Can You Earn As An Academic Writer?

There is a growing demand in the writing industry of professional academic writers who assist in the research and writing of dissertations, thesis statements, essays and reports of students.

In this sector, students contact you with their requirement or if you are working with an agency, they outsource the work to you. You are expected to use your expertise in your chosen subject and complete students’ assignments.

The Moral Dilemma of an Academic Writer

Education boards and teachers are well aware of this evolving academic writing trend and they severely criticize it.

One reason of their criticism is they feel that by seeking the services of an academic writer, the student is putting to risk their learning abilities.

Clearly, if you are writing a thesis and the student passes it as his own and receives an excellent grade, does the student learn anything in the process?

No! This is what the educational administers are worried about – hiring the services of an academic writer will lower educational quality and the standard of the students.

This moral dilemma is the reason why many professional academic writers want to associate themselves with an agent or professional writing service company that does not allow clients (students) to pass off their work as their own.

In other words, the clients have to sign a contract where they agree to the condition that the academic content provided to them will be taken only as a draft / outline upon which the client will submit the one created by the client and not the one received from the agency or company.

Violating this condition may lead to plagiarism charges and reputed professional academic writing companies are strict with their terms and conditions.

Therefore, you have two ways ahead of you:

• As an academic writer, you can choose to work with an agency that follows the above working ethic – this way you get paid for your help and you get to retain the copyrights as well.

• As an academic writer, you can choose to work individually with clients (students) and allow them to use your work as their own – this way you get paid for your work but you don’t get to retain the copyrights.

Decide which kind of work you want to do first and then move on to the preparation stage.

How Should You Go About Becoming an Academic Writer?

Preparing Your Application – No matter if you have decided to work with professional academic writing agencies or directly with students, you need to have a resume, portfolio and samples ready. A resume and portfolio will show your writing experience and the works you have done in the past.

If you haven’t done any academic writing before, write whatever you have done in the past because employers are more interested in looking at your writing style than anything else.

Moreover, you have to keep at least 3 samples ready on the subject of your choice. Keep in mind that you will limit your income potential if you restrict your academic writing services to only one subject.

For instance, if you are qualified in English Literature, you can put Sociology, Philosophy, General English, Management, and History as your associative subjects, meaning you can handle assignments on these subjects as well – this will increase you income potential.

Remember to prepare three samples in different subjects. If you have written papers in your college years, you can use those too as samples.

Further, your application should be interesting and not boring. Write it in a manner that will interest people and make them eager to at least revert back to you.

The application you send will either make or break the deal, so devote a good amount of time to develop the application package – resume, portfolio and samples.

Applying Centers – AcademicResearch.com, Writers.ph, Allwriting.net, ResearchPaperWriter.com, BestEssays.com, SmartWriting24.com and Freelancer.com are some of the professional academic writing websites that need qualified and experienced academic writers regularly.

What you do is visit these websites and fill out their online form. Submit your resume and samples for their review. Typically, they take around three days to one week to review your application. If they are interested, they will contact you for a mock test, so be ready!

Taking another test is just their way to confirm that you can actually write as you have claimed in your application. They do this as a security measure to weed out fraudulent applicants.

In the academic world, you need to be aware of four types of referencing or citation standards – APA, MLA, Harvard Style, and Chicago Style. There are several online written and video tutorials for these citations.

Keep yourself up to date with current stylistic features because every academic write up needs to be appended with these citations. In other words, they are unavoidable so brush up on your knowledge before any company rejects your application just because you don’t know them.

Be Aware of Frauds –

While starting out with academic writing, you need to be aware of fraudulent activities that go on in this industry. Internet being the biggest resource engine will be of a great help here.

For instance, when you want to apply to a company, Google their name and check out reviews and feedbacks. You can type “(Company / Website name) is a scam” and see what response the search engine sends back.

Like this, bookmark all the companies before sending applications and do a quick background check. The main thing you have to see is the ‘payment delay.’

While writing this informative piece, I came across a critical review on AcademicResearch.com. Apparently, the 7 year old company is actually based in Ukraine but the address displayed on their website mentioned New York.

Again, there were several grievances from previous employees crying foul on non – payment for the works received by Academic Research. Moreover, they try to deduct payment with stupid excuses.

Another similar website with an equal reputation is EssayWriters.org. I don’t know how much the feedback on Academia Research is true but I can vouch for Essay Writers because I worked with them for one month in 2010.

In that one month, I got two projects – I did one and the second one was cancelled by the client. In all, they owed me $25 for that one project and believe me; I didn’t receive the money ever.

Their reason – $5 was deducted for account maintenance and $20 as a “fine” for the other project cancelled. Now, why should I be held responsible if a client cancels his project? It is beyond my understanding. My advice – stay away from EssayWriters.org!

You need to research academic writing websites before you apply – it will save you your hard work and money.

Earning Potential –

All things said and discussed, your earning potential as an academic writer can be like this per month:

• Less than 1000 USD – working part time (weekends and evenings)
• Between 1000 USD and 5000 USD – working full time ( 6 – days a week)
• Above 6000 USD – working full time, especially during peak season

If you don’t have one, create a PayPal account because most of the payments are sent through PayPal. You can also register with MoneyBookers or AlertPay.

Final Thoughts –

Earning as a freelance academic writer is definitely a career to think about. It is a job that gives you the convenience to work from your home any time or anywhere for that matter.

If you are lucky to get good clients, your monthly rewards will be good. Once you establish your credibility, you will get a constant flow of work and the best thing is, you have no pressure, you choose your subject and work in your own scheduled time.