I Tried EssayPay With My Own Sources and Instructions — Did They Actually Matter?

I wanted to test something that sounds obvious but is surprisingly easy to get wrong: does giving a writing service your own sources and unusually detailed instructions actually change the result?

Instead of sending a vague request for “a history essay about barcodes,” I built a deliberately demanding assignment. I specified the length, historical scope, source requirements, citation style, and even the exact kind of story I wanted. The assignment had to reconstruct one early supermarket barcode implementation in the United States during the 1970s, rather than drifting into a general history of barcodes.

That distinction mattered. The test was less about whether someone could write 1,500 words and more about whether the supplied research constraints would survive the journey from order instructions to finished academic work.

My finding was fairly straightforward: yes, detailed instructions and sources matter, but only when they are specific enough to change the writer's research and decision-making. A topic, a word count, and “use Chicago style” leave plenty of room for interpretation. A defined case, three categories of primary evidence, four scholarly secondary sources, competing interpretations, and explicit source limitations leave much less.

That became particularly obvious when I designed the assignment around the first UPC checkout test at a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, in 1974.

I deliberately made the assignment difficult

The biggest surprise was that the barcode story became less about the barcode itself the closer I looked at Marsh.

At national scale, the 1970s story looks inevitable: retailers needed efficiency, an industry committee selected a standard, scanners appeared, and supermarkets became more data-driven.

At the scale of one store in Troy, the transition looks much messier.

Employees had to label products. Customers noticed changes they did not necessarily appreciate. Equipment manufacturers had to coordinate with the supermarket. Variable-weight goods required their own solution. The famous first scan lasted an instant, but the infrastructure behind it depended on hours of preparation and cooperation.

That is what I would take away from the essaypay.com test as well. My own sources and instructions did matter, but their value came from narrowing the writer's decisions rather than simply making the order longer.

If I were doing the assignment again, I would give fewer general directions and more evidence-specific ones: define the case, identify what each source should establish, state what must remain uncertain, and explain exactly what would make the finished paper successful.

That is a much better test of whether instructions matter than simply counting how many words appear in the final document.

What I would change next time

I would make my source instructions even more operational.

Instead of saying “use three primary sources,” I would identify the role each source should play: one contemporary newspaper or trade account for the local event, one government or institutional record for the broader retail context, and one physical or archival record for the technology itself.

I would also explicitly ask for a source audit before the final draft: which claims come directly from primary evidence, which come from secondary scholarship, and which are the writer's interpretation.

That would make it harder for a polished but generic paragraph to sneak into the paper.

I would also avoid assuming that more sources automatically produce better history. Four weak secondary sources would not improve this assignment. Morton and Basker, for example, answer different questions: one helps reconstruct the development of the UPC, while the other provides quantitative evidence about productivity.

The point is not to accumulate citations. It is to make each source do a distinct job.

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