I wanted to find out something more specific than whether EssayPay could produce a readable paper. I wanted to know what would happen if I gave the service a demanding brief and refused to fill in the gaps myself.So I designed a test around a 1,500-word history essay on a deliberately narrow subject: cassette mixtape culture among American teenagers during the 1980s. My instructions required a microhistory rather than a broad survey, at least three primary sources, four scholarly secondary sources, discussion of copyright and home recording, and Chicago Notes and Bibliography style. I also supplied the research direction and set a seven-day deadline.The short answer is that the experiment was more revealing than I expected. The strongest part was not simply getting a complete draft on time. It was seeing how much difference very specific instructions made to the finished paper. When I gave the writer something concrete to work with, the result became much closer to what I actually wanted. When I left a point open to interpretation, that was where I had to pay the most attention.
