Thursday, September 07, 2006

Essays for Money

I'm sure many of you have to write several essays each semester in fulfillment of the course requirements for your various classes. You may even look forward to writing a couple of them because they satisfy some intrinsic, scholarly, curiosity on your part. Well, what if you could also earn some money for the essays you write? (And I'm not talking about selling your essay to some desperate underclassman.) If you have the inkling, check out the following essay contest sponsored by the Institue for Humane Studies at George Mason University.

  • aBetterEarth.org is sponsoring a contest on the topic "Endangered Species Act has failed not because it isn’t strong enough, expansive enough, or funded enough, but because its incentives are wrong."
  • aWorldConnected.org typically sponsors a contest on the topic of Globalization.
  • iLiberty.org typically sponsors a contest on the topic of Civil Liberties.
Prize money for each of the above contests are typically:

1st prize: $2000
2nd prize: $1250
3rd prize: $750
Honorable mentions (4): $250
Authors of the top 50 essays will receive a free book.

If anyone is interested in pursuing any of the contests, just check out the above websites for the details. I'd be happy to proof read any of your essays if you're interested.

If anyone is aware of any other essay contests, please add relevant links to the Comments section of this post.

1 comment:

Greg Delemeester said...

Hmmm...David, are you saying that Marietta College should pay its students to write essays? Should we also pay you to take exams? On the contrary, you must pay us to write essays and take exams. If the college were to pay you I suspect your tuition fees would rise to cover the costs of making such payments to students. The essay contests mentioned in the post are sponsored by organizations that have a particular agenda in mind and are looking for ways to popularize their ideas. Of course, students could always try to earn some extra bucks off of their fellow classmates by selling old essays to them, but this would be considered plagiarism by the college and is quite frowned upon.