There is one skill, above all others, that is the most important and vital skill every good writer needs. For most of us, it’s also the most boring of tasks and the hardest to force ourselves to accomplish readily. That skill is proofreading.
Proofreading (also called “proofing”) is a very necessary process and great writers (or at least steadily employed ones) are often marked by their ability to proof their own work and hand editors and publishers ready-to-print material. These writers are, in most editor’s view, true professionals.
Here are some examples of how quality proofing can make-or-break your career – or at least your ability to get in print.
I work with an editor at a well-known online site regularly. I submit work and she usually accepts it or asks for simple revisions (another info source, a change of wording or removal of a corporate name, etc.). We’ve worked together for nearly a year and she’s never once returned something for grammatical revision. After she’d approved four articles in a row without comment, I asked her if she was happy with my work. She responded that it was top quality and I was one of the few she worked with that required little supervision in terms of staying on subject and grammar/readability.
Curious, I asked her to elaborate and she used a well-known person who occasionally writes for the same site as her example. This person is a medical doctor and holds two PhD’s in related fields. She said that despite this, the written pieces he submits are horrible. “His on-target and general flow are great, but his grammar and total lack of punctuation are painful to read. I spend a lot of time cleaning up his submissions. If he weren’t a ‘special guest’ to the site, I would have asked that he be kicked to the curb long ago.”
In another instance, I was bidding on a job writing a handful of technical articles based on Microsoft software for someone’s website. He’d narrowed it down to me and one other person and suggested a “write off” where we would each write one article on the same subject, he’d pay us both for that one article, but would hire the best of the two for the rest of the job. We accepted and I submitted my article the next day.
After I’d won the job, I asked him what had won him over about my writing and he sent me the other guy’s submission and said, “Because with your stuff, I won’t have to proof read it and make sure it’s OK before I put it online. His stuff is like this.” I read through it and while the writing was good, the lack of punctuation and the huge paragraphs and large number of misspellings were the obvious work of someone in a hurry.
What you’ll find as a writer is that you’re more likely to have your work accepted, to win the job you’re bidding on, and to win over your editor to get the extra assignments or better payments if you are a professional. A big part of that is making sure you’re proofreading all of your work and submitting only high-quality, top-notch stuff. Each time, every time.
The following is a fun little Reading Test and proof primer from Udder Buffoonery:
It appears that the Udder Buffoonery website has gone the way of the Dodo. Oh well.
“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.” -Lord Byron
Today, I’m going to step away from the business aspects of professional writing and look instead at another aspect of putting words to paper: as a theraputic.
Many writers, especially of personal journals and fiction, are tortured souls with a lot to deal with internally. Hemingway would go into bouts of severe depression and usually come out the other side of it with a new novel. Stephen King describes his writing as a “need” in the same way a heroin addict describes their habit. Ann Frank likely found much solace in her enclosed, fearful world by putting pen to paper. Benjamin Franklin said:
“If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write something worth reading or do things worth writing.”
Many psychologists and psychiatrists have realized the healing benefit of journal writing. It’s also likely that many writers are drawn to the business of writing (especially fiction) as a means to vent or deal with their inner psyche. In fact, studies have shown that those who write on emotionally-difficult issues in their lives generally not only experience better well-being, but can actually become more physically fit as well.
Culturally, many peoples have noted the benefits of journal writing. It’s encouraged amongst many cultures and religions world wide, including the Church of Latter Day Saints (Mormons), in many public schools, amongst Jews, and in the Japanese culture.
So writing does have some great benefits beyond the business income and the learning and education that goes with it. Remember that as you write your articles, website copy, personal journal, poetry, novel, and friendly emails. Writing is communication and, as humans, we are all creatures of social interaction and putting words down is one way we do that.
Let’s say you’ve been offered the opportunity or have
been contacted about writing something for someone on a for-hire basis. No doubt, you found my information in Finding Writing Work to be highly essential and powerful in your search for writing jobs.
Now that you’ve been offered a job or are looking at a project and thinking about bidding on it.. what next?
The bidding process itself, even if you’re just quoting a price for a client, can be confusing and frustrating. If you begin blind, you will no doubt spend a lot of time kicking yourself for under- or over-bidding the job. Over-bidding is fine if you actually win the contract, but in the competitive bidding process, a bid that’s too high is sure to get your proposal round-filed. Even if the customer does accept your bid and you get the job, they will sooner or later find out that they’ve paid too much. That breeds resentment.
So how do you go about bidding on writing jobs? What is the “right price” to make the payment fair to both you and your client?
Those are hard to answer questions, as so many things factor into the bidding process, but here is some basic advice and a look at how I bid projects I’m interested in.
Evaluate the Job To Be Done
This is the part where you figure out all of the aspects of the job that will, figuratively, cost you money. Anything that will require your time or effort will cost you money, so getting a fairly accurate estimate on what those things are – for the job at hand – is essential. Usually, for writing, this consists of three things:
Research (time, possible costs)
Writing (the actual penning of the piece(s) for the client)
Each of those requires time and effort and might also cost you some money up front. For my own work, most of my costs are associated with the first and third aspects. Most of the time that I find myself complaining that a job is not going to make me any money, it’s because of revisions. Almost every one of these three things can be controlled, however, with just a little knowledge and professionalism.
Research Time and/or Costs
Before bidding on a job, make sure you’re completely clear on what the client expects of you. This will tell you how much research will be required on the given subject matter. Most writing, especially Web content and copy writing, requires little or no references to be included in the work. For me, this type of work is a straight money-maker if I’m already familiar with the subject matter as I can do most of it off the top of my head, requiring little or no research at all.
Factual pieces, however, require substantiation of every factoid or supposition made in the piece. These are a lot more research-intensive and will require much more time for research versus the time spent actually writing the finished product. Before bidding, I recommend doing a little spot-research on the subject to get an idea of how difficult it will be to get that information. Ten or fifteen minutes with a Google search can tell you,within the first couple of pages of results, what kind of time will be required to find and assimilate all of the information you’ll need.
Use common sense, but assume that most of your costs here will not be words written, but words read. On average, in a lightly-researched piece, I assume that 50 words will be read for every word I’ve written, so a 1,000-word piece will require 5,000 word’s reading time.
Writing the Piece
If the piece is to be straight forward without a lot of formatting or rules for you to follow, this can help or hinder the writing time required to create the work. I find, in general, that the less hindered I am by rules or markup/layout requirements in a piece, the better off I am in terms of time. Free form, I can write much more quickly and easily than if I must conform to a set of rules. Other writes have told me that they prefer a strong structure to write within. If they aren’t given one, they’ll choose one of the standard academic layouts given in most College Writing and Business Writing courses. Those are readily available online, if you’re interested.
The actual process of writing the piece, once research is done, is much easier for me than any of the other three parts to building a complete project for a client. Most writers likely agree with this and it’s true of most professions. The build-up to get the job going and the final cleanup required after the bulk of it is done are the real hard parts to any job, whether it be construction, writing, or driving a truck.
Editing, Revisions, Etc.
The proof reading and editing process is inherent in any type of writing. For most writers, it’s the least enjoyable part of the job. I gauge the amount of editing to do by two things: what the job is being written for and how well it was written to begin with.
If I did a good job of writing the thing to begin with, then the proof reading probably won’t require much. I’m a relatively good self-editor during the actual writing itself, but that is not common. Most writers prefer what I call the “word hose” method. This is where the words just flow out and spill onto the page and the writer worries about how they look and read later. The idea is to get all of the information out first, then structure and clean it up later. Since I’m not good at doing this without automatically hitting backspace or going back to ad or remove a word as I write, this type of stream-of-consciousness writing is not for me. I suspect it’s why I’m not very good at writing fiction.
So if the piece appears to be written well as you go through your writing, the editing probably won’t take too long. Then you’re faced with revisions.
This part is the worst, to me. In my mind, I’ve written a great piece, it’s grammatically correct and editorially awesome and yet, the client wants changes. It’s part of the job, but for me, it’s the worst part. This is why I’ve gravitated towards clients who are more interested in my work as I have produced it than I am towards clients who want me to write as if I were them.
When ghost-writing, if the client has a “voice” they’ve established through written work they’ve already produced, be prepared to spend a lot of time learning to copy that before ghost-writing for them. On the other hand, I have one client I’ve created a voice for (he had never written anything of merit before hiring me) and others who are only interested in looking smart, which I can provide as a ghost-writer. These are my preferred clients.
Clients to Avoid
I’m about to say something that will sound sexist, but it’s not meant to be so: avoid writing for “girlie” clients.
By this, I don’t mean to avoid women, I mean to avoid those clients who appear to have too-clear a vision of how they want things to be and who have too-obvious tastes when you review their website, project descriptions, etc. These clients will never be happy with anything you’ve produced and will nit-pick everything, killing your bottom line on the project. I’ve literally told clients to keep their money and go somewhere else after the 8000th revision on something I expected to take two hours of my time. It can be hard on you and you’ll think it will destroy your reputation, but sometimes letting someone go is easier and better for you than staying on and taking the loss. Trust me.
The other type of client to avoid are the over-communicative ones. These are the clients who will call you daily (or more), send you masses of emails or “spot research” information to “help” you along, and so forth. Every time you communicate with your client, it costs you money. This is because not only are you spending your time answering their communique, but you’re probably revising the project in the process. Once the bid is in, you should be left free to do your thing.
Of course, there are exceptions to this rule, as some projects require a lot of client interaction, but most of the time, it’s not. So avoid it. One trick is to leave their emails until the end of the day and then answer them all at once. If they’re really annoying, just tell them that you need space to concentrate and get the job done right and they’ll probably understand.
Final Conclusions
The bidding process is not the easiest thing in the world, but it’s something that all professionals have to learn. Most of it is common sense and experience. As a writer, expect to lose your shirt on the first few projects you bid on and then be happily surprised if you don’t.
You will invariably make mistakes in the beginning, but it’s part of the learning process. Note what you did right and wrong, then repeat and avoid as necessary in the future. It doesn’t take long to get to the point where you can bid on most jobs in a few minutes and wait for the winning results. After a while, you’ll learn to judge your prospective clients quickly and to know how to bid their job (or when not to bid at all) with confidence.
For most, including myself, the bidding process was the hardest thing to learn and the most confusing aspect of professional writing. It’s fundamental to the business of writing, however, so it must be learned.
There is one skill, above all others, that is the most important and vital skill every good writer needs. For most of us, it’s also the most boring of tasks and the hardest to force ourselves to accomplish readily. That skill is proofreading.
It appears that the Udder Buffoonery website has gone the way of the Dodo. Oh well.
