Although freelance writing has a lot of benefits and opportunities available, I realized that one has to be careful in choosing the projects one partakes of. Not so much because of issues of getting paid or not but more so on issues about what the project really is about.
I was aghast to find out that there are legitimate companies who really hire professional and good writers to write papers for their clients who are, sad to say, students trying to get someone to do their school papers for them. I knew that somehow there are first world country students who are thick enough to avail the services of a writer, most probably from a third world country, for their school term papers and projects but what I was not prepared for was that there are valid companies – professional looking ones at that – who can handle such things.
This company that I have recently applied for was what showed me such. I was impressed by the professional look of their website and I took pains in accomplishing their application form, which asked me about my knowledge of citation styles and my experiences with academic writing. Then their examination was equally strenuous since I was given 15 minutes to write a composition whose outline and topic they have dictated. When I got in, I spent a day learning their system – the writing guidelines as well as how I can take job orders and submit them. The company was very professional, all right. They even had an online chat support. Best of all, they were really big on plagiarism and how sternly it is punished.
But when I began looking at the orders, I was gravely disappointed. I was so disappointed to find that most of them were term papers of students, undergraduate and masters alike. I was expecting companies looking for writers to write contents for their websites or brochures, or perhaps something like Wikipedia looking for people to check their contents or something like that. I looked at order by order, trying to find something that I could write. I had no issues whether I could write the content or not even when it involved research on my part. I knew I could. I had issues with my conscience though for I can never seem to get away the bothersome feeling that I was doing someone else’s work and my work would be passed off as someone else’s.
I am not trying to sound self-righteous. Nor am I saying I am better than anyone else. I am not. But I do adhere deeply to the value of integrity – integrity even in one’s study. I am not saying that the company condones such practices. It’s just that they don’t censor what clients they get. I even saw an order wherein the client appealed to whoever would take her order to make a good job because the last time she asked the company to create a job for her, her professor gave her an F. Imagine that! I bet the professor knew she asked someone else to do the work for her.
The pay is good alright. Three dollars is the minimum I saw for one page of a paper and a paper usually has a minimum of 2 pages. Mostly the pay is $20-$30 dollars per project. Not bad really. In fact, it’s one of the highest paying freelance writing job I saw. But then the downside is, someone else get to pass your work as his or her. It is not plagiarism per se but it is a violation of intellectual rights not to mention sheer integrity.
Disappointed, I had to leave that company. I realized that it is better to earn $0.01 per ad clicked on those PTC sites than to earn $30 on a “term paper”.
Next: Various Ways of Earning through the Internet
