our academic writing jobs

our academic writing jobs

Exploring the Landscape of Academic Writing Jobs: Opportunities, Challenges, and Strategies

1. Introduction to Academic Writing Jobs

Academic writing jobs offer a unique dynamism not usually found within traditional employment roles. This section explores the multiple meanings, characteristics, and experiences associated with this unique type of work. Moreover, it highlights a key dichotomy characterizing academic writing jobs: idealism versus realism of the work’s potential outcomes and experiences. This is an important theme discussed and developed throughout the chapter. The chapter is interspersed with real testimonials from individuals who are currently working or have worked as academic writers.

Many argue that academic writing can offer important opportunities, such as facilitating economic and social empowerment among talented individuals who would otherwise be held back through no fault of their own; enabling financial security to those who would not otherwise have achieved this through other jobs; allowing individuals to maximize their potential, skills, qualifications, and knowledge; and enabling people to do a job that allows valued work-life balance and flexibility. Yet this idealism is countered by accepted negative or realistic attributes, such as the potential for low wages, administrative difficulties, exploitation, poor working conditions, pressure, and working from home and the resulting lack of social interaction.

2. Opportunities in the Academic Writing Industry

Although freelancing has been around for several decades, largely as contractual work undertaken by professionals, the advent of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) as utilized by online tools and platforms has considerably modified how freelancing works. In the pre-ICT era, long-term consulting work in multinational organizations or international consulting companies accounted for a unique kind of freelancing by professionals. However, the emergence of independent web-based platforms, particularly in the social media age, revolutionized the process of connecting peers in a virtually global workplace powered by micro-contracts, where workers market their skills to the world on a platform, and potential employers post those micro-tasks and look for suitable output. The old immediate outsourcing condition necessarily produced contingent freelancers available internationally on an ad hoc basis, catering to impermanent skill shortages to create permanent value. Despite this new norm, the weaknesses of that early outsourcing model led to detrimental knowledge turnovers after the freelancing impacts materialized.

However, on-demand qualifications in an ICT online labor marketplace could offer many advantages: operational efficiency, quick problem solving, leverage of best employer practice mingled with bottom-up thinking, and possibly a method of stranding skilled research graduates who do not immediately find the industry employment they had envisioned. This argument paves a flourishing marketplace for micro-work. For academics who are humanists, scholars, and researchers engaged in the collective endeavor of creative thought, it seems as though viewing a skill as a workable zone to be a revolution is yet another kind of short sell. But it is comprehensible that sometimes the situation required a freelance market. This approach is motivated in part by the skills acquired through excessive years of education as a STEM circle who are lazy and innovative. Whether it is difficult to establish the project as insignificant or unsympathetic or to activate the skill base of employer course graduates, analysis and learning are promoted by this mismatch.

3. Challenges Faced by Academic Writers

Academics who leave their formal educational positions to support their academic writing goals face a variety of challenges when transitioning from formal academia to a range of nontraditional career paths. These challenges involve many aspects of their professional life, for example, lack of collegial interaction, lower than expected financial rewards, and lack of travel to conferences they used to attend or to present findings from research projects that are of interest to the academic writers. Another type of challenge academic writers encounter when they write for clients concerns ethics. The most intriguing issue seems to arise with professional writers who work with clients to write their dissertations and even theses.

Another challenge academic writers face concerns their contracts with their clients. Many of them like the work because of the flexible lifestyle or remote location. However, sometimes academic writers, especially freelance writers, experience abrupt changes in clients or contracts or in the content they are being asked to create. The constant hustle to find clients, whether for a day, a week, or a year, can interrupt both writing and time in front of the computer. This begins to chip away at the lure of the life; that is, the very nature that drew many of them to this line of work in the first place – the activity of academic writing. Since any one academic writer often enters into one writing project after another, sometimes even one or more every month, professional writers can miss out on the satisfaction they derive from pursuing their research interests. Finally, many academic writers miss the pleasure of having a work in progress and being able to work and write to the best of their abilities.

4. Strategies for Success in Academic Writing Jobs

Given the opportunities and challenges of academic writing jobs, we conclude with recommendations for success. Some of these recommendations are relevant to other types of contingent academic work such as research consulting, while others are specific to academic writing jobs. When working on academic writing jobs, students should log their hours in a spreadsheet so that they know how much they are actually being paid. Students should not get too caught up in making a comparatively high average hourly salary, but if jobs do not provide at least an hourly wage that meets or exceeds the minimum wage, students should consider dropping those jobs and reallocating those hours to freelance writing or other opportunities that pay more, or that at least provide more experience and learning.

We recognize that financial concerns may be a primary motivation for students taking academic writing jobs. Many students may have no choice and must do what will provide them and their families with the most money—whether the job is perceived as exploitative or not. A feature of the US higher education system that we critique is that students in PhD programs, especially those from marginalized backgrounds, are compensated so little that they might have to engage in highly exploitative work in order to pursue their degrees. For some, the marginal pay provided on funded research assistantships, teaching assistantships, and hourly work will not even be enough to make ends meet; students may have to take on loan debt, a second job, or live in poverty as they work to obtain the prestigious ‘union card’ of a doctoral degree.