Questions
Frequently asked questions.
Nine questions, including the three most likely to talk you out of buying something today. Those are here because a page that only answers the easy ones is a page you cannot trust on the hard ones.
Quick answers
What this actually is
The category question, and the one underneath it that people are too polite to ask first.
Do you write any part of my work?
No. We do not write the argument, the abstract, the cover letter or the response to reviewers. We diagnose, prioritise and rehearse; you write. Editing is different. If you add The Language Pass to a Manuscript MRI, Rejection Reversal or Grant Surge, a specialist edits the language of the text you wrote, records every change in the report and tells you what to put in the acknowledgements. For a thesis or coursework, we edit only as far as your institution permits in writing. Not writing for you is a published commitment rather than a policy applied case by case, and it is the one thing on this site that is not negotiable at any price. A request that crosses the line is declined in writing, with the reason — and that refusal is part of the product rather than a failure of it.
Is this allowed by my institution and my journal?
Diagnostic and advisory support is ordinary and declarable — the same category as a writing centre, a statistical consultant or a critical friend, and most journals have a disclosure field for exactly this. What is not allowed anywhere is somebody else writing your work, which is the thing we refuse to do. Our commitments are published so you can quote them in a declaration rather than paraphrase them.
How is this different from a good supervisor?
It is not better than a good supervisor. It is what you do when you do not have one, when they are stretched across fourteen students, or when they are outside your subfield and cannot tell you how your target journal reviews. A supervisor who is present and expert makes most of this unnecessary, and we will tell you when that is the situation you are in.
Quick answers
Money and commitment
What it costs, what happens if it goes wrong, and what you are locked into. Nothing.
What if the service turns out to be the wrong one?
You get a full refund or a credited rescope onto a service that does fit — your choice, not ours, decided within 24 hours of the pre-brief and before any work starts. In practice there is usually nothing to refund: your card is authorised at checkout rather than charged, and captured only once we have read your work and agreed the service is right. An authorisation that is never captured is money that never left your account. After delivery the remedy changes: tell us within 14 days if the work misses the brief we agreed, and we revise it once, free; if the revision still misses it, half the fee comes back as a refund or a credit.
Can I pause a long engagement?
Yes — once per commitment period, with no penalty, no fee and no explanation required. Billing stops and the minimum term extends by the length of the pause; nothing you have paid for is forfeited. Long engagements meet illness, bereavement and teaching terms that swallow a semester, and a pause is a normal event in one rather than a failure of it. If you need a second pause, tell us: that is a conversation about whether this is the right time for the engagement at all, not a request to be refused.
What if I cannot afford this?
Say so. The Global South Scholar Fund is a published subsidy for eligible researchers, assessed by a person before anybody is sent to a payment page — it is not a discount code, because a code would route people to a subsidy nobody assessed them for. There are also two genuinely free things on this site that need no application at all: the Momentum writing tracker and the Scholar’s Vault.
Quick answers
Time, pace and staying well
The answers most likely to talk you out of buying something today, which is why they are here.
How fast can this realistically go?
Faster than doing it alone, and slower than you want. A diagnostic turnaround is days; a rejection reversed is a fortnight of your work after ours; a thesis is months whatever anybody sells you. We will give you a realistic timeline rather than an encouraging one, and if your deadline does not fit we will say so before you pay rather than after. Sustainable pace is not a soft consideration here — close to one in three early-career researchers report elevated depressive or anxiety symptoms, and a plan that assumes you have no life is a plan that fails in week three.
Why is there no countdown timer or “only 2 spots left”?
Because manufactured urgency is a way of stopping you from thinking, and this is not a purchase that should be made without thinking. There are no fake deadlines, no expiring discounts and no seat counters, not even accurate ones: if a tier is full, you hear it from a person in the reply to your enquiry, before any money moves. If the honest answer is “there is no rush”, we would rather say it and lose the sale this week.
Quick answers
Your work and your data
Who sees it, where it goes, and when it is deleted.
What happens to my unpublished work?
It goes to private storage outside any web root, is read by the specialist assigned to your engagement, and is deleted 30 days after your project is delivered — or 90 days after submission if you never bought anything, so that a brief you abandoned does not simply sit with us. Every deletion writes an audit row that outlives the record it belonged to, so “we deleted it” stays checkable. Nothing you send is used to train, fine-tune or evaluate any model.
Where the detail lives
Longer answers, in full.
- The four integrity commitments — what each one forbids, and the mechanism that enforces it.
- The guarantees — every window and every remedy, named.
- The Global South Scholar Fund — who is eligible and how to apply.
Something not answered here? Write to contact@xp-consulting.org. If it turns out to be a question other people have, it ends up on this page.