Succeeding as an academic writer?

For those who do this as a living,

Do you think that you have to have a passion for writing in order to be able to be successful at this job? From what I have gleaned, making money from this line of writing requires the ability to write huge volumes of work, in short periods of time. It seems like the best writers out there are those taking "rush" orders. How long did it take you before you felt comfortable taking those large volumes of work? Is this profession simply a teach-yourself-solitary-endavor, or are there resources where one can learn and strengthen their own academic-writing abilities.

Regards,
Jess

Sorry but you never gonna succeed. If you are a writer for some months now and you still dont get it you never will. There no difference if you write one page or 300 pages. You should take ESL grammer course and joga class and start again, but theres little hope...

Oh, stu4, your idiocy is exceeded only by your inadequacy.

I was made redundant 2 weeks ago and looking to make a living from writing until i get a 9-5 job

I think it is obvious which one of is ESL, considering I am from Bozeman Montana. A little disconnected from the world, but still definitely native English.

Succeeding as an academic writer is the most challenging thing. There are many writers still struggling to shine in their field. 95% of native writers i know, succeeded in the field of academic writing. Probability of success for Non native writers are very less. The continuous hard work and the practice will bring success.

No kidding...

I hope you are a non native writer like me.

Hello, Pheelyks
How have you been?

No, I'm a native writer who doesn't think you've succeeded as much as you think you have.

Cool :)

I'm glad you think that's cool. Why exactly are you here?

Just for time-pass and also waiting for a good opportunity to develop my skillful writing team.

You ought to try developing your own writing skills before trying to "develop a team."

This is also one of the reason why I am here. I hope good people like you will keep on helping me to develop my writing skills.

In that case, go work on the following:

-comma usage

-"the"

-colloquialisms/idiomatic phrases

Sure. And thanks a lot, brother. :-)

This job is more of a calling than a career that one charts for himself. In order to succeed in this job, one needs to be passionate about reading, learning, and writing.

In the span of 3 months, an effective writer will find himself better educated than when he graduated with his degree from college.

This job makes a person a well rounded, intellectually enlightened individual.

Mostly because of the constant exposure to every topic under the sun.

One tends to become an expert across various fields because of the orders being put out there for claiming.

As for the page volume per work, that is not something that you can plan on doing. You slowly ease into it because you gain the confidence and the resources to help you complete the task in a precise manner.

Regardless of the time frame. It will be scary at first, I did not take my first large volume work until 6 months after I began writing academic papers, but once you get over the nerves, you actually begin to look forward to the challenge that large volume orders provide.

The most successful writers in this business are those who enjoyed reading volumes of material during their college days and then writing about it for their research or opinion papers. They are the ones who normally end up sticking with the job on a long-term basis. They enjoy the work because it becomes an extension of their college education, often making them highly educated in various fields due to the types of papers they have to write.If one were to think about where the training for this job comes from, it is possible to consider that the foundation is laid out throughout their early grammar education, high school essay writing, and college research paper development. Writers who often get A's during their undergraduate days will most likely excel in this profession. Blogging is also one form of practice for opinion essayists. Basically, a successful academic writer is someone who has always had a passion for writing and a desire to share the knowledge he has with others.

I think you should be a little more careful about making assumptions and generalities about people you don't know. While my teachers always mentioned that I was a good writer, the fact of the matter is that, like many students, I hated having to write for school and never wrote anything for pleasure until several years after I graduated from law school. As I've explained in greater detail in my review thread, I specifically chose to go to law school over psychology grad school because I didn't want to have to do all the writing typically required in psychology programs. My hatred of (and intimidation by) substantial assigned essays as a college student helps me understand exactly why my clients need my services, especially those who are good students and capable of writing for themselves if they have to. It's ironic that I've now written more than enough psychology papers, theses, and dissertations to have satisfied the writing requirements of dozens of degrees, including doctorates, in that field. (This is not a claim to know as much psychology as doctorates in the field; but simply means that I've written more papers for those degrees than most people who actually hold those degrees.)


I'd also disagree that an impulse to "share knowledge" is characteristic of many writers in this industry, even very good ones. More often than not, whatever we know about many of the subjects that we write about comes from doing the research for those projects -- research that we had no interest in doing until it became necessary for a specific project. This is a job. People who happen to write well and who have learned how to research information and who learn how to adapt to the pressure of constant deadlines are well-suited to it; but it's really not like a "calling" to become a teacher or a doctor. It's a job that's workable if you're a good writer and if its demands fit your lifestyle better than those of traditional jobs. Nothing more and nothing less.

People have to bear this in mind if they ought to stay in the industry. Academic writing, although dubbed as freelance, is to be taken seriously because of its nature as a job. It is not something you can simply throw yourself into because you had decent grades in high school and college. You need to take it seriously at one point or another. Furthermore, people should ensure that they have consistent training to keep up with competitors in the field. This, of course, involves a lot of writing exercises and research practices to assure customers that you're going to provide them with quality services.

For writers whose native language is English, success doesn't involve any kind of continual training. It's just a matter of prioritizing writing projects and deadlines over all of the other things in your daily schedule and being available to write most days of your life.

I'd like to argue otherwise. Even if a writer's native language is English, it would not be tantamount to being a successful academic writer. The requirements are a little bit more different than that. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that there are non-native speakers who certainly can exceed expectations because they are a lot more cautious with the work that they put out. This certainly makes a huge difference.

Dude: You're here constantly pontificating about writing and about how well ESL writers can write in English. Meanwhile, practically every sentence of yours in every single post of yours contains glaring errors in grammar, word choice, and idiomatic expression. On plenty of occasions, you use words that have entirely different meaning than you think they do and that aren't even synonyms for the right word, but merely sound similar to the right word. I've had no reason to go out of my way to embarrass you by pointing out all of your obvious mistakes, but if you'd like to learn from them (or if you suggest that I'm wrong about this), I'd be more than happy to start correcting your English for you. Either way, if I were you, I'd really just stop making arguments about how well ESL writers can write in English. Certainly, there are some who can, but you're definitely not one of them.

I don't think I ever mentioned on the forum that I'm a clear-cut writer. I do make mistakes. I am well-aware that this is because it's my second language. What I was mentioning is that I am well-aware that there are ESL writers who can certainly exceed the standards that are typically expected of them. This can be inclusive of people who have studied overseas, published in reputable academic journals, or have worked for academic writing platforms. Regardless, these people do exist. To immediately reject that as an argument would be close to shameful, especially in due respect for others who definitely are capable.

I would better hire someone from 3rd party company who definitely knows better how to write it down. Of course in case when I don't have much time to do it by myself.

There's really no magic or secret involved in becoming a successful professional academic writer. You just have to be a good writer who is capable of writing well in grammatically-correct English and who knows how to do basic research online. Beyond that, it's really just a matter of cultivating a clientele very gradually, broadening your subject-matter range, and becoming more efficient at writing relatively fast without compromising the quality of your work. That's the formula. A person who struggles to compose a 3 or 4-sentence forum post without glaring mistakes of grammar, proper word choice, and idiomatic expression will not be able to succeed as a writer in this business, at least not one whose clients are mostly NES and looking for a writer who writes at least as well, and, preferably, a lot better than they do. Nobody who isn't ESL himself wants to pay good money for writing that's full of glaring elementary mistakes or that is instantly recognizable as having been written by an ESL writer. A good NES writer can always simplify his writing to the ESL level, but the vast majority of ESL writers, even fairly decent ones, simply cannot do the same in reverse.

One of the initial mistakes that I made when I first started as an academic writer was the fact that I was persistently trying to overly research certain projects. In hindsight, this definitely hindered me from developing a larger clientele early on in my career. Now, looking back, I can ascertain that I definitely needed to be smarter when it came to researching content for clients. I have realized that basic researches definitely suffice in creating a holistic paper that will satiate the client. Learning through personal experiences definitely pay off in this path.

The people who make it successfully as freelance writers are ultimately those who excelled in writing and research while in college. As a student, the future writer learns the rudiments of research and writing in high school, eventually honing this skill as a college student. There is a reason why our educational system focuses on research and essay writing, it is the best way for a person to learn. One first must love reading, which will then lead to a proficiency in writing, and finally, result in a writing career (for some). An academic writer must have an interest in academic reading, not just reading in general, due to the job requirements. The academic writer will only be successful in this line of work if he has a strong foundation in research and writing during his own time as a student. Just like any other job, the technical skills of being an academic writer is developed on the job, based on client requirements for specific research and opinion papers.

This statement is completely and absolutely false. I always liked scribbling stuff down, but I never "excelled" in it, especially not in college. It was only after that I started to consider writing as a more serious career choice and evolved my skill over time. There might be some writers who actually enjoyed writing in college and even high school, but I somehow doubt they work in this exact field. It's much more likely they pursue other types of writing careers.

I also have to disagree with this, and most particularly, with the word "must" in both places where it appears. I never liked -- let alone "loved" -- reading, but as anybody familiar with this community over the last decade or so will attest, I've managed to become about as successful doing this as anybody in the recent history of this business. As a student, I detested assigned reading; and even as an adult, I only chose to read for the purpose of learning about specific topics about which I had some interest in knowing more. My reading comprehension and writing ability drew compliments from my teachers since grade school, but they are both largely innate, although the latter is also substantially attributable to having been raised by a father who was a grammarian and whose lessons were then perfectly supplemented by a 10th-Grade English teacher, a master of the language, himself. My own development as a writer completely disproves the proposition that love of reading is a necessity; and I've known plenty of intelligent adults who love to read but who would not even remotely be considered good writers, thereby disproving the other part of that particular argument, although, admittedly, only anecdotally.


I agree, but this actually contradicts your earlier statement about the significance of a love of reading before becoming a working academic writer as a necessary prerequisite to success as a writer. As I've described in much greater detail elsewhere on this forum, I was as intimidated by writing assignments in college as my clients are today, despite the fact that my writing was always technically good whenever I was forced to do it. That's one reason that I understand exactly why they need me and why I don't think they should be apologetic or ashamed about needing my services.

When I started doing this for a living roughly 20 years ago, I was already a very good writer, notwithstanding the facts that I rarely read for pleasure and that I was no better at research than any typical college graduate who never wrote anything that hadn't been assigned in school. At first, writing a 10-page essay took me several days and many drafts, just as is the case for most non-professional writers, even though my writing was actually already very good. It was, in effect, my on-the-job training doing this for a living as an essay-company writer that allowed me to become sufficiently proficient and efficient doing this to be able to write a (good) 10 or 20-page project (or half a dozen short essays) overnight, if necessary, and to produce a high enough volume of writing to earn a decent living doing (only) this.