My Job - Posted in my Facebook

Thanks to my friend Marc, I have found a rewarding online job. I would like to consider myself now as an online freelance writer.

The job could be funny sometimes because you are made to rewrite articles that are unintelligible and just plain preposterous. But I am actually learning a lot. I've covered different topics from waffle makers to psoriasis to Charlie Sheen.

In the short time that I have been a freelance writer, I now somehow know the ins and outs of the business. I started this thing charging a dollar per article. However, to Americans, it was really cheap. So I started charging more. As it is freelancing and I'm not very well known yet in the freelance community, I just bid and then leave the projects they send me if I have procrastinated long enough not to have done it.

When I was so overloaded the other day, I tried to outsource my projects to other "writers" much to my dismay. There were about 6 people who placed a bid on my project. Two of the people simply did not just pass because their messages were already dismantled English. There were two people that impressed me with their portfolio so I gave them the job. I just gave them 2 articles each to write/rewrite and oh my lord was their work a complete plagiarism.

In the real world, plagiarism is defined as copying even a simple thought or idea. However, in online freelancing, it has a broader definition. Most people in that business define the term as copying the sentence verbatim. There is actually some software and programs designed to detect this. This is one thing that clients are really avoiding. It is primarily because if Google detects two identical articles, it would eliminate the later version. It's an SEO thing. And speaking of SEO, one has to repeat the keywords given exactly as they are x times in a sentence. That x times would always be at least 2-3% of the article, which is very achievable.

Back to plagiarism. Those two people that got me impressed were just mere scammers. They probably thought I was not smart enough to not detect what they have done. I told them that I did not have a software to detect whether their work was a plagiarism or not. I think they capitalized on that. But a simple "quote" search in Google really told me that everything they did was just copied and pasted. One of them just even changed the font that when I copied his document to my document, all links/tags appeared - the same thing used in Wikipedia when the whole sentence contained words or phrases with a Wikipedia definition. Unfortunately for him, I was using the same source as he was using but I just know how to twist and turn the words to appear different.

I really disgust these writers. I was even told by one of my clients that out of the 10 people who placed a bid on his project, I was the only one who gave him an unplagiarized sample (we were made to rewrite something he assigned). I was promised a $200 monthly salary for something so easy and my client placed it on the project title when he posted it. I am sure that there were "serious" writers who placed a bid. The fact that the site I'm using is thriving with fake writers is very sad.

This may not be a permanent job and this might not be a serious job to some, but I love it. I get to do what I like. I did not study to become a writer - hell I did not even finish college - but I'm serious about writing. This seems to be easy for me. If you have reached this part, I'm sure you would've noticed how perfect my grammar is. Why make it go to waste?