brag that each consultant “only” works 20 students in one application cycle, but in our experience, that’s quite high.

• Long list of impressive (but anonymous) testimonials
• Only work with “top students”
• No information on their website about who the editors are
• Each essay coach works with up to 20 students at one time

#13 – Empowerly

Our Verdict — Larger Platform with Mystery Editors Price: High, from $6000/year Empowerly has over 60 college counselors who each work with an average of 5 students per year, in order to have more time to devote to each student. Their counselors come from “different educational backgrounds,” and while they do not provide specific biographical details we can assume that most of their essay coaches did not attend highly selective schools.

• Cost: typically from $6000/year
• Essay coach qualifications: college counselors
• Counselors work with just a few students per year
• You have to upgrade to “Empowerly Elite” to guarantee a counselor with a more selective educational background
• No professional writing experience

#14 – Prepory

Our Verdict — Expensive but with Good Expertise Price: $325/hr Prepory is a college application and career counseling service that offers a comprehensive program for college applications at any stage of the process (including as early as 9th grade). They make a lot of impressive claims about the expertise of their coaches, but it’s quite difficult to actual find much information about their essay coach qualifications.

• Cost: $325/hr
• They have a comprehensive college application program that begins as early as 9th grade.
• Limited information about essay coaches
• High prices

Top 40 College Essay Services Considered

• College Essay Editor
• The College Essay Guy
• College Vine
• College Essay Mentor
• Study Point
• Allison Karpf
• The College Guru
• Lotus Learning
• Summit Prep
• Sofia Zapiola
• Ivy Global / New Summits
• College Essay Solutions
• Your College Vision
• Essay Edge*
• ServicEscape*
• PapersForge*
• QuickWriter*
• JustEditMyEssay*
• JustDoMyEsssay*
• ExpertWriting*
• SpeedyPaper*
• GradeMiners*

* A number of services will edit essays directly for students, or even write portions of the essay for students. We do not condone this. Admissions officers can tell when essays have been written or edited by adults and this can have severe consequences. We have excluded these services from our reviews.

Why are college application essays important?

Can a great college essay alone get you into Harvard?

No. You’ll need your grades, test scores, and extracurricular activities (as well as letters of recommendation and interview) to be outstanding.

But can a mediocre essay be the reason you didn’t get into Harvard?

Yes. There are thousands of amazingly-qualified students who graduate from high school each year. Great grades and test scores might be a prerequisite for admission to a competitive college, but they alone aren’t enough.

College essays are a key component of a student’s application . When done well, they transform a collection of numbers—GPA, class rank, SAT or ACT scores , number of AP classes taken, AP scores—into a glimpse of a real, individual person.

Essays do many things. Good college essays can highlight extracurricular achievements which otherwise would be overlooked in a sterile list. Strong essays often indicate the student’s future plans —how they plan to leave a mark on their college campus and on the world. They can shine a light on unique challenges that a student may have had to face on their journey.

College admissions officers only have a few minutes to spend on each application. College essays need to be original, interesting, and memorable . They need to grab the attention of the admissions officer and persuade them that this is the student out of hundreds or thousands of other similarly-qualified applicants who should be admitted.

College admissions essays are usually unlike any other kind of writing that students have done before. They’re a combination of memoir and marketing pitch, and they need to be creative but also highly strategic. That’s a tough assignment!

What’s more, students are left to figure this assignment out on their own. A thoughtful and generous high school English teacher may provide guidance or offer to read essays and give feedback, but these teachers are responsible for many students, and they’re (usually) not experts in admissions strategies.

There’s another reason college essays are especially important from 2024 on. After the recent Supreme Court decision, the application essay has become one of the main ways that you can communicate how your racial identity has affected your life.

In fact, the New York Times published an article about how important it can be for students to discuss race in their college application essays!

Why work with a college essay service?

You may want to consider a college essay service if:

• You have no idea where to start in order to write your college application essays
• You feel overwhelmed by all of the different ideas you have and don’t know what would be the most strategic for college admissions—and what topics to definitely avoid for college essays
• You don’t know how to craft a compelling stor y
• You’re not sure how to edit and refine what you’ve written
• You have a hard time keeping yourself on track and want an external structure to hold you accountable
• You’re tired of conflict between students and parents about college essays
• You’re aiming at a competitive college (not just the Ivy League!) and know that you need your essays to be outstanding
• Your grades, test scores, and extracurriculars aren’t exceptional, so you need your essay to make your essay stand out from the pack
• You’re unfamiliar with the US college admissions process (a common situation for international students and first-generation families in the US)

Any of these are strong reasons to consider working with a college essay service!

It’s also worth remembering that a lot of the free advice on college’s website isn’t always very clear. For example, NYU’s admissions Senior Assistant Director of Admissions says that “There is no right or wrong way to answer as long as your answer is genuine to you.”

While that’s true, that doesn’t offer much guidance on how to actually write the essay!

Though many college applicants might not mention it, more and more students are using professional college application consultants. Research at the University of Chicago has shown that over a quarter of high-achieving seniors employed private specialists to help with the college application process.

In fact, according to NPR , some companies are even offering college admissions counseling to their top employees as an incentive–that’s just how important professional help can be in the current landscape of college admissions.

It’s important to note that a good college essay service will not write your college application essays for you . This is unethical and illegal. That’s not just coming from us: take it from a school like Princeton, whose website insists on the importance of writing your own application essays.

A good college essay service will guide you through each step of the process , teaching you how to self-reflect and write well while sharing insider insight about admissions strategy .

What makes a good college essay service?

We strongly believe that students need to write their own college essays , and we do not condone plagiarism or “buying” a college essay.

However, writing college application essays requires a completely new set of skills that is rarely taught in high school!

Writing a personal essay is much more creative than simply writing a good paper for English class. It requires a compelling narrative and a great deal of writing craft . A good essay service will teach how to do this kind of writing.

There are many college essay services that will provide only written feedback to students, usually in the form of comments added to an essay draft. (Remember, it’s important that students write their own essays, so avoid any college essay service that will make edits directly to an essay document .)

Written comments can be an effective component of good essay coaching. However, writing college essays is a deeply personal process , and it’s incredibly difficult to guide a student through the process of self-reflection, brainstorming, and planning purely through written comments.

In addition, a great college essay coach will teach students how to do this entire process of brainstorming, planning, outlining, writing, and revising . It’s difficult to learn why an essay coach is advising certain changes through written comments alone.

For these reasons, look for a college essay service with live, one-on-one services , not just written feedback. These days, it’s easy to work with the best college essay consultants in the country over Zoom!

Students need to reflect on their goals, their passions, and what drives them to be the person they are. This requires a great deal of self-awareness and self-analysis . An experienced college essay coach can help draw these ideas out of students through tested introspection techniques and brainstorming exercises .

On top of all of that, students need to be cognizant of which traits and accomplishments will be most appealing to colleges , and which stories will be cliche and boring. Personal statements and supplementary essays need to fit together to tell a cohesive story, and they need to work together with the rest of the student’s application (extracurriculars, grades, and other accomplishments).

In other words, there’s a great deal of strategy here! An experienced college essay service can help students decide how to present themselves in the best possible light .

Furthermore, most students don’t know how to edit effectively . A really top-notch college essay service will also teach students how to edit their own writing —how to reorder sections for better flow, cut unnecessary words to meet a word count, eliminate passive verbs, and make their writing vivid and exciting. Our students are routinely amazed by how transformative this step can be, and how much they learn by doing it together with the essay coach.

Finally, the best college essay services can also help students to make a writing plan and keep them on track , so that parents don’t have to be involved directly.

Ready to work on your college essays? Schedule a free 15- to 30-minute consultation with Jessica or one of our founders.

Best overall: PrepMaven’s tutors offer the highest quality at the best price. With three tiers of tutors, they make it easy to work with an Ivy League undergraduate for as little as $79/hr. Or, families can work with education professionals or Ivy League graduates from $150/hr. PrepMaven’s track record means that you can be sure every hour is being spent productively, so that you can expect real results from the work.

Best for individual consultants: College Essay Mentor. In theory, College Essay Mentor would offer an unparalleled level of individual attention and guidance: his website boasts of some very impressive results. You might find it hard to actually schedule with him, however, since he’s very selective about his clients.

Best for unlimited essay assistance: The College Essay Guy might not offer that personalized attention you get from live, face to face essay coaching, but they do offer unlimited essay editing for up to 10 schools (if you’re comfortable paying a hefty package price).

Best of the big platforms: College Vine will always be a bit of a gamble. Because it’s a tutor marketplace, your results (and costs) will really depend on how lucky you get with your consultant. From our research, however, many of their essay coaches look to have solid track records.

Ready to work on college essays with one of our experienced writing coaches? Schedule a free test prep consultation with Jessica (Director of Tutoring) or one of our founders to see what would be the best fit for your family.

It’s always best to start early and not wait until the last minute to write your college essays! Remember that essays can be used to earn scholarships as well as college admission, so a few months of writing now can pay off with up to $300,000 in tuition saved later. 

We work with students at all stages of the writing process, from I-have-no-idea-what-to-write to final edits. To start working with an Ivy-League writing coach today, set up a quick free consultation with our team.

Schedule a free college essay consultation

Top College Essay Posts

• 14 Best College Essay Services for 2023 (40 Services Reviewed)
• Qualities of a Successful College Essay
• 11 College Essays That Worked
• How to Answer the UC Personal Insight Questions
• How Colleges Read your College Applications (A 4-Step Process)
• How to Write the Princeton Supplemental Essays
• The Diamond Strategy: How We Help Students Write College Essays that Get Them Into Princeton (And Other Ivy League Schools)
• What is the College Essay? Your Complete Guide for 202 4
• College Essay Brainstorming: Where to Start
• How to Write the Harvard Supplemental Essays
• How to Format Your College Essay

Emily graduated  summa cum laude  from Princeton University and holds an MA from the University of Notre Dame. She was a National Merit Scholar and has won numerous academic prizes and fellowships. A veteran of the publishing industry, she has helped professors at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton revise their books and articles. Over the last decade, Emily has successfully mentored hundreds of students in all aspects of the college admissions process, including the SAT, ACT, and college application essay. 

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The college essay is one of the most critical parts of your application. It goes beyond your grades and test scores to give schools a sense of your personality and potential—qualities that numbers alone cannot show. A compelling piece that exudes intellectual vitality, vulnerability, and humor can tip the admissions odds in your favor. We'll review your college essay to ensure it's one that admissions officers won't forget.

I Replace adverbs with strong verbs when possible. love really like throwing out the garbage. Most teens dread the exhausting, two-minute trek to the curb, but I find solace "Solace in" is more idiomatic. in on my daily dumpster walk. Every night at 10 PM Every day , I hear my mother lock the entrance, cueing entrance. She cues me to empty out the garbage cans on the main floor. As I lug carry pounds of many losing lotto tickets, candy wrappers, and crushed coffee cups Use stronger imagery to paint a picture of your duties. drinks on my back, I take took a sigh of relief knowing that we’ve survived This is wordy. managed to make it through yet another night shift See extended comment. at the family business.

I’ve worked The tone here is a bit formal compared to the rest of your writing. laboured at the family business since I was being ten years old. Of course, Focus on what you did, not on what you didn't do. I wasn’t a fifth-grade student ringing up customers or reciting the day’s winning lotto numbers like my parents were. I spent Here, the simple past works best. The modal verb is unnecessary. I would've spent most of my time either restocking or eating from the candy aisle—to my parents’ parent's pride and disappointment, respectively. Not until my freshman year did they give me permission to man the cash register, which had mesmerized me for years.

OVERALL COMMENTS:

Hi John! This essay does a great job showcasing not only your knack for software development, but also how your family’s business allowed you to mature a bit quicker than others. However, I'd consider reconstructing the first two paragraphs. The opening of your essay leads me to believe that you'll go on to discuss your experiences at the family business, but from the third paragraph on, you mostly focus on software development. By the end of the essay, the introduction feels distant and irrelevant.

We'll check for errors like dangling modifiers, comma splices, and ambiguous pronouns.

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We'll point out areas your essay falls short and suggest ways to improve your writing.

We'll provide a 2–3 paragraph evaluation of the overall strength of your essay.

“If there was an option for 6 stars out of 5, I would give this service 10.”

Next Admit stuck with me as I sent essay after essay for review with such a small amount of turnaround time and I could never be more grateful for all the work they do. The feedback is both fair and kind, and I felt better trusting consultants that had just gone through the whole college admissions ordeal and gotten in rather than consultants who hadn’t been through the process in decades.

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At Harvard, Hana is involved with the Institute of Politics, Model Congress, and Women in Business. In high school, Hana spent her time getting involved in education policy work, winning a seat on her Board of Education.

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At Harvard, Julia served as the President of the Undergraduate Women in Law Association and provides mentorship to students as a Peer Concentration Advisor. In high school, Julia spent much of her time engaging in community service.

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At Princeton, Mikaylah is a Visiting Scholar at the Nation's Service Initiative Fellow, where she is obtaining her master's degree in Public Affairs and specializing in Domestic Politics. She is a former Visiting Scholar at the U.S. Department of State.

• Writer at U.S. Department of State
• Visiting Scholar at the USIP

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Lauren was really helpful in giving detailed feedback! I was really surprised to see how she went through each and every one of my sentences and gave me direct feedback on how to expand my ideas. I feel really confident about submitting my application now thanks to her comments!

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Best Essay Writing Service Reviews: Top 15

Quick Overview

Our current pick for the best website that writes essays for you is Customwritings.com . It’s a service that delivers great work that is recognized by best colleges. Choosing this site for essay writing is a wise decision.

Best essay writing service reviews according to the A*Help score (2024)

With hectic schedules and millions of things on your to-do list, it is extremely easy to get bogged down in daily routines without any chance to find a spare moment for your academic assignments. This is when custom writing services step in to throw a lifeline with their professional writers at your disposal to cover all possible topics and tasks – from essays to dissertations. But having to choose a reliable provider of essay writing services is another challenge due to scarcity of information and obvious lack of transparency and genuine reviews.

We have compiled a list of the best essay writing services that just get the job done for you, when you have a lot going on . You can also browse though our buying guide . For the sake of being clear and consistent with our judgment and assessment, we have introduced our own rating framework, called A*Help score. See How We Test Essay Writing Services for more details about our testing approach.

Our approach to essay writing service reviews

Our experts conduct mystery shopping by placing online orders with essay writing companies and analyze all vital aspects of the customer journey. We scrutinize how smoothly the ordering process unfolds and how customer support deals with inquiries and requests. We order papers from services – here you can read more about our testing scenario . Received writings are sent to US professors for evaluation through the same standards and criteria as those applied in US colleges and universities to ensure that the outcome can be projected on a real-life situation.

Three pillars supporting the A*Help score are Value for Money, Overall Experience and Paper Quality. In our opinion, they incorporate all important aspects of custom writing services to meet the needs of students and solve their problems. This is the first attempt in the essay writing niche to introduce a customer-first approach to choosing the best writing platforms.

TOP essay service reviews

According to our Mystery Shopping Reviews (2024) we can recommend the following legit writing services:

CustomWritings

One of the old-timers of the industry with more than 15-year experience in essay writing business. CustomWritings.com has earned an excellent reputation over the years and turned into a household name when it comes to writing essays and fulfilling academic assignments. This service should be given praise for consistency in its efforts to make quality and customer satisfaction their top priorities from top to bottom throughout all their processes. 

We audited CustomWritings.com with two college assignments, and they did really well across all reviewed aspects. Our US-based professor graded their paper with the highest score 92.6 out of 100 pts, pointing out flawless integrity (100%), spelling (97%), grammar (100%), punctuation (97%), clarity (100%) and objectivity (98%). Generally speaking, the platform produced excellent papers, reaching the second-highest result in our rating in this category. 

Our mystery shoppers were delighted with the level of communication with assigned writers about orders. The writers took time to find out our preferences and personal details to incorporate the data into their texts so that they align with potential customer writing style and personality.  

Minimum price per page starts at $10, but we would put this service into a somewhat pricey category since our average paper price was $81, which is above the industry medium level. But everything comes with a price and you get what you pay for, you know. With high quality papers, positive overall experience and value for money ratio, this website deserved the top position according to the A*Help score. They just get the job done and save a ton of students’ time. 

• High-quality papers
• Customer-oriented communication
• Lots of additional services
• No loyalty program
• Limited discounts

SpeedyPaper

SpeedyPaper is another established provider of essay writing services with 8+ years in this field. It’s a great outlet to meet your writing needs. 

Our assessment of the service is torn between two conflicting issues. The paper quality score in our rating (85.9) was high as both documents were well-composed by the writers, but there were minor flaws with word choice (77%), grammar (89%), and clarity (74%). On the other hand, we didn’t enjoy sufficient communication with their writers and were limited with payment options. Interaction with the author was low, which left us wondering whether the final result would comply with our personal preferences and traits to be incorporated into the essay. This furnishes room for improvement. Food for thought for SpeedyPaper.   

Other than that, the company is definitely to be recommended. They fall into a medium price segment, with the average price at $60.66. Minimum price starts from $9. Our orders were delivered ahead of deadline and customer support was helpful and responsive. 

We can say for sure that, according to Speedy Paper reviews, this platform puts customers first, and their writers are determined to produce the best results with their services. At the end of the day, the main goal of the essay writing company is to provide decent and plagiarism-free papers, which SpeedyPaper did quite well.

• Quality papers
• Responsive customer support
• Wide range of free and additional services 
• Limited payment options
• Low customer-writer communication

MyAssignmentHelp

MyAssignmentHelp.com was set up in 2009, and they are one more seasoned and reputable provider of online assignment help with affordable pricing. They claim to be budget-friendly, and it turned out to be 100% true.

Our online orders were both quoted at $40, which keeps their average price at a lucrative $40-level, the second lowest price in our rating. Low-priced segment always raises questions about integrity and paper quality. Can they deliver what they promise and advertise? Unfortunately, our experience with MyAssignmentHelp.com did prove the point that lower price comes with potential issues with results.

Our personal narrative essay by MyAssignmentHelp.com received 80.9/100 pts and our memo to the CEO was graded at 58.6. The latter score means that the article failed to meet the assessment minimum acceptance limit of 60 pts according to the US college grading methodology. Our assessor criticized the document formatting, labeling it “fair”, and pointed out issues with grammar (75%), word choice (51%), reference formatting and text efficiency (51%).     

In terms of service and overall experience, MyAssignmentHelp.com is a well-oiled machine and well-rounded business. They provide a vast array of free and additional services, users can largely benefit from discounts and their loyalty program, and their support is above all helpful. 

We will track MyAssignmentHelp.com and collect more data to support our rating and essay writing services reviews to back up our arguments with even more actual paper scores based on their delivered papers. 

• Affordable prices
• Fast order completion
• Great price-service ratio
• Not suitable for complex assignments
• Difficult-to-grasp pricing strategy

The next place in our TOP-10 rating belongs to EssayShark.com. This website is built around a bidding model when writers compete to get hired for orders. EssayShark was established in 2011. Sure thing, they belong to the top cohort of the legit essay writing companies. 

Our review of EssayShark showed that they perform very well in every department. Their papers are in the medium+ price segment. The charging policy is consistent regardless of the paper type. We paid $83 and $86 for our papers, which came to an average of $84.5. 

Speaking of the work’s quality, there isn’t a significant disparity between their evaluations either. The first essay (88.2/100) received high marks on nearly all fronts. However, efficiency (51%) and word choice (75%) were the only performance elements that left room for improvement.

On the other hand, the second paper (79/100) had its weak spots in citation formatting and references. In contrast, all other aspects were rated highly. This indicates a consistent level of quality across different assignments, with specific areas identified for enhancement.

All in all, EssayShark is a reliable provider that can be trusted to fulfill different academic assignments. Customers can be sure to receive their orders in a timely and due manner.   

• Meeting deadlines
• Robust refund policy
• High level of communication with writers
• No additional services

PaperHelp.org was registered in 2008 and their major focus is on developing custom academic papers. This is the most expensive website in our rating, with the highest price quoted for the paper in our shopping experience. We were charged a stunning amount of $108.29 for a 4-page memo to the CEO with a comfortable 7-day deadline. Our 6-hour paper request cost us $74.4, taking the average price to $91.35. 

We have pointed out that pricing of PaperHelp.org is the top-tier category. And many paperhelp.org reviews from students prompt them to expect great paper quality due to such high prices. With this in mind, let’s look at the scores received by their articles to see how the price and value compare. Both essays beat the expected grading minimum of 60 pts and came with high scores of 79.8/100 pts (personal narrative story) and 71.9/100 pts (Memo to the CEO). This leaves us wondering – are high prices justified in this case? To be frank, the highest price doesn’t guarantee the highest score, just bear this in mind, when you select any custom writing service. 

The site offers few basic payment options, but they have robust discounts and an interesting referral program. On top of that, customers can enjoy a wide selection of free and additional services and justified value for money traits. And, to answer the question “is Paper Help legit?” we will say that they do provide great essays which you can rely on.   

• A wide range of additional features
• Appealing discounts and loyalty programs
• Few payment methods
• Medium communication with the writer

CheapestEssay

CheapestEssay.com came online in 2014. They position themselves as an out-of-the-box essay writing service with affordable prices. We have audited both statements. 

First of all, our main verdict is that CheapestEssay.com stands out as one of the best services in the low-budget category, although not “the cheapest”, but still affordable. The average paper price for our orders turned out to be $44.07 ($40.72 and $47.42 respectively), which is a good start. 

Second of all, their submissions were graded with mostly positive scores, nothing remarkable but well-rounded and elaborate. The personal narrative essay was a tiny bit short and the papers showed lackluster results in terms of the text efficiency (51%), clarity and objectivity.  

Our experts were picky about the overall experience, citing the low communication with the writer and laid-back attitude of support not rushing to solve our customer problems. 

CheapestEssay.com provides great value for money, offering diverse free services, affordable prices and above-average writing standards. It’s a solid and versatile provider of essay writing services.    

• Affordable pricing
• Wide selection of free and paid extras
• Fine quality of work
• Timely delivery
• Poor customer service
• PayPal inaccessibility

With their bluebird brand mascot resembling a distant relative of another famous tweeting bird, EduBirdie.com has been trusted by students since 2015. Medium prices, acceptable quality of papers and generally positive overall experience make this website almost as good as they describe themselves. But for small and recommended tweaks in all our reviews categories.

The average article price was $72.55, which is far from being the cheapest, but still acceptable. There was a slight difference with quoted prices for our orders – $65 and $80.1.   

Essay quality score received 74.3 pts with the papers varying in terms of assessment from the very good document formatting of the personal narrative essay (83.9/100 pts) and the lacking document formatting of the memo to the CEO (64.7/100 pts). Paper aspects such as text efficiency (51%), word choice (52%) and grammar (67%) left room for improvement.  

Value for money could be boosted by introducing more additional services and payment methods. The writer’s communication within our orders was medium, as almost everything with EduBirdie.com. If we express our opinion in sports terms, this website is a strong and balanced team in the middle of the table that is never relegated to lower divisions, but always has good chances of getting one step closer to the top of the league through hard work and a bit of luck.

• Active support team
• Variety of free services
• Quick paper completion
• Lack of payment methods
• Above-average results across all categories

EssayPro.com is the absolute winner in terms of paper prices. The site beats its peers with the bottom-low average price of $35.63. Scandalous prices of $32.49 and $38.76 could make you ask questions like “is Essaypro legit?”. Or, on the other hand, they could easily make you forget about all other aspects – shut up and take my money!   

We, of course, take a more balanced approach, scrutinizing EssayPro.com and its writers from all possible angles. 

This website came out of the blue for many industry veterans, disrupting the traditional way of doing business with its low-budget pricing and aggressive marketing approaches. Let’s look at what’s going on under the hood of EssayPro.com.

Their biggest bet is the low price – do they manage to make it work as a sustainable business model? Can they ensure excellence of their papers? We would say that it can be a gamble. We got one of our essays, the personal essay, written very well and received 89.7/100 pts from the US professor. It drove us to believe that EssayPro.com may have found some magic formula or well-trained AI-algorithm to compile fine writings with low prices. But the harsh reality struck us with the second order, which failed to reach the grading limit of 60 pts scoring 58.7/100 pts. The main drawbacks included formatting (31%) with missing elements, low attention to details, punctuation (51%), and text efficiency (51%). Students’ time is too precious, and few have enough of it to spare for improving what they’ve paid for. With the overall paper score of 74.2 pts EssayPro.com tanked down our charts.      

We had a really great overall experience with this website since they have helpful and responsive support, various payment options and high communication with the writer. Almost perfect overall experience, we would say.

EssayPro.com doesn’t offer any additional solutions, but you can count on a discount provided upon registration. If it hadn’t been for the lapse with the quality of one of our papers, we would have called EssayPro.com the best and most valuable essay writing service. We hope they will earn this title through our future mystery shopping efforts.

• Early paper completion
• Moderate paper quality
• Lacking discount and loyalty programs

Interesting service claiming to operate the AI-powered platform, quickly connecting customers with hundreds of their freelance writers. But, since it uses artificial intelligence, is Gonerdify legit at all? The website utilizes a social-first approach taking their business interaction to messengers instead of traditional channels. Their “nerdy” positioning and a so-called AI-approach which in reality is supported by human operators comes at a pricey $88.2 on average ($82.8 for the personal essay and $93.6 for the memo to the CEO). Generous discounts and referral options serve as sweeteners to attract new customers.    

Using messengers for user interaction implies responsive support and convenient payment scenarios. Although the communication with the writer could have been better. 

When it comes to our favorite point of paper quality, “the Nerds” provided us with good, but not the best works. The memo to the CEO hardly made it to 64.1/100 pts, beating the grading limit by a thin margin, and the personal narrative essay did much better with 79.2/100 pts. In total, paper quality stood at 71.65 pts which is somewhere in the middle of our desired range. Nothing to complain and nothing to brag about – issues included punctuation (51%), fair formatting and text acuity (59%).

Those who prefer text messengers for their speed and convenience could benefit from ordering essay writing services from GoNerdify.com.

• A wide range of free and extra services
• Varied payment methods
• Poor writer-customer communication

CheapWritingService

This company has been in the market of academic writing services for over 15 years, having accumulated a vast pool of professional authors and a community of satisfied customers during this time. The service distinguishes itself from others with exceptionally quick turnaround time and a risk-free pay-on-delivery work model.

What’s the price tag for these benefits? The cost for a personal essay stood at $54.40, while a CEO memo was priced slightly higher at just $3 more, averaging an industry standard of $56. The narrow price difference between the two distinct papers underlines the affordability of this pricing, making it a cost-effective option for those seeking quality writing services.

The first paper (63.1/100) nearly aced all mechanical aspects, spanning from spelling to word choice. However, it fell significantly short in the area of reference formatting. The scholarly references provided didn’t measure up, and it lacked a reference list altogether. Additionally, the absence of in-text citations was a notable drawback that impacted the final score.

Conversely, the memo to the CEO (79.7) exhibited better structuring, with only minor formatting glitches and errors in the reference section header. The subpar quality of academic references was flagged as well. Regarding the general mechanics of the paper, it’s hard to find fault – every aspect scored above 90%, showcasing a high level of proficiency. 

CheapWritingService excels in delivering high-quality customer support, offering additional options to lower the final cost of the order, and presenting various payment options. These features embody what one would anticipate from a reputable company, catering to its clientele’s diverse needs and preferences.

• Helpful support
• Many free and paid services
• No loyalty programs
• Quality may vary

Final thoughts on college paper writing service reviews  

We are committed to providing unbiased opinion and essay writing services reviews without prejudice and unfair treatment. Our mission is to provide true reviews that can be used as guidance for informed customer decisions to hire the best providers that put quality at the top of their business agenda. We do hope that the A*Help score can serve as the North Star showing the way for travelers in the land of academic assignments.

Best essay writing services – May 2023 Update

As life never remains still, rapid transformations are inevitable in all sectors, including the academic services industry. As newer and better offerings continue to emerge, A*Help stays in sync with these changes to provide students with more options to choose from. Thus, we’re excited to introduce new, superior-quality companies that have earned a spot on our 2023 list of the best in the field .

99Papers is an excellent essay-writing platform that collaborates with professional independent authors. The company affirms that all its staff members are meticulously chosen and their academic credentials are verified.

Our study showed that the 99Papers consistently excels across all evaluation criteria we used. The service is clearly user-oriented and provides an expansive array of free and paid offers. The flexibility in payment options, including credit cards and PayPal, will likely appeal to numerous users. We paid $55.08 for the essay and $63.26 for the memo. This indicates that the company reasonably charges clients.  

The work’s quality did not let us down either. On the contrary, it exceeded our expectations. Both documents were rated quite highly. The personal essay earned a score of 95.3, while the memo received 78.9, which is considered high for technical writing based on our experience and observations. The personal essay nearly hit perfection in all its elements, scoring between 90-100% for each. The only aspect that slightly faltered was objectivity, standing at 79%. Regarding the memo, despite some notable issues in formatting and the references section (80%), the rest of the components performed as well as they did in the essay. 

The A*Help score of 85.5/100 effectively sums up our collaboration. 99Papers stands as an excellent choice for anyone in search of a dependable partner for all sorts of writing needs.

• High quality of papers
• Plenty of free and paid services
• Nice loyalty and referral programs
• Unlimited revisions
• Missing Google Pay and Apple Pay
• Poor communication with writers

Academized represents another writing platform that offers a comprehensive suite of academic writing solutions, catering to everything from minor homework tasks to major projects such as dissertations. The company assures swift delivery of completed works, along with student discounts.

The service truly offers fine value for money. Customers can select their preferred writer from multiple available choices and academic levels, and numerous supplemental features can be added to enhance their paper. The average cost for our orders was $69.97 ($63.73 for essays and $76.20 for memos), which aligns with the standard market rate. 

Academized performed impressively on both assignments we ordered. The essay received a score of 94.3, and the memo to the CEO – 80.2. The average grade for the two papers stands at 87.25. The areas of improvement include issues with formatting, vertical and horizontal spacing in particular, and certain inconsistencies in citation formatting.

Nonetheless, some aspects of the company’s operation disappointed us as users. The standard customer support is a little limited and of average effectiveness, while personalized help comes at an extra cost. 

Although some drawbacks, such as the demanding registration process, subpar quality of basic customer support, and limited payment choices, were discovered, Academized is a dependable writing service. It consistently delivers well-written essays within the specified timeline.

• Variety of free features
• Extensive discount program
• No communication with writers

Affordable Papers

When an online business has managed to sustain and grow for nearly two decades, it clearly indicates its excellence and the trust it has garnered from users. Affordable Papers is precisely such a company, promising to carry out your work perfectly, and as its name implies, it offers everything at a reasonable cost.

The two assignments we ordered cost $51 and $64, placing the platform in the medium price range with an average cost of around $58 per order. It is indeed very affordable, as the name declares. Furthermore, customers are given the option to split their payment, paying 50% upfront and the remaining 50% after the paper completion. 

The quality of work delivered by AffordablePapers was impressive, with a personal essay scoring 91.8/100 and a memo to the CEO – 72.9/100. Both assignments scored highly for technical aspects like length, grammar, punctuation, and reasoning. However, they also experienced formatting issues relating to spacing, margin control, and citation formatting. Despite these minor defects, the overall writing level was very good. 

AffordablePapers’ customer support was responsive and helpful, accessible through various platforms, including a 24/7 chat. Our interactions with the assigned writers also went well; they clarified task requirements and communicated about adjustments made. 

Overall, our experience with Affordablepapers.com was largely positive, but with more diverse payment options, the service could potentially rank even higher.

• Variety of extra services
• Helpful customer support
• Good paper quality
• No variety of payment options
• Limited options for free extras

“Do my essay” is the request this company seeks to hear from its clientele. It assures that the team of writing professionals consisting of native speakers and university professors, will take care of all sorts of academic writing assignments. 

What primarily catches the users’ attention are the incredibly low prices. We were charged around $36.60 on average for our essay ($34.20) and memo ($38.40). While discounts are minimal, we still managed to receive 5% off our first order. 

Domyessay demonstrated remarkable quality in our papers. The personal narrative scored an impressive 93.5 out of 100 points, while the business memo received 78.1 points. The final grades were primarily taken down by issues with formatting in the essay and poorly organized citations and references in the memo (51%). Despite these problems, both papers were well-structured and followed instructions, with excellent grammar and spelling (100%), suggesting that Domyessay’s writers are competent and dedicated.

The intuitive interface and effective customer support immediately create a positive experience. Among the most felt shortcomings is the difficulty establishing communication with the writers, which is often critical for personalized tasks. Overall, Domyessay provides a satisfactory experience, though certain areas can be improved.

• Free plagiarism report
• Limited payment methods

GradeMiners

Grademiners is ahead of many in providing value for money, with customer satisfaction levels that surpass many industry veterans.

The prices are reasonably set in the lower-middle range, with our essay costing $53 and the business memo a dollar less. Though the minimum price per page is $14.59, the extensive array of free services should compensate for this. The company provides enticing discounts, such as a 15% on your first order and a referral program that offers $50 rewards. We were also impressed by their adherence to deadlines, with our orders arriving well before the due time. 

As for the quality, the results of the personal narrative essay and business memo were 78.6/100 and 65.1/100, respectively. Both papers showcase excellent grammar, spelling, and punctuation, with the essay standing out for its word choice. Yet, their reasoning and logic failed, particularly in the personal essay. Both documents struggled with formatting, especially the memo, as it has more specific requirements for structuring. Despite exceeding the minimum acceptable score of 60 pts, it’s essential to consider these factors when opting for Grademiners as an academic writing service.

Grademiners’ overall user experience leaves a lasting impression. Their customer support is exemplary, with prompt and professional representatives ready to assist with all sorts of inquiries. Although our contact with the writer was minimal, the possibility to engage in more extensive communication is there, further facilitated by the supportive customer service. 

Summing up, it is a solid essay-writing provider. Good value for money, reasonable prices, and an assortment of free and paid services are among its merits. Users should also expect to receive well-written assignments. 

• Rich choice of free and paid additional services
• Responsive and helpful customer support
• Google Pay, PayPal not available
• May be pricey without discounts

Our methodology and testing scenario

Here is what we asked to write:

Paying Attention to the Right Features: Buying Advice for Essay Writing Services

Reading reviews is a good way to learn which writing services are better than the others. But what if there are a few good ones? How do you decide between seemingly similar platforms? There are some specific features that you can pay attention to so that you won’t miss a gem.

Versatility of Services

If you decide to work with an essay writing platform, look to get as broad of assistance as you can. Notice which features the website offers to give you for free. Do they offer revisions? Is there any quality assurance? Can you add something like references or a title page? You should also pay attention to additional features. The more there are, the less you will have to worry about bringing your assignment to the ideal format.

Prices can vary, as well as your budget, but getting a few % off your order will always be a huge plus when it comes to assignment help websites. Look at the platform’s first-order coupons, loyalty programs, and referral opportunities. They will help you find a service that cares for its customers and doesn’t skimp on discounts. 

Customer Support

Sometimes, the ordering process can get confusing. Or you are getting anxious about not finding the right writer. All you need to solve these problems is to turn to customer support. It should be convenient to talk to, that’s why a 24/7 on-site chat or a social media contact is always a huge advantage. The agents should be responsive and quick to answer, in case you need something arranged immediately. A good client support system is always a sign of a highly-functional organization.

Paper Quality

Of course, you can’t know how good of a paper you will receive without making at least one order. As it is a very important aspect of an essay writing service, it’s a good idea to scroll through review websites like Reddit, Sitejabber, Trust Pilot, and Reviews.io to find what previous customers have to say. And if you don’t want to go through all that trouble, you can just read through the A*Help reviews. They always include paper quality in their analysis. 

You need to be able to revise your work at least a few times without paying additional costs. It’s your right as a customer to get your work to the result you want. So, don’t forget to look through the website’s revision policies or inquire in the support chat regarding the specifics. 

Why academichelp.net is a credible source of information:

Stay curious with us. Academichelp.net has been a reliable educational resource since 2011, providing students with the latest news, assignment samples, and other valuable materials. Even with the extensive information we process, our quality remains consistent. Each team member has experience in education, allowing us to evaluate new sector offerings critically. Our reviews are up-to-date and relevant, with impartiality ensured by the A*Help score methodology from mystery shopping. We aren’t affiliated with any listed service providers. Our focus remains on providing our audience with reliable and unbiased data.

Follow us on Reddit for more insights and updates.

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Crying Myself to Sleep on the Biggest Cruise Ship Ever

Seven agonizing nights aboard the Icon of the Seas

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Updated at 2:44 p.m. ET on April 6, 2024.

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MY FIRST GLIMPSE of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optic nerve to try again.

The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.

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“Author embarks on their first cruise-ship voyage” has been a staple of American essay writing for almost three decades, beginning with David Foster Wallace’s “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” which was first published in 1996 under the title “Shipping Out.” Since then, many admirable writers have widened and diversified the genre. Usually the essayist commissioned to take to the sea is in their first or second flush of youth and is ready to sharpen their wit against the hull of the offending vessel. I am 51, old and tired, having seen much of the world as a former travel journalist, and mostly what I do in both life and prose is shrug while muttering to my imaginary dachshund, “This too shall pass.” But the Icon of the Seas will not countenance a shrug. The Icon of the Seas is the Linda Loman of cruise ships, exclaiming that attention must be paid. And here I am in late January with my one piece of luggage and useless gray winter jacket and passport, zipping through the Port of Miami en route to the gangway that will separate me from the bulk of North America for more than seven days, ready to pay it in full.

The aforementioned gangway opens up directly onto a thriving mall (I will soon learn it is imperiously called the “Royal Promenade”), presently filled with yapping passengers beneath a ceiling studded with balloons ready to drop. Crew members from every part of the global South, as well as a few Balkans, are shepherding us along while pressing flutes of champagne into our hands. By a humming Starbucks, I drink as many of these as I can and prepare to find my cabin. I show my blue Suite Sky SeaPass Card (more on this later, much more) to a smiling woman from the Philippines, and she tells me to go “aft.” Which is where, now? As someone who has rarely sailed on a vessel grander than the Staten Island Ferry, I am confused. It turns out that the aft is the stern of the ship, or, for those of us who don’t know what a stern or an aft are, its ass. The nose of the ship, responsible for separating the waves before it, is also called a bow, and is marked for passengers as the FWD , or forward. The part of the contemporary sailing vessel where the malls are clustered is called the midship. I trust that you have enjoyed this nautical lesson.

I ascend via elevator to my suite on Deck 11. This is where I encounter my first terrible surprise. My suite windows and balcony do not face the ocean. Instead, they look out onto another shopping mall. This mall is the one that’s called Central Park, perhaps in homage to the Olmsted-designed bit of greenery in the middle of my hometown. Although on land I would be delighted to own a suite with Central Park views, here I am deeply depressed. To sail on a ship and not wake up to a vast blue carpet of ocean? Unthinkable.

Allow me a brief preamble here. The story you are reading was commissioned at a moment when most staterooms on the Icon were sold out. In fact, so enthralled by the prospect of this voyage were hard-core mariners that the ship’s entire inventory of guest rooms (the Icon can accommodate up to 7,600 passengers, but its inaugural journey was reduced to 5,000 or so for a less crowded experience) was almost immediately sold out. Hence, this publication was faced with the shocking prospect of paying nearly $19,000 to procure for this solitary passenger an entire suite—not including drinking expenses—all for the privilege of bringing you this article. But the suite in question doesn’t even have a view of the ocean! I sit down hard on my soft bed. Nineteen thousand dollars for this .

The viewless suite does have its pluses. In addition to all the Malin+Goetz products in my dual bathrooms, I am granted use of a dedicated Suite Deck lounge; access to Coastal Kitchen, a superior restaurant for Suites passengers; complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream (“the fastest Internet at Sea”) “for one device per person for the whole cruise duration”; a pair of bathrobes (one of which comes prestained with what looks like a large expectoration by the greenest lizard on Earth); and use of the Grove Suite Sun, an area on Decks 18 and 19 with food and deck chairs reserved exclusively for Suite passengers. I also get reserved seating for a performance of The Wizard of Oz , an ice-skating tribute to the periodic table, and similar provocations. The very color of my Suite Sky SeaPass Card, an oceanic blue as opposed to the cloying royal purple of the standard non-Suite passenger, will soon provoke envy and admiration. But as high as my status may be, there are those on board who have much higher status still, and I will soon learn to bow before them.

In preparation for sailing, I have “priced in,” as they say on Wall Street, the possibility that I may come from a somewhat different monde than many of the other cruisers. Without falling into stereotypes or preconceptions, I prepare myself for a friendly outspokenness on the part of my fellow seafarers that may not comply with modern DEI standards. I believe in meeting people halfway, and so the day before flying down to Miami, I visited what remains of Little Italy to purchase a popular T-shirt that reads DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL across the breast in the colors of the Italian flag. My wife recommended that I bring one of my many T-shirts featuring Snoopy and the Peanuts gang, as all Americans love the beagle and his friends. But I naively thought that my meatball T-shirt would be more suitable for conversation-starting. “Oh, and who is your ‘daddy’?” some might ask upon seeing it. “And how long have you been his ‘little meatball’?” And so on.

I put on my meatball T-shirt and head for one of the dining rooms to get a late lunch. In the elevator, I stick out my chest for all to read the funny legend upon it, but soon I realize that despite its burnished tricolor letters, no one takes note. More to the point, no one takes note of me. Despite my attempts at bridge building, the very sight of me (small, ethnic, without a cap bearing the name of a football team) elicits no reaction from other passengers. Most often, they will small-talk over me as if I don’t exist. This brings to mind the travails of David Foster Wallace , who felt so ostracized by his fellow passengers that he retreated to his cabin for much of his voyage. And Wallace was raised primarily in the Midwest and was a much larger, more American-looking meatball than I am. If he couldn’t talk to these people, how will I? What if I leave this ship without making any friends at all, despite my T-shirt? I am a social creature, and the prospect of seven days alone and apart is saddening. Wallace’s stateroom, at least, had a view of the ocean, a kind of cheap eternity.

Worse awaits me in the dining room. This is a large, multichandeliered room where I attended my safety training (I was shown how to put on a flotation vest; it is a very simple procedure). But the maître d’ politely refuses me entry in an English that seems to verge on another language. “I’m sorry, this is only for pendejos ,” he seems to be saying. I push back politely and he repeats himself. Pendejos ? Piranhas? There’s some kind of P-word to which I am not attuned. Meanwhile elderly passengers stream right past, powered by their limbs, walkers, and electric wheelchairs. “It is only pendejo dining today, sir.” “But I have a suite!” I say, already starting to catch on to the ship’s class system. He examines my card again. “But you are not a pendejo ,” he confirms. I am wearing a DADDY’S LITTLE MEATBALL T-shirt, I want to say to him. I am the essence of pendejo .

Eventually, I give up and head to the plebeian buffet on Deck 15, which has an aquatic-styled name I have now forgotten. Before gaining entry to this endless cornucopia of reheated food, one passes a washing station of many sinks and soap dispensers, and perhaps the most intriguing character on the entire ship. He is Mr. Washy Washy—or, according to his name tag, Nielbert of the Philippines—and he is dressed as a taco (on other occasions, I’ll see him dressed as a burger). Mr. Washy Washy performs an eponymous song in spirited, indeed flamboyant English: “Washy, washy, wash your hands, WASHY WASHY!” The dangers of norovirus and COVID on a cruise ship this size (a giant fellow ship was stricken with the former right after my voyage) makes Mr. Washy Washy an essential member of the crew. The problem lies with the food at the end of Washy’s rainbow. The buffet is groaning with what sounds like sophisticated dishes—marinated octopus, boiled egg with anchovy, chorizo, lobster claws—but every animal tastes tragically the same, as if there was only one creature available at the market, a “cruisipus” bred specifically for Royal Caribbean dining. The “vegetables” are no better. I pick up a tomato slice and look right through it. It tastes like cellophane. I sit alone, apart from the couples and parents with gaggles of children, as “We Are Family” echoes across the buffet space.

I may have failed to mention that all this time, the Icon of the Seas has not left port. As the fiery mango of the subtropical setting sun makes Miami’s condo skyline even more apocalyptic, the ship shoves off beneath a perfunctory display of fireworks. After the sun sets, in the far, dark distance, another circus-lit cruise ship ruptures the waves before us. We glance at it with pity, because it is by definition a smaller ship than our own. I am on Deck 15, outside the buffet and overlooking a bunch of pools (the Icon has seven of them), drinking a frilly drink that I got from one of the bars (the Icon has 15 of them), still too shy to speak to anyone, despite Sister Sledge’s assertion that all on the ship are somehow related.

Kim Brooks: On failing the family vacation

The ship’s passage away from Ron DeSantis’s Florida provides no frisson, no sense of developing “sea legs,” as the ship is too large to register the presence of waves unless a mighty wind adds significant chop. It is time for me to register the presence of the 5,000 passengers around me, even if they refuse to register mine. My fellow travelers have prepared for this trip with personally decorated T-shirts celebrating the importance of this voyage. The simplest ones say ICON INAUGURAL ’24 on the back and the family name on the front. Others attest to an over-the-top love of cruise ships: WARNING! MAY START TALKING ABOUT CRUISING . Still others are artisanally designed and celebrate lifetimes spent married while cruising (on ships, of course). A couple possibly in their 90s are wearing shirts whose backs feature a drawing of a cruise liner, two flamingos with ostensibly male and female characteristics, and the legend “ HUSBAND AND WIFE Cruising Partners FOR LIFE WE MAY NOT HAVE IT All Together BUT TOGETHER WE HAVE IT ALL .” (The words not in all caps have been written in cursive.) A real journalist or a more intrepid conversationalist would have gone up to the couple and asked them to explain the longevity of their marriage vis-à-vis their love of cruising. But instead I head to my mall suite, take off my meatball T-shirt, and allow the first tears of the cruise to roll down my cheeks slowly enough that I briefly fall asleep amid the moisture and salt.

I WAKE UP with a hangover. Oh God. Right. I cannot believe all of that happened last night. A name floats into my cobwebbed, nauseated brain: “Ayn Rand.” Jesus Christ.

I breakfast alone at the Coastal Kitchen. The coffee tastes fine and the eggs came out of a bird. The ship rolls slightly this morning; I can feel it in my thighs and my schlong, the parts of me that are most receptive to danger.

I had a dangerous conversation last night. After the sun set and we were at least 50 miles from shore (most modern cruise ships sail at about 23 miles an hour), I lay in bed softly hiccupping, my arms stretched out exactly like Jesus on the cross, the sound of the distant waves missing from my mall-facing suite, replaced by the hum of air-conditioning and children shouting in Spanish through the vents of my two bathrooms. I decided this passivity was unacceptable. As an immigrant, I feel duty-bound to complete the tasks I am paid for, which means reaching out and trying to understand my fellow cruisers. So I put on a normal James Perse T-shirt and headed for one of the bars on the Royal Promenade—the Schooner Bar, it was called, if memory serves correctly.

I sat at the bar for a martini and two Negronis. An old man with thick, hairy forearms drank next to me, very silent and Hemingwaylike, while a dreadlocked piano player tinkled out a series of excellent Elton John covers. To my right, a young white couple—he in floral shorts, she in a light, summery miniskirt with a fearsome diamond ring, neither of them in football regalia—chatted with an elderly couple. Do it , I commanded myself. Open your mouth. Speak! Speak without being spoken to. Initiate. A sentence fragment caught my ear from the young woman, “Cherry Hill.” This is a suburb of Philadelphia in New Jersey, and I had once been there for a reading at a synagogue. “Excuse me,” I said gently to her. “Did you just mention Cherry Hill? It’s a lovely place.”

As it turned out, the couple now lived in Fort Lauderdale (the number of Floridians on the cruise surprised me, given that Southern Florida is itself a kind of cruise ship, albeit one slowly sinking), but soon they were talking with me exclusively—the man potbellied, with a chin like a hard-boiled egg; the woman as svelte as if she were one of the many Ukrainian members of the crew—the elderly couple next to them forgotten. This felt as groundbreaking as the first time I dared to address an American in his native tongue, as a child on a bus in Queens (“On my foot you are standing, Mister”).

“I don’t want to talk politics,” the man said. “But they’re going to eighty-six Biden and put Michelle in.”

I considered the contradictions of his opening conversational gambit, but decided to play along. “People like Michelle,” I said, testing the waters. The husband sneered, but the wife charitably put forward that the former first lady was “more personable” than Joe Biden. “They’re gonna eighty-six Biden,” the husband repeated. “He can’t put a sentence together.”

After I mentioned that I was a writer—though I presented myself as a writer of teleplays instead of novels and articles such as this one—the husband told me his favorite writer was Ayn Rand. “Ayn Rand, she came here with nothing,” the husband said. “I work with a lot of Cubans, so …” I wondered if I should mention what I usually do to ingratiate myself with Republicans or libertarians: the fact that my finances improved after pass-through corporations were taxed differently under Donald Trump. Instead, I ordered another drink and the couple did the same, and I told him that Rand and I were born in the same city, St. Petersburg/Leningrad, and that my family also came here with nothing. Now the bonding and drinking began in earnest, and several more rounds appeared. Until it all fell apart.

Read: Gary Shteyngart on watching Russian television for five days straight

My new friend, whom I will refer to as Ayn, called out to a buddy of his across the bar, and suddenly a young couple, both covered in tattoos, appeared next to us. “He fucking punked me,” Ayn’s frat-boy-like friend called out as he put his arm around Ayn, while his sizable partner sizzled up to Mrs. Rand. Both of them had a look I have never seen on land—their eyes projecting absence and enmity in equal measure. In the ’90s, I drank with Russian soldiers fresh from Chechnya and wandered the streets of wartime Zagreb, but I have never seen such undisguised hostility toward both me and perhaps the universe at large. I was briefly introduced to this psychopathic pair, but neither of them wanted to have anything to do with me, and the tattooed woman would not even reveal her Christian name to me (she pretended to have the same first name as Mrs. Rand). To impress his tattooed friends, Ayn made fun of the fact that as a television writer, I’d worked on the series Succession (which, it would turn out, practically nobody on the ship had watched), instead of the far more palatable, in his eyes, zombie drama of last year. And then my new friends drifted away from me into an angry private conversation—“He punked me!”—as I ordered another drink for myself, scared of the dead-eyed arrivals whose gaze never registered in the dim wattage of the Schooner Bar, whose terrifying voices and hollow laughs grated like unoiled gears against the crooning of “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

But today is a new day for me and my hangover. After breakfast, I explore the ship’s so-called neighborhoods . There’s the AquaDome, where one can find a food hall and an acrobatic sound-and-light aquatic show. Central Park has a premium steak house, a sushi joint, and a used Rolex that can be bought for $8,000 on land here proudly offered at $17,000. There’s the aforementioned Royal Promenade, where I had drunk with the Rands, and where a pair of dueling pianos duel well into the night. There’s Surfside, a kids’ neighborhood full of sugary garbage, which looks out onto the frothy trail that the behemoth leaves behind itself. Thrill Island refers to the collection of tubes that clutter the ass of the ship and offer passengers six waterslides and a surfing simulation. There’s the Hideaway, an adult zone that plays music from a vomit-slathered, Brit-filled Alicante nightclub circa 1996 and proves a big favorite with groups of young Latin American customers. And, most hurtfully, there’s the Suite Neighborhood.

I say hurtfully because as a Suite passenger I should be here, though my particular suite is far from the others. Whereas I am stuck amid the riffraff of Deck 11, this section is on the highborn Decks 16 and 17, and in passing, I peek into the spacious, tall-ceilinged staterooms from the hallway, dazzled by the glint of the waves and sun. For $75,000, one multifloor suite even comes with its own slide between floors, so that a family may enjoy this particular terror in private. There is a quiet splendor to the Suite Neighborhood. I see fewer stickers and signs and drawings than in my own neighborhood—for example, MIKE AND DIANA PROUDLY SERVED U.S. MARINE CORPS RETIRED . No one here needs to announce their branch of service or rank; they are simply Suites, and this is where they belong. Once again, despite my hard work and perseverance, I have been disallowed from the true American elite. Once again, I am “Not our class, dear.” I am reminded of watching The Love Boat on my grandmother’s Zenith, which either was given to her or we found in the trash (I get our many malfunctioning Zeniths confused) and whose tube got so hot, I would put little chunks of government cheese on a thin tissue atop it to give our welfare treat a pleasant, Reagan-era gooeyness. I could not understand English well enough then to catch the nuances of that seafaring program, but I knew that there were differences in the status of the passengers, and that sometimes those differences made them sad. Still, this ship, this plenty—every few steps, there are complimentary nachos or milkshakes or gyros on offer—was the fatty fuel of my childhood dreams. If only I had remained a child.

I walk around the outdoor decks looking for company. There is a middle-aged African American couple who always seem to be asleep in each other’s arms, probably exhausted from the late capitalism they regularly encounter on land. There is far more diversity on this ship than I expected. Many couples are a testament to Loving v. Virginia , and there is a large group of folks whose T-shirts read MELANIN AT SEA / IT’S THE MELANIN FOR ME . I smile when I see them, but then some young kids from the group makes Mr. Washy Washy do a cruel, caricatured “Burger Dance” (today he is in his burger getup), and I think, Well, so much for intersectionality .

At the infinity pool on Deck 17, I spot some elderly women who could be ethnic and from my part of the world, and so I jump in. I am proved correct! Many of them seem to be originally from Queens (“Corona was still great when it was all Italian”), though they are now spread across the tristate area. We bond over the way “Ron-kon-koma” sounds when announced in Penn Station.

“Everyone is here for a different reason,” one of them tells me. She and her ex-husband last sailed together four years ago to prove to themselves that their marriage was truly over. Her 15-year-old son lost his virginity to “an Irish young lady” while their ship was moored in Ravenna, Italy. The gaggle of old-timers competes to tell me their favorite cruising stories and tips. “A guy proposed in Central Park a couple of years ago”—many Royal Caribbean ships apparently have this ridiculous communal area—“and she ran away screaming!” “If you’re diamond-class, you get four drinks for free.” “A different kind of passenger sails out of Bayonne.” (This, perhaps, is racially coded.) “Sometimes, if you tip the bartender $5, your next drink will be free.”

“Everyone’s here for a different reason,” the woman whose marriage ended on a cruise tells me again. “Some people are here for bad reasons—the drinkers and the gamblers. Some people are here for medical reasons.” I have seen more than a few oxygen tanks and at least one woman clearly undergoing very serious chemo. Some T-shirts celebrate good news about a cancer diagnosis. This might be someone’s last cruise or week on Earth. For these women, who have spent months, if not years, at sea, cruising is a ritual as well as a life cycle: first love, last love, marriage, divorce, death.

Read: The last place on Earth any tourist should go

I have talked with these women for so long, tonight I promise myself that after a sad solitary dinner I will not try to seek out company at the bars in the mall or the adult-themed Hideaway. I have enough material to fulfill my duties to this publication. As I approach my orphaned suite, I run into the aggro young people who stole Mr. and Mrs. Rand away from me the night before. The tattooed apparitions pass me without a glance. She is singing something violent about “Stuttering Stanley” (a character in a popular horror movie, as I discover with my complimentary VOOM SM Surf & Stream Internet at Sea) and he’s loudly shouting about “all the money I’ve lost,” presumably at the casino in the bowels of the ship.

So these bent psychos out of a Cormac McCarthy novel are angrily inhabiting my deck. As I mewl myself to sleep, I envision a limited series for HBO or some other streamer, a kind of low-rent White Lotus , where several aggressive couples conspire to throw a shy intellectual interloper overboard. I type the scenario into my phone. As I fall asleep, I think of what the woman who recently divorced her husband and whose son became a man through the good offices of the Irish Republic told me while I was hoisting myself out of the infinity pool. “I’m here because I’m an explorer. I’m here because I’m trying something new.” What if I allowed myself to believe in her fantasy?

“YOU REALLY STARTED AT THE TOP,” they tell me. I’m at the Coastal Kitchen for my eggs and corned-beef hash, and the maître d’ has slotted me in between two couples. Fueled by coffee or perhaps intrigued by my relative youth, they strike up a conversation with me. As always, people are shocked that this is my first cruise. They contrast the Icon favorably with all the preceding liners in the Royal Caribbean fleet, usually commenting on the efficiency of the elevators that hurl us from deck to deck (as in many large corporate buildings, the elevators ask you to choose a floor and then direct you to one of many lifts). The couple to my right, from Palo Alto—he refers to his “porn mustache” and calls his wife “my cougar” because she is two years older—tell me they are “Pandemic Pinnacles.”

This is the day that my eyes will be opened. Pinnacles , it is explained to me over translucent cantaloupe, have sailed with Royal Caribbean for 700 ungodly nights. Pandemic Pinnacles took advantage of the two-for-one accrual rate of Pinnacle points during the pandemic, when sailing on a cruise ship was even more ill-advised, to catapult themselves into Pinnacle status.

Because of the importance of the inaugural voyage of the world’s largest cruise liner, more than 200 Pinnacles are on this ship, a startling number, it seems. Mrs. Palo Alto takes out a golden badge that I have seen affixed over many a breast, which reads CROWN AND ANCHOR SOCIETY along with her name. This is the coveted badge of the Pinnacle. “You should hear all the whining in Guest Services,” her husband tells me. Apparently, the Pinnacles who are not also Suites like us are all trying to use their status to get into Coastal Kitchen, our elite restaurant. Even a Pinnacle needs to be a Suite to access this level of corned-beef hash.

“We’re just baby Pinnacles,” Mrs. Palo Alto tells me, describing a kind of internal class struggle among the Pinnacle elite for ever higher status.

And now I understand what the maître d’ was saying to me on the first day of my cruise. He wasn’t saying “ pendejo .” He was saying “Pinnacle.” The dining room was for Pinnacles only, all those older people rolling in like the tide on their motorized scooters.

And now I understand something else: This whole thing is a cult. And like most cults, it can’t help but mirror the endless American fight for status. Like Keith Raniere’s NXIVM, where different-colored sashes were given out to connote rank among Raniere’s branded acolytes, this is an endless competition among Pinnacles, Suites, Diamond-Plusers, and facing-the-mall, no-balcony purple SeaPass Card peasants, not to mention the many distinctions within each category. The more you cruise, the higher your status. No wonder a section of the Royal Promenade is devoted to getting passengers to book their next cruise during the one they should be enjoying now. No wonder desperate Royal Caribbean offers (“FINAL HOURS”) crowded my email account weeks before I set sail. No wonder the ship’s jewelry store, the Royal Bling, is selling a $100,000 golden chalice that will entitle its owner to drink free on Royal Caribbean cruises for life. (One passenger was already gaming out whether her 28-year-old son was young enough to “just about earn out” on the chalice or if that ship had sailed.) No wonder this ship was sold out months before departure , and we had to pay $19,000 for a horrid suite away from the Suite Neighborhood. No wonder the most mythical hero of Royal Caribbean lore is someone named Super Mario, who has cruised so often, he now has his own working desk on many ships. This whole experience is part cult, part nautical pyramid scheme.

From the June 2014 issue: Ship of wonks

“The toilets are amazing,” the Palo Altos are telling me. “One flush and you’re done.” “They don’t understand how energy-efficient these ships are,” the husband of the other couple is telling me. “They got the LNG”—liquefied natural gas, which is supposed to make the Icon a boon to the environment (a concept widely disputed and sometimes ridiculed by environmentalists).

But I’m thinking along a different line of attack as I spear my last pallid slice of melon. For my streaming limited series, a Pinnacle would have to get killed by either an outright peasant or a Suite without an ocean view. I tell my breakfast companions my idea.

“Oh, for sure a Pinnacle would have to be killed,” Mr. Palo Alto, the Pandemic Pinnacle, says, touching his porn mustache thoughtfully as his wife nods.

“THAT’S RIGHT, IT’S your time, buddy!” Hubert, my fun-loving Panamanian cabin attendant, shouts as I step out of my suite in a robe. “Take it easy, buddy!”

I have come up with a new dressing strategy. Instead of trying to impress with my choice of T-shirts, I have decided to start wearing a robe, as one does at a resort property on land, with a proper spa and hammam. The response among my fellow cruisers has been ecstatic. “Look at you in the robe!” Mr. Rand cries out as we pass each other by the Thrill Island aqua park. “You’re living the cruise life! You know, you really drank me under the table that night.” I laugh as we part ways, but my soul cries out, Please spend more time with me, Mr. and Mrs. Rand; I so need the company .

In my white robe, I am a stately presence, a refugee from a better limited series, a one-man crossover episode. (Only Suites are granted these robes to begin with.) Today, I will try many of the activities these ships have on offer to provide their clientele with a sense of never-ceasing motion. Because I am already at Thrill Island, I decide to climb the staircase to what looks like a mast on an old-fashioned ship (terrified, because I am afraid of heights) to try a ride called “Storm Chasers,” which is part of the “Category 6” water park, named in honor of one of the storms that may someday do away with the Port of Miami entirely. Storm Chasers consists of falling from the “mast” down a long, twisting neon tube filled with water, like being the camera inside your own colonoscopy, as you hold on to the handles of a mat, hoping not to die. The tube then flops you down headfirst into a trough of water, a Royal Caribbean baptism. It both knocks my breath out and makes me sad.

In keeping with the aquatic theme, I attend a show at the AquaDome. To the sound of “Live and Let Die,” a man in a harness gyrates to and fro in the sultry air. I saw something very similar in the back rooms of the famed Berghain club in early-aughts Berlin. Soon another harnessed man is gyrating next to the first. Ja , I think to myself, I know how this ends. Now will come the fisting , natürlich . But the show soon devolves into the usual Marvel-film-grade nonsense, with too much light and sound signifying nichts . If any fisting is happening, it is probably in the Suite Neighborhood, inside a cabin marked with an upside-down pineapple, which I understand means a couple are ready to swing, and I will see none of it.

I go to the ice show, which is a kind of homage—if that’s possible—to the periodic table, done with the style and pomp and masterful precision that would please the likes of Kim Jong Un, if only he could afford Royal Caribbean talent. At one point, the dancers skate to the theme song of Succession . “See that!” I want to say to my fellow Suites—at “cultural” events, we have a special section reserved for us away from the commoners—“ Succession ! It’s even better than the zombie show! Open your minds!”

Finally, I visit a comedy revue in an enormous and too brightly lit version of an “intimate,” per Royal Caribbean literature, “Manhattan comedy club.” Many of the jokes are about the cruising life. “I’ve lived on ships for 20 years,” one of the middle-aged comedians says. “I can only see so many Filipino homosexuals dressed as a taco.” He pauses while the audience laughs. “I am so fired tonight,” he says. He segues into a Trump impression and then Biden falling asleep at the microphone, which gets the most laughs. “Anyone here from Fort Leonard Wood?” another comedian asks. Half the crowd seems to cheer. As I fall asleep that night, I realize another connection I have failed to make, and one that may explain some of the diversity on this vessel—many of its passengers have served in the military.

As a coddled passenger with a suite, I feel like I am starting to understand what it means to have a rank and be constantly reminded of it. There are many espresso makers , I think as I look across the expanse of my officer-grade quarters before closing my eyes, but this one is mine .

A shocking sight greets me beyond the pools of Deck 17 as I saunter over to the Coastal Kitchen for my morning intake of slightly sour Americanos. A tiny city beneath a series of perfectly pressed green mountains. Land! We have docked for a brief respite in Basseterre, the capital of St. Kitts and Nevis. I wolf down my egg scramble to be one of the first passengers off the ship. Once past the gangway, I barely refrain from kissing the ground. I rush into the sights and sounds of this scruffy island city, sampling incredible conch curry and buckets of non-Starbucks coffee. How wonderful it is to be where God intended humans to be: on land. After all, I am neither a fish nor a mall rat. This is my natural environment. Basseterre may not be Havana, but there are signs of human ingenuity and desire everywhere you look. The Black Table Grill Has been Relocated to Soho Village, Market Street, Directly Behind of, Gary’s Fruits and Flower Shop. Signed. THE PORK MAN reads a sign stuck to a wall. Now, that is how you write a sign. A real sign, not the come-ons for overpriced Rolexes that blink across the screens of the Royal Promenade.

“Hey, tie your shoestring!” a pair of laughing ladies shout to me across the street.

“Thank you!” I shout back. Shoestring! “Thank you very much.”

A man in Independence Square Park comes by and asks if I want to play with his monkey. I haven’t heard that pickup line since the Penn Station of the 1980s. But then he pulls a real monkey out of a bag. The monkey is wearing a diaper and looks insane. Wonderful , I think, just wonderful! There is so much life here. I email my editor asking if I can remain on St. Kitts and allow the Icon to sail off into the horizon without me. I have even priced a flight home at less than $300, and I have enough material from the first four days on the cruise to write the entire story. “It would be funny …” my editor replies. “Now get on the boat.”

As I slink back to the ship after my brief jailbreak, the locals stand under umbrellas to gaze at and photograph the boat that towers over their small capital city. The limousines of the prime minister and his lackeys are parked beside the gangway. St. Kitts, I’ve been told, is one of the few islands that would allow a ship of this size to dock.

“We hear about all the waterslides,” a sweet young server in one of the cafés told me. “We wish we could go on the ship, but we have to work.”

“I want to stay on your island,” I replied. “I love it here.”

But she didn’t understand how I could possibly mean that.

“WASHY, WASHY, so you don’t get stinky, stinky!” kids are singing outside the AquaDome, while their adult minders look on in disapproval, perhaps worried that Mr. Washy Washy is grooming them into a life of gayness. I heard a southern couple skip the buffet entirely out of fear of Mr. Washy Washy.

Meanwhile, I have found a new watering hole for myself, the Swim & Tonic, the biggest swim-up bar on any cruise ship in the world. Drinking next to full-size, nearly naked Americans takes away one’s own self-consciousness. The men have curvaceous mom bodies. The women are equally un-shy about their sprawling physiques.

Today I’ve befriended a bald man with many children who tells me that all of the little trinkets that Royal Caribbean has left us in our staterooms and suites are worth a fortune on eBay. “Eighty dollars for the water bottle, 60 for the lanyard,” the man says. “This is a cult.”

“Tell me about it,” I say. There is, however, a clientele for whom this cruise makes perfect sense. For a large middle-class family (he works in “supply chains”), seven days in a lower-tier cabin—which starts at $1,800 a person—allow the parents to drop off their children in Surfside, where I imagine many young Filipina crew members will take care of them, while the parents are free to get drunk at a swim-up bar and maybe even get intimate in their cabin. Cruise ships have become, for a certain kind of hardworking family, a form of subsidized child care.

There is another man I would like to befriend at the Swim & Tonic, a tall, bald fellow who is perpetually inebriated and who wears a necklace studded with little rubber duckies in sunglasses, which, I am told, is a sort of secret handshake for cruise aficionados. Tomorrow, I will spend more time with him, but first the ship docks at St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Charlotte Amalie, the capital, is more charming in name than in presence, but I still all but jump off the ship to score a juicy oxtail and plantains at the well-known Petite Pump Room, overlooking the harbor. From one of the highest points in the small city, the Icon of the Seas appears bigger than the surrounding hills.

I usually tan very evenly, but something about the discombobulation of life at sea makes me forget the regular application of sunscreen. As I walk down the streets of Charlotte Amalie in my fluorescent Icon of the Seas cap, an old Rastafarian stares me down. “Redneck,” he hisses.

“No,” I want to tell him, as I bring a hand up to my red neck, “that’s not who I am at all. On my island, Mannahatta, as Whitman would have it, I am an interesting person living within an engaging artistic milieu. I do not wish to use the Caribbean as a dumping ground for the cruise-ship industry. I love the work of Derek Walcott. You don’t understand. I am not a redneck. And if I am, they did this to me.” They meaning Royal Caribbean? Its passengers? The Rands?

“They did this to me!”

Back on the Icon, some older matrons are muttering about a run-in with passengers from the Celebrity cruise ship docked next to us, the Celebrity Apex. Although Celebrity Cruises is also owned by Royal Caribbean, I am made to understand that there is a deep fratricidal beef between passengers of the two lines. “We met a woman from the Apex,” one matron says, “and she says it was a small ship and there was nothing to do. Her face was as tight as a 19-year-old’s, she had so much surgery.” With those words, and beneath a cloudy sky, humidity shrouding our weathered faces and red necks, we set sail once again, hopefully in the direction of home.

THERE ARE BARELY 48 HOURS LEFT to the cruise, and the Icon of the Seas’ passengers are salty. They know how to work the elevators. They know the Washy Washy song by heart. They understand that the chicken gyro at “Feta Mediterranean,” in the AquaDome Market, is the least problematic form of chicken on the ship.

The passengers have shed their INAUGURAL CRUISE T-shirts and are now starting to evince political opinions. There are caps pledging to make America great again and T-shirts that celebrate words sometimes attributed to Patrick Henry: “The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people; it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government.” With their preponderance of FAMILY FLAG FAITH FRIENDS FIREARMS T-shirts, the tables by the crepe station sometimes resemble the Capitol Rotunda on January 6. The Real Anthony Fauci , by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appears to be a popular form of literature, especially among young men with very complicated versions of the American flag on their T-shirts. Other opinions blend the personal and the political. “Someone needs to kill Washy guy, right?” a well-dressed man in the elevator tells me, his gray eyes radiating nothing. “Just beat him to death. Am I right?” I overhear the male member of a young couple whisper, “There goes that freak” as I saunter by in my white spa robe, and I decide to retire it for the rest of the cruise.

I visit the Royal Bling to see up close the $100,000 golden chalice that entitles you to free drinks on Royal Caribbean forever. The pleasant Serbian saleslady explains that the chalice is actually gold-plated and covered in white zirconia instead of diamonds, as it would otherwise cost $1 million. “If you already have everything,” she explains, “this is one more thing you can get.”

I believe that anyone who works for Royal Caribbean should be entitled to immediate American citizenship. They already speak English better than most of the passengers and, per the Serbian lady’s sales pitch above, better understand what America is as well. Crew members like my Panamanian cabin attendant seem to work 24 hours a day. A waiter from New Delhi tells me that his contract is six months and three weeks long. After a cruise ends, he says, “in a few hours, we start again for the next cruise.” At the end of the half a year at sea, he is allowed a two-to-three-month stay at home with his family. As of 2019, the median income for crew members was somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000, according to a major business publication. Royal Caribbean would not share the current median salary for its crew members, but I am certain that it amounts to a fraction of the cost of a Royal Bling gold-plated, zirconia-studded chalice.

And because most of the Icon’s hyper-sanitized spaces are just a frittata away from being a Delta lounge, one forgets that there are actual sailors on this ship, charged with the herculean task of docking it in port. “Having driven 100,000-ton aircraft carriers throughout my career,” retired Admiral James G. Stavridis, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, writes to me, “I’m not sure I would even know where to begin with trying to control a sea monster like this one nearly three times the size.” (I first met Stavridis while touring Army bases in Germany more than a decade ago.)

Today, I decide to head to the hot tub near Swim & Tonic, where some of the ship’s drunkest reprobates seem to gather (the other tubs are filled with families and couples). The talk here, like everywhere else on the ship, concerns football, a sport about which I know nothing. It is apparent that four teams have recently competed in some kind of finals for the year, and that two of them will now face off in the championship. Often when people on the Icon speak, I will try to repeat the last thing they said with a laugh or a nod of disbelief. “Yes, 20-yard line! Ha!” “Oh my God, of course, scrimmage.”

Soon we are joined in the hot tub by the late-middle-age drunk guy with the duck necklace. He is wearing a bucket hat with the legend HAWKEYES , which, I soon gather, is yet another football team. “All right, who turned me in?” Duck Necklace says as he plops into the tub beside us. “I get a call in the morning,” he says. “It’s security. Can you come down to the dining room by 10 a.m.? You need to stay away from the members of this religious family.” Apparently, the gregarious Duck Necklace had photobombed the wrong people. There are several families who present as evangelical Christians or practicing Muslims on the ship. One man, evidently, was not happy that Duck Necklace had made contact with his relatives. “It’s because of religious stuff; he was offended. I put my arm around 20 people a day.”

Everyone laughs. “They asked me three times if I needed medication,” he says of the security people who apparently interrogated him in full view of others having breakfast.

Another hot-tub denizen suggests that he should have asked for fentanyl. After a few more drinks, Duck Necklace begins to muse about what it would be like to fall off the ship. “I’m 62 and I’m ready to go,” he says. “I just don’t want a shark to eat me. I’m a huge God guy. I’m a Bible guy. There’s some Mayan theory squaring science stuff with religion. There is so much more to life on Earth.” We all nod into our Red Stripes.

“I never get off the ship when we dock,” he says. He tells us he lost $6,000 in the casino the other day. Later, I look him up, and it appears that on land, he’s a financial adviser in a crisp gray suit, probably a pillar of his North Chicago community.

THE OCEAN IS TEEMING with fascinating life, but on the surface it has little to teach us. The waves come and go. The horizon remains ever far away.

I am constantly told by my fellow passengers that “everybody here has a story.” Yes, I want to reply, but everybody everywhere has a story. You, the reader of this essay, have a story, and yet you’re not inclined to jump on a cruise ship and, like Duck Necklace, tell your story to others at great pitch and volume. Maybe what they’re saying is that everybody on this ship wants to have a bigger, more coherent, more interesting story than the one they’ve been given. Maybe that’s why there’s so much signage on the doors around me attesting to marriages spent on the sea. Maybe that’s why the Royal Caribbean newsletter slipped under my door tells me that “this isn’t a vacation day spent—it’s bragging rights earned.” Maybe that’s why I’m so lonely.

Today is a big day for Icon passengers. Today the ship docks at Royal Caribbean’s own Bahamian island, the Perfect Day at CocoCay. (This appears to be the actual name of the island.) A comedian at the nightclub opined on what his perfect day at CocoCay would look like—receiving oral sex while learning that his ex-wife had been killed in a car crash (big laughter). But the reality of the island is far less humorous than that.

One of the ethnic tristate ladies in the infinity pool told me that she loved CocoCay because it had exactly the same things that could be found on the ship itself. This proves to be correct. It is like the Icon, but with sand. The same tired burgers, the same colorful tubes conveying children and water from Point A to B. The same swim-up bar at its Hideaway ($140 for admittance, no children allowed; Royal Caribbean must be printing money off its clientele). “There was almost a fight at The Wizard of Oz ,” I overhear an elderly woman tell her companion on a chaise lounge. Apparently one of the passengers began recording Royal Caribbean’s intellectual property and “three guys came after him.”

I walk down a pathway to the center of the island, where a sign reads DO NOT ENTER: YOU HAVE REACHED THE BOUNDARY OF ADVENTURE . I hear an animal scampering in the bushes. A Royal Caribbean worker in an enormous golf cart soon chases me down and takes me back to the Hideaway, where I run into Mrs. Rand in a bikini. She becomes livid telling me about an altercation she had the other day with a woman over a towel and a deck chair. We Suites have special towel privileges; we do not have to hand over our SeaPass Card to score a towel. But the Rands are not Suites. “People are so entitled here,” Mrs. Rand says. “It’s like the airport with all its classes.” “You see,” I want to say, “this is where your husband’s love of Ayn Rand runs into the cruelties and arbitrary indignities of unbridled capitalism.” Instead we make plans to meet for a final drink in the Schooner Bar tonight (the Rands will stand me up).

Back on the ship, I try to do laps, but the pool (the largest on any cruise ship, naturally) is fully trashed with the detritus of American life: candy wrappers, a slowly dissolving tortilla chip, napkins. I take an extra-long shower in my suite, then walk around the perimeter of the ship on a kind of exercise track, past all the alluring lifeboats in their yellow-and-white livery. Maybe there is a dystopian angle to the HBO series that I will surely end up pitching, one with shades of WALL-E or Snowpiercer . In a collapsed world, a Royal Caribbean–like cruise liner sails from port to port, collecting new shipmates and supplies in exchange for the precious energy it has on board. (The actual Icon features a new technology that converts passengers’ poop into enough energy to power the waterslides . In the series, this shitty technology would be greatly expanded.) A very young woman (18? 19?), smart and lonely, who has only known life on the ship, walks along the same track as I do now, contemplating jumping off into the surf left by its wake. I picture reusing Duck Necklace’s words in the opening shot of the pilot. The girl is walking around the track, her eyes on the horizon; maybe she’s highborn—a Suite—and we hear the voice-over: “I’m 19 and I’m ready to go. I just don’t want a shark to eat me.”

Before the cruise is finished, I talk to Mr. Washy Washy, or Nielbert of the Philippines. He is a sweet, gentle man, and I thank him for the earworm of a song he has given me and for keeping us safe from the dreaded norovirus. “This is very important to me, getting people to wash their hands,” he tells me in his burger getup. He has dreams, as an artist and a performer, but they are limited in scope. One day he wants to dress up as a piece of bacon for the morning shift.

THE MAIDEN VOYAGE OF THE TITANIC (the Icon of the Seas is five times as large as that doomed vessel) at least offered its passengers an exciting ending to their cruise, but when I wake up on the eighth day, all I see are the gray ghosts that populate Miami’s condo skyline. Throughout my voyage, my writer friends wrote in to commiserate with me. Sloane Crosley, who once covered a three-day spa mini-cruise for Vogue , tells me she felt “so very alone … I found it very untethering.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in an Instagram comment: “When Gary is done I think it’s time this genre was taken out back and shot.” And he is right. To badly paraphrase Adorno: After this, no more cruise stories. It is unfair to put a thinking person on a cruise ship. Writers typically have difficult childhoods, and it is cruel to remind them of the inherent loneliness that drove them to writing in the first place. It is also unseemly to write about the kind of people who go on cruises. Our country does not provide the education and upbringing that allow its citizens an interior life. For the creative class to point fingers at the large, breasty gentlemen adrift in tortilla-chip-laden pools of water is to gather a sour harvest of low-hanging fruit.

A day or two before I got off the ship, I decided to make use of my balcony, which I had avoided because I thought the view would only depress me further. What I found shocked me. My suite did not look out on Central Park after all. This entire time, I had been living in the ship’s Disneyland, Surfside, the neighborhood full of screaming toddlers consuming milkshakes and candy. And as I leaned out over my balcony, I beheld a slight vista of the sea and surf that I thought I had been missing. It had been there all along. The sea was frothy and infinite and blue-green beneath the span of a seagull’s wing. And though it had been trod hard by the world’s largest cruise ship, it remained.

This article appears in the May 2024 print edition with the headline “A Meatball at Sea.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Beach house, check. Family drama, check. ‘Sandwich’ is that summer book.

Catherine Newman’s new novel is a relatable tale of a woman caught between the needs of her kids, her parents — and herself.

The sandwich Catherine Newman serves up in her new novel, “ Sandwich ,” is a classic one: grown kids on one side, aging parents on the other and 54-year-old narrator Rachel, a.k.a. “Rocky,” in the middle. As they do every year, three generations of Rocky’s family have decamped to Cape Cod for a week, a gathering made all the more special since son, Jamie, and daughter, Willa, no longer live at home, and their grandparents are becoming quite frail.

Newman’s last novel, the very moving “We All Want Impossible Things,” was a paean to friendship. Her new book practically glows with family feeling — “I’m drowning in love,” says Rocky at one point. “Sandwich” has much in common with Ann Patchett’s “Tom Lake,” though Patchett’s novel doesn’t have an older generation, a key element here.

The laughter begins on the first page, where we learn that Rocky is “long married to a beautiful man who understands between twenty and sixty-five percent of everything she says” — and the great lines and witty observations never stop. Many of them arise from the indignities of aging and menopause, which has left no part of Rocky’s physical and emotional being untouched.

“My hair! What on earth? It used to hang down in heavy, glossy waves, and now it sticks out of my head like a marshful of brittle autumn grasses. It is simultaneously coarse and weightless in a way that seems like an actual paradox, as if my scalp is extruding a combination of twine, nothing, and fine-grit sandpaper.”

Newman is fearless in her depiction of the physical and emotional indignities of getting older. Rocky’s fits of irrational rage often manifest in her relationship with her calm and kind husband, Nick. A typical moment occurs when the couple is in line at the bakery and Rocky gets mad at Nicky because he doesn’t know which pastry Rocky would choose. When she insists that in nearly 30 years she has never once chosen sweets for breakfast, he reminds her about the almond croissants she ordered in Paris. She grudgingly concedes his point but remains angry. The poor man realizes there is no course but apology. “I’m sorry I don’t know you better. In the bakery sense.”

As it turns out, there is more than baked goods involved, though it’s Rocky’s fault for having kept an important secret for many years. The week in Cape Cod probably wasn’t going to be all sunshine and rainbows, but Rocky’s miserable perseverating over something in her distant reproductive past feels a little out of place. Perhaps this is also occasioned by menopause, representing as it does the close of a chapter of life, but to this reader the whole thing felt a bit cooked-up.

Summer reading

The other stone in the shoe of the gentle plot is concern for the health of Rocky’s parents, which makes more sense. The depiction of Mort and Alice, their dialogue, their posture, their sleeping white heads on the pillow, their humor, is endearing. When Mom has a fainting spell at the beach and ends up briefly in the hospital, Rocky wonders if they’ll stay an extra day. “But my parents have a strict two-night policy. If they traveled sixty million miles to visit you on Mars, they’d bring Zabar’s whitefish salad in a cooler bag and they’d stay two nights.”

The abundance of love flourishing in Rocky’s family is refreshing and inspiring, but Newman is not afraid to go to the dark side of it. There was a time, Rocky recalls, when her children were small and she was half-mad with exhaustion and anxiety, and she ruminated on stories about women driving themselves and their children off cliffs or into oncoming traffic. “I thought, ruinedly, Yeah. I get that .” She wouldn’t have done it, she says, but understood why someone might. And then she continues, “I hope I wouldn’t have. I’m honestly not entirely sure.”

I imagine some readers will feel a little shock of gratitude upon reading this passage, and even more will embrace Rocky’s view of the meaning of life. At one point, she and Willa are in the laundromat when a child begins to cry because her beloved (smelly) snail shell has been taken away. After Willa calms her down, expressing empathy about having to abandon the dubious treasure, Rocky suggests this takeaway:

“And this may be the only reason we were put on this earth. To say to each other , I know how you feel. To say, Same. To say, I understand how hard it is to be a parent, a kid. To say, Your shell stank and you’re sad. I’ve been there.”

Marion Winik, host of the NPR podcast “The Weekly Reader,” is the author of numerous books, including “First Comes Love” and “The Big Book of the Dead.”

By Catherine Newman

Harper. 240 pp. $26.99

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Review: Rocking Out, and Falling in Love, in ‘The Lonely Few’

Lauren Patten and Taylor Iman Jones star in an achingly romantic, softly sexy new musical by Rachel Bonds and Zoe Sarnak.

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By Laura Collins-Hughes

Of all the juke joints in all the towns in all the South, Amy had to walk into Paul’s.

OK, yes, he invited her. A musician with a touch of fame, whom he’s known since she was a child, she’s stopping in for a visit on a break from her solo tour.

For Lila, the frontwoman of the local band that’s playing the bar that night, the world shifts permanently when Amy glides in, trailing all the glamour and cool of a life so much bolder than anything Lila has ever lived.

“Great set,” Amy tells her afterward. And when Lila bashfully shrugs off the compliment, Amy repeats it. “No, really — great set,” she says, her words unambiguously flirtatious. The chemistry between these two is instant, and profound. As soon as they sing together, so is the harmony.

“The Lonely Few,” the achingly romantic, softly sexy, genuinely rocking new musical by Rachel Bonds (“ Jonah ”) and Zoe Sarnak at MCC Theater , is Lila and Amy’s love story. The telling of it gives us more of Lila’s world than of Amy’s, though — the same way that the 1999 rom-com “Notting Hill” is grounded more in the world of the ordinary bookseller than of the movie star who wanders in and claims his heart.

Meticulously directed by Trip Cullman and Ellenore Scott, “The Lonely Few” is beautifully cast, and it has an absolute ace in its Lila: Lauren Patten, bringing the full-voiced ferocity that she unleashed in “ Jagged Little Pill ” — and won a Tony Award for — and the endearing awkwardness that she lent to “ The Wolves ,” alongside a vulnerability that could just about break you.

In Lila’s tiny Kentucky hometown, music-making is the passion she gets up to when she isn’t working her grocery store job with her bassist and best friend, Dylan (Damon Daunno), or keeping an anxious eye on her brother, Adam (Peter Mark Kendall), whose drinking is out of control.

Her life is gritty and messy and small. Once Amy (Taylor Iman Jones) comes along, Lila is a little ashamed of that, and of her inability to escape to something better — maybe in a place where the fact of her sexuality isn’t met with averted eyes.

“God, I wouldn’t be able to breathe,” Amy says, though of course she recognizes the feeling. Her songwriting hit is a wistful breakup tune called “She,” about her ex-wife, that made it big only when a man recorded it.

Amy’s tour, as it happens, is on pause; her opening act bailed, and she needs to find a new one. Sensing talent as well as a spark, she enlists Lila and her band, the Lonely Few — which also includes Paul (Thomas Silcott), on drums, and JJ (Helen J Shen), on keyboard — to join her for the rest of the tour.

On the road, romance ensues, and so do family complications: Lila’s fretful guilt as Adam spirals without her, still grieving their mother’s death; Amy’s enduring anger that when Paul — the drummer who was her stepdad long ago — left her alcoholic mother, back in New Orleans, he left her, too.

With a habit of cutting people out of her life, Amy is more of a loner than Lila, but each of them has constructed a carapace. The question is whether they are brave enough to shed them for each other.

This intimate, tightly woven musical envelops the audience: with Sibyl Wickersheimer’s wraparound set, which seats some of the crowd in the bar; Adam Honoré’s rock-show lighting, whose beams touch all of us; and the pulse of the songs, which we feel in our bodies — the hard-driving numbers and the quiet ones, too. (Music direction is by Myrna Conn, leading a mostly offstage four-piece band. Sound design, worryingly muddy at first, is by Jonathan Deans and Mike Tracey.)

It might seem for a while that Daunno, a Tony nominee in 2019 for Daniel Fish’s “ Oklahoma! ” revival, is being squandered in a too-small role. But each of the men gets a number in which he demonstrates the depth of his affection — Dylan and Adam for Lila, Paul for Amy — and each of the actors smashes it. Daunno’s tender reprise of “Waking Up Thirty,” a song about surrendering to dead-end, small-town American life, is devastating.

Seen in an earlier, longer version last year in Los Angeles with a partially different cast, this intermissionless show is constitutionally unsentimental. Ever-present in Bonds’s book and Sarnak’s lyrics is a knowledge of the craggy complexity of life and relationships, and the ways that pain can forestall possibility. Still, “The Lonely Few” puts up a fight against such bleakness.

Over in a corner of the bar is an untouched piano, lurking like a gun in Chekhov. When someone at last sits down to play it, watch out. That’s the cue for one of the scariest human emotions: hope.

The Lonely Few Through June 2 at MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org . Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.

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Dear Colleague Letter: NSF Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Program (S-STEM) Scholarship Supplements for Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Recipients

May 28, 2024

Dear Colleagues:

With this Dear Colleague Letter (DCL), the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Directorate for STEM Education (EDU) invites active Advanced Technological Education (ATE) program recipients to submit supplemental funding requests to provide scholarship support for students who meet the qualifications for the NSF Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Program (S-STEM).

A well-educated science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) workforce is critical to maintaining the competitiveness of the U.S. in the global economy, yet there continues to be high attrition among STEM undergraduate students across U.S. colleges and universities 1 . The NSF S-STEM program addresses the need for a high-quality STEM workforce in STEM disciplines supported by the program by providing scholarships to academically-talented, low-income students with demonstrated financial need who are pursuing associate, baccalaureate, or graduate degrees in these disciplines. This DCL encourages active ATE recipients to submit supplemental funding requests to provide S-STEM scholarships to eligible students participating in active ATE projects.

Supplemental Funding Request Preparation Instructions

Supplemental funding requests from current ATE recipients should be limited exclusively to funds for student scholarships and should align with the eligibility requirements outlined in the S-STEM program solicitation .  Namely, prospective scholarship recipients must:

• Be citizens of the United States, nationals of the United States (as defined in section 101(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act), aliens admitted as refugees under section 207 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, or aliens lawfully admitted to the United States for permanent residence. Please note that Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) individuals are ineligible for support from this solicitation unless they meet the requirements listed in the first sentence of this bullet by the time of application;
• Be enrolled at least half-time as defined by the institution in a program leading to an associate degree in an S-STEM eligible discipline;
• Demonstrate academic ability or potential as defined by the institution;
• Be low-income. The definition of low-income must follow the institutional guidelines for income thresholds that qualify the student as low-income (for example, see eligibility requirements for the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) Pell and TRIO grant programs or for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) public housing program . The institution's definition of low-income must be included in supplementary documents within a letter from the Financial Aid Office.
• Have demonstrated unmet financial need. Demonstrated financial need for undergraduate students is defined by the US Department of Education rules for need-based Federal financial aid Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). In the case of S-STEM, institutions are required to follow the calculations in section II.B of NSF 24-511 that include other grants, fellowships, and scholarships but not loans (see https://studentaid.gov/complete-aid-process/how-calculated#need-based ). Income from potential work study should not be included in the calculation for undergraduate students. Loans should not be included in calculations of unmet need for students.

The supplemental funding request must include the following:

• A detailed summary of proposed work that describes the planned scholarship program including institutional context and numbers 2-7 below.
• Pool of Potential Scholars: A description of the pool of potential scholars, including the table below.
• Retention and Graduation Rates: A description of current 1-year retention rates and graduation rates for the above pool of students in each S-STEM eligible discipline that is included in the request.
• Cost of Attendance: Cost of Attendance (COA), determined by each educational institution, is the total amount it will cost a student to go to school, including tuition and fees; on-campus room and board (or a housing and food allowance for off-campus students); allowances for books, supplies, computer equipment, transportation, loan fees, dependent care, mandatory health insurance, graduation fees, and costs related to a disability; and miscellaneous expenses.
• COA - Student Aid Index (SAI) - other grants and scholarships (which for the purpose of this program should exclude loans and work) = Unmet Need.
• The SAI is determined by the FAFSA form and represents the expected family contribution toward the COA ( https://studentaid.gov/ ).
• Determination of Financial Eligibility: A description of the determination of financial eligibility including the institution's definition of low-income must be included in the request.
• Description of Academic Eligibility: The request should describe clear and equitable selection criteria for scholarships and describe how scholars will be selected out of the pool of all qualified individuals.
• Student Support Services: The request should discuss already existing academic and student support structures that are relevant to the S-STEM supplement and describe ways in which the S-STEM supplement will use or enhance those structures. These activities need to respond to the documented low-income student and institutional needs or goals.
• Letter from the Financial Aid Office or equivalent: The letter should certify the Office's understanding of the guidelines and requirements of the S-STEM program, confirming the institutional definition of low income, that the eligible students will meet its definition of low income, and stating their commitment to support the project as described in the proposal if awarded. This letter should be included in the other supplementary documents section.

Additional guidance on the contents of each of the above listed items can be found in Section V.A.5 of the S-STEM solicitation. Additional guidance on preparing and submitting a supplemental funding request may be found in Chapter VI.E.5 of the  NSF Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide .

Supplemental Funding Details

Support will be provided through S-STEM supplements to existing ATE recipients. Funding shall not exceed 20% of the total original ATE award. Scholarship costs should be entered as Participant Support Costs (line F.1. of the budget request sheets) in the proposed budget. Indirect costs (F&A) are not allowed on participant support costs. Therefore, indirect costs are not permitted for this supplemental funding request.

Target Date

Supplemental funding requests may be submitted at any time in FY2024 or FY2025.

Submission and Review

All supplemental funding requests will be reviewed in accordance with the NSF’s merit review process.

Supplemental funding requests cannot be submitted without prior NSF approval. To explore submission, please contact the cognizant Program Officer (see list below) of the award to which the supplement will be attached by sending via email, a 2-page (maximum) summary of the planned funding request including a draft budget. You will then be contacted on how to proceed.

Principal investigators with questions pertaining to this DCL may contact:

• Celeste Carter, Program Director, EDU/DUE, [email protected]
• Thomas Kim, Program Director, EDU/DUE, [email protected]

James L Moore, III Assistant Director, EDU