Higher education is under mounting pressure to confront student practices of assignment outsourcing to internet services. The scale and buoyancy of this ‘essay mill’ industry has now been well documented, including its various marketing techniques for urging students to purchase bespoke academic work. However, the inherently suspect nature of such services demands that they adopt a particularly shrewd and empathic rhetoric to win custom from website visitors. In this paper, we investigate how such rhetoric currently constructs a critical version of the student's higher education experience. We present a thematic analysis of promotional text and images as found on a large sample of essay mill sites. Findings reveal how these sites promulgate a hostile and negative attitude towards higher educational practice. Yet these findings may also indicate where the higher education sector needs to reflect on its practice, not least in order to resist the toxic messages of essay mills.

高等教育面临着越来越大的压力，要面对学生将作业分配给互联网服务的做法。如今，“杂文工厂”行业的规模和浮力已得到充分证明，包括其各种营销技巧，以敦促学生购买定制的学术作品。但是，此类服务固有的可疑性质要求它们采用特别精明和富有同情心的措辞来赢得网站访问者的风俗习惯。在本文中，我们研究了这种言辞目前是如何构成学生高等教育经验的重要版本。我们对大量的论文工厂样本中的促销文字和图像进行了主题分析。调查结果揭示了这些网站如何对高等教育实践产生敌意和消极态度。