In case you’re not aware of it yet, there are actually students out there, a lot of them in fact, that are willing to pay you if you are skillful enough to do their homework and research papers for them. It’s a freelancing job that you can apply for. And in this post, we will discuss the ins and outs of that job, and what it takes in applying for it.

What is the job of an academic writer?

Yes, that’s your job description if you decide to hop into that and if you are lucky enough to get hired. The demand for academic writing jobs online stems from the reality that there are a lot of students, (from high school level to masters level) who don’t have enough time to work on their papers.

There are lots of online portals where you can grab writing projects pertaining to those and earn big bucks. We’ll get to that later. First, you have to be acquainted with the following.

Kinds of academic writing tasks

As an academic writer, you will be writing these:

Essays – opinionated writings about any topic the teacher might give to students, who will task you to write it for them.

Research papers – quantitative, qualitative, or any data-gathering tasks. These are often longer than standard essays and are a bit trickier to make.

Literature Reviews – academic papers, books, and articles that you must read, summarize and make a review for.

Journals – student activity logs that you must record and expound. Mostly, you will pretend to be that student client who pays you for the task.

Theses – compared to standard research papers, these are much longer and would require a lot of revisions from the client. Of course, it pays more than the other tasks above.

Because of the very diversified nature of today’s educational systems, there are a lot of academic writing tasks that do not actually fall into any of those categories. Most of the writing tasks revolve around those 5 though. And if you are quite confident that you can make those kinds of writings, then you are already on your first steps towards becoming a profitable academic writer.

Skills you need to have

Like any other online job or any other job for that matter, you need to have some skills so you can be an effective academic writer. The job pays well, but you need to be sure that you have the following skills:

English/grammar proficiency

Universities all over the world use English as the most important medium of instruction. To put it simply, you need to be good with it, as well as the grammatical rules that revolve around it. This is the most important skill you should have, and sadly for those who are not good enough with the language, they won’t be very successful as an academic writer.

Knowledge of office apps/software

Since you will be writing most of the time, you really need to be knowledgeable with the likes of MS Word and Libre Office Writer. As someone who’s computer-literate already, this shouldn’t be too much of a problem. However, you also need to have some knowledge of spreadsheet apps such as Excel, and presentation programs like PowerPoint. Many academic writing tasks include making projects that require those software, so it will be a huge bonus if you know how to use them.

Researching skills

Thankfully, search engines like Google have made this very easy. However, academic writing requires you to go beyond standard researching because the professors of those clients you work for would not consider your work to be acceptable if your sources come from Wikipedia or some ordinary blog posts.

To make your research truly valid, you need to cite your sources from credible academic sites, most preferably those that fall to the “.edu” or “.org” categories.

Knowledge of academic writing styles

Unlike blog posts and website content that only require standard word processor formatting, academic papers must be written in a format that can be easily read and be scribbled on for correction by the professors that read them.

The standard formatting for academic writing is double-spaced, font size 12, of typical Times New or Serif Fonts. You have to format your writings in this manner unless the client specifies otherwise. You have to also structure your work in accordance with writing standards such as APA, MLA, or Chicago which are basically, the standards for academic writing.

When you’re new to academic writing, such terms might appear foreign to you. There’s no need to worry though since templates for such styles are freely available online, and most likely, your company’s website will provide them for you. Learning about them will be easy as you will surely figure out soon.

Additional helpful skills to have

It is stated earlier that English proficiency is the most important skill to have in this kind of job. But the truth is, there is also a place for graphic designers, programmers, and video editors in academic writing sites.

This is because some teachers require students to make video presentations, animations, and other tasks that do not really require much writing. There are also computer science tasks that may require coding and database analysis.

So technically, there are slots for every computer-literate individual in academic writing platforms. But tasks related to video, graphics, and computer programming are very rare and if you wait for those types of projects to appear on your choices, you’d be better off working for other platforms that focus specifically on those tasks.

In working for academic writing companies, you have to be skillful with English first, then work on other skills later on so you can expand your project options, which of course can enhance your earning potential. Read more…