Why Is Hiring a Ghostwriter a Bad Idea?

A music professor asked his students to submit their own classical composition as a final project. One student found his own professor’s submitted composition when he was a student, and submitted it as his own, but rewrote it backwards to avoid getting caught. As a result, the student submitted Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

You may want to think twice if you are planning to hire a ghostwriter for your school essay because the actual risk is higher than what you may think.

The same situation may never happen in essay writing, but there is an equivalent strategy for it in writing—article spinning. It is the act of rewriting same given facts at the same manner of presentation as done by another writer but at a different outline or structure. Usually, it is done sentence per sentence if not paragraph per paragraph.

This is a generally questionable act which puts a legit writer in a compromised situation, even landing legal disputes. Hiring a ghostwriter means putting your own reputation at the chopping board. There is always a risk of you getting unoriginal essay, which is somehow hard to ascertain since there is no way for you to scan every published work to look for possibility of spinning. You benefit from it when not caught, but the damage could be too much for you to handle when disputed by someone else, like the original writer or the publisher.

Essentially, article spinning as a form of rewriting is quite acceptable, provided that there is no authorship and copyright involved. This is true for Wikipedia entries and other articles written for public consumption without added liability or need for royalty and citation.

Nevertheless, spinning an original work with the intention of owning the final product and not using it only for reference and citation is a clear violation of copyright laws. It also differs from rehashing topics which is done regularly by other writers in the publishing and entertainment industry.

Literary connoisseurs say that all stories and ideas have already been told, but the manner of presenting them and reaching the conclusion is indefinite. Rehashing ideas is dealing with the same propositions and thesis using the writer’s own style and choice of words. In storytelling, it is done by using the same conflict as another already published story, and probably, the same plot and setting but with different developments and twists to change the story line. Using ghostwriters for essay may somehow be safer for academic purposes but definitely not for publication purposes.

The worst case scenario anyone can face in hiring a ghostwriter is being sued with plagiarism. Many people think that plagiarism is merely stealing and publishing another written piece already published under a different author, but that is a total mistake.

Anti-plagiarism laws define the act as “wrongful appropriation” and “close imitation” of any work, published or not. Using another authored work as foundation even without exact semblance is different from using it as an inspiration (which is still sometimes questionable in court). The act is still liable for plagiarism.

Plagiarism is not really considered a crime more than an ethical violation. Nonetheless, it is still punishable by law. The case even gets bigger when there are damages involved, like when a published work is stolen for commercial purposes. In which case, the person being sued, who is not necessarily the ghostwriter, would be asked to pay all the damages incurred for plagiarizing another work. In fact, it is considered a lame defense to say that the defendant only hired a ghostwriter because hiring a ghostwriter and owning up for a written output by a ghostwriter are considered as one act.

## Photos courtesy of Free Digital Photos