“Persuasion Beyond Logic: The Importance of Rhetorical Training for Military Officers”

by Danielle Roach | Xchanges 7.2

OEMs and Academic Authorship

Several aspects of the ongoing conversation about authorship in general seem especially prescient when examining OEMs and authorship in the academy. Theories of authorship offer some tools for the consideration of how these essay mills function to convey and shape cultural ideas about writing, authorship, and the academy to students. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, discusses cultural intermediaries as functioning in the spaces in between social classes or between the producer and the consumer, and indeed we can see the same patterns emerge in the relationship between students and the academy via these OEMs.

Although certainly no one would argue that these mills are somehow arbiters of good taste (as Bourdieu constructs cultural intermediaries when he discusses their role in the circulation of high culture and art), the parallels between the two scenarios offer some key insights into the circulation of cultural norms in this new quasi-digital realm. Keith Negus’s examination of non-traditional groups that function as cultural intermediaries offers a starting point for such an endeavor. Negus pushes back against a narrower view of cultural intermediaries that tends to privilege certain “symbolic” workers in the process of cultural mediation while sidelining the many other occupational groups equally crucial to connecting production with consumption (504). Thus, Negus’s insistence that cultural intermediaries need not be limited to “creatives” allows for the examination of entities like OEMs that serve a similar function in relation to already-stratified social groups. Indeed, Bourdieu himself observes that emerging cultural intermediaries tend to be drawn toward discourses that challenge existing cultural hierarchies (366). We see this sympathy (or at least a feigned version of it) in the language used by OEMs, as it seeks to align itself with the needs and anxieties of the students.

Perhaps another way to approach the circulation of ideas and power between these OEMs, students, and the academy is to consider all the parties in terms of how they participate in the discussion. Raymond Williams discusses how a given social moment, group, or interaction can be understood in terms of the dominant, residual, and emergent features circulating through a particular group at a given moment. These categories offer some useful insight as to both the potential opportunities for change afforded to and by these OEMs but also ways in which their language may in fact reinforce academic ideas about authorship. Williams emphasizes that fully understanding a “dominant” cultural formation requires also attending to its “residual” and “emergent” counterparts, since each reveals something important about the characteristics of the dominant itself (121-22). The “residual,” as Williams explains, represents practices and ideas that were once part of the dominant but are no longer, while the “emergent” represents those features which are just beginning to circulate and which have the potential to someday become part of the dominant. Applying this framework to the discourse surrounding this particular site of contestation can help explain both how OEMs claim to situate themselves in relation to academic discourse but also how they perhaps function very differently from that claimed role.

The current dominant ideology of authorship, though certainly in flux, raises the text to a high position of power within the academy, and so the text’s author/owner becomes privileged as a commodity as well. Roland Barthes observed that the historical reign of the Author has corresponded closely with the reign of the Critic (147). If we consider this idea in terms of academic writing, we can see how the new historicism and its allies have shaped even the very notions of authorship in the writing classroom. Because the text has been the fetishized object of the critic (i.e. the instructor), authorship has been formally conceived as a singular endeavor.

Certainly some residual ideologies interact with this dominant mode of thought about the author, complicating and sometimes contradicting what we know to be “true” or “absolute” about authorship and ownership of a text. Notions of communal authoring and storytelling that dominated earlier primarily oral cultures, particularly prior to the invention of the printing press, seem to be at odds with the more dominant metaphors of authorship proffered by printed texts. Kembrew Macleod explains that the printing press played a key role in the shift from oral to manuscript to print culture in Europe, and that print culture in turn worked to close down intertextuality by emphasizing Romantic notions of originality and creativity — it was at this point that the idea of words as private property began to take hold (72). Additionally, the Enlightenment and the advent of mass printing production further marginalized this more overt notion of intertextuality as the social power of author and text as commodity became even more prevalent in the late-18th and early-19th century. Clearly, these models of authorship hold limited sway in light of the current dominant ideology that privileges the commodifiable text. However, with these oral traditions and storytelling cultures still lurking in the background of our collective ideology, the potential exists for residual ideas about authorship that dominated discourse prior to the Enlightenment to push back against the notion of the singular author in ways that undermine the legitimacy of the now-dominant model.

Ironically then, on the other end of Williams’ spectrum, the emergent ideology has begun to almost hyper-realize the commodity metaphor inherent in current dominant understandings of “intellectual property,” and it is in this realm that OEMs purport to situate themselves. Just as Murphy suggests that students reason their way to a kind of finders-keepers logic about assembled knowledge, these OEMs take that logic to the next level, promoting all kinds of intellectual products as property whose ownership is determined solely by who found and/or paid for it (39). Sites like these OEMs, then, seem at first glance to engage in the promotion of an emerging ideology that situates authorship as a commodity.

Particularly with sites offering custom essays, the language suggests that the essay is simply a commodifiable product, promoting this model through various rhetorical strategies. Several such sites advertise perks like free bibliographies and free revisions if the finished work doesn’t match the assignment instructions, and many heavily promote round-the-clock customer service via chat and toll-free phone numbers. Even the language of value and “bargain-shopping” is prominent at these sites, with at least one explicitly framing itself as offering the best service at the most reasonable price for budget-conscious customers. In these ways, a cursory examination of OEMs would seem to indicate that they seek to subvert the dominant by embracing a contradictory emergent strand of discourse that disregards the power of the academy in shaping societal notions of authorship.

However, as much as these sites seem to succeed in shaping the essay as commodity, the very premise of their existence can be seen as resting squarely on the very dominant ideology that these sites supposedly subvert. Macleod argues that because the academy has come to accept the model of the singular author, students who feel somehow disenfranchised by academic discourse turn to discursive tactics that don’t conform to that model of originality and authorship (71-72). And yet we can see that in fact the very act of engaging in these practices, as embodied by OEMs, serves not to subvert but instead to privilege the very discourse which has denied them voice. As these OEMs reify the essay as a way to meet the demands of the institution, they are, in effect, telling students that those expectations are justified and worth fulfilling, whether legitimately or not. OEMs promise to offer students not an alternate conceptualization of authorship, but instead merely a way to game the system to give the appearance of meeting those dominant expectations.

Additionally, these sites can potentially distance students even further from any position of real power by reinforcing the dominant ideology, with custom-essay sites inviting students to simply hand off the topic, description, and due date and “leave the research and writing up to the professionals.” By situating the site’s own writers as “professionals,” they necessarily imply that students are something other than that standard, that they are not writers and that perhaps they should not try to be.

Perhaps symbolic of the complications of the relationship between the university and these OEMs is a screenshot from a site called EssayInfo.com. The origins of the site are unclear, but it purports to have been initiated as a student project, billing itself as a comprehensive resource on academic writing, resume writing, financial aid, scholarships, and college life that grew from a modest university assignment into one of the web’s larger academic-writing resources. At any rate, the site ostensibly provides guidelines for students on how to write certain types of papers, but because it is powered by GoogleAds, it is flanked by literally dozens of windows linking to related “products.” The screenshot captures the irony of the surrounding ads: while topped by a banner ad for Old Dominion University, the body text is framed by dozens of stacked boxes offering things like “Awesome A+ Essays,” “Premium Writing Service,” and even essays for as little as $10. Examples like this problematize attempts to juxtapose academic expectations with the presentation of authorship by OEMs; indeed, both are institutions, and both operate within and in response to systems that commodify knowledge, albeit sometimes in slightly different ways, but always with an eye toward social power and influence.