A little background: most freelance job sites are like trendy nightclubs on a Friday night – they’re meat markets. While there are some classy individuals who are there to meet people, dance and enjoy themselves, the majority of attendees are lounge lizards who are out hunting. They target young, single women – fresh, naïve, probably a little drunk and willing to accept lower quality (if it’s wearing Armani).

In freelancing terms, the classy people are the ones who post full job details, offer a reasonable rate of pay for the work required and are willing to push their budget a bit when they find someone with remarkable talent.

The lizards, on the other hand, want the best they can get for the smallest outlay. New freelancers and offshore workers are the best targets: enthusiastic, unfamiliar with reasonable pricing and as naïve as a college fresher on Spring Break. (Not that I’d know, of course.)

Here’s the job advertisement in question:

I need a lot of writing done – I don’t have a big budget.  I need about 1 articles / blog to be writen between today or tommorow .  Most of the articles will come from transcribing about 15 hours of audio / video material.  your job is to write me a  1 article.  more information will be given in interview. I only have about $10 to pay for this work, I am trying to help a client so I hope you can provide this.  I don’t really do upfront payment.

I should add that a very similar ad has appeared almost every day for a week. The most noticeable change has been that the buyer now wants “about 1 articles”, whereas he originally wanted 47 for the same price. Yes, forty-seven.

I have the following to say about this (incredibly bad) advertisement:

• Payment of ten dollars
• 15 (note, fifteen) hours’ transcribing as research
• TEN dollars. TEN.
• Completed by tomorrow
• Ten. 10. One Zero. Dix. Zehn. Tien. Dieci. Dziesiec.
• No up-front payment.
• $10/15 + hours = roughly 65c per hour

I don’t need to explain what we can learn from this, do I? Thought not.

It’s one of those posts that’s unusual because it was apparently written on the spur of the moment – hence the rather large number of errors in the text. The commenters on it are incredibly varied, too, ranging from those who found it useful to some who are downright insulting.

The post is titled How to Write Articles and Essays Quickly and Expertly. It’s a couple of years old and is on the Half an Hour blog.

Read it. Even if you don’t agree or think it’s incomplete, it’s a very interesting, detailed piece.

[Originally published on www.wordophilia.com]

As notification of the failed first attempt, I received a letter. Given that there’s no real signature, I assume it was automatically generated by their ordering system. The text is reproduced below.

Thank you for your Credit/Debit Card order, for your convenience details of your order are shown below.

{…}

On this occasion, we have been unable to secure authorisation from the Card Issuer against the items marked with a *, as a result, we are unable to despatch these items.

We may have been unable to secure authorisation for a number of reasons and should you wish to re-order, please do so by calling our Order line on {number removed} having to hand your Credit or Debit Card, alternatively you can visit ‘my account’. In the event of re-ordering by post please enclose a cheque or postal order to cover the value of your order.

Apparently, when this company’s automated ordering system was implemented, the letters it produces were not considered important enough to be written properly.

For starters, all but one of the phrases reproduced is a run-on sentence. The second paragraph states that marked items were not dispatched, but there should be quotes around that asterisk, for clarity’s sake.

The final paragraph’s first sentence is terribly unwieldy and unclear. There should be a period after “reasons”, since the second part of the (run-on) sentence addresses an entirely different subject. “Order Line” should have both words capitalised, since it is a proper name and is written as such in the company’s documentation.

It is also unclear exactly what is meant by ‘my account’: in this case, the letter refers to the ‘My Account’ section of the company’s web site (note the proper name capitalisation, as taken from said site). The original usage virtually invites the reader to look at the letter-writer’s account, although they are saved from deriving this precise meaning by the quotes around the web reference.

Thankfully, the company in question is excellent in other ways: they send updates on an order’s progress by email, include parcel tracking references and always respond very quickly to queries. It’s a shame their system-generated missives compare so badly.

Lesson to learn: don’t let the programmers write the computer-generated letters. It just makes your company’s customer service staff look bad.

[Originally published at www.wordophilia.com]

Over at Wallstats, Jess posted A Visual Guide To The Financial Crisis back in December – someone just pointed it out to me today. Admittedly, it’s a very simplified analysis – it has to be, given that it’s only a couple of diagrams – but it shows how the US economy reached the point where it went into crisis.

Beautifully presented, clear and concise, it’s a great piece of work and shows how a presentation should be done. Pop over and have a gander: definitely worth your time.

[Originally published on www.wordophilia.com]

Today’s example texts come from two companies selling web site design services. Have a look at them both and decide with which organisation you would rather spend your hard-earned business loan.

Today having a website is not an option but a necessity and {Company A} is the perfect partner to design your own website to run your business and show your place on the market without the headache to build it and on the top of this will help you to manage this project and run the web site.

Whatever you are an individual, self-employed, a start up or an established company. {Company A} get the solution you need to start selling your products, subscribtions or increase your sales through the web as communicate information or get a better return on investment to improve marketing and strategy, reference your website on high debit engine search such as google and others, show your place on the market.

{Company B} is a website design agency based in London. We specialise in creating and communicating clear, compelling brand and marketing messages across interactive media.

By combining rigorous analysis with creative spark, and integrating fresh perspectives with hands-on practical experience, {Company B} define, create, build and communicate brands. Be it professional website design, online marketing, website development, content management systems, flash animations, or a viral marketing campaign, we have the flexibility to work with clients in the way that best meets their objectives – no set solutions or formulaic approaches here.

Company B, right? But why?

Both texts try to sound dependable and reassuring. Company B uses a few more buzzword expressions, which management types seem to like, but adds a promise of personalisation and flexibility that many companies need.

Apart from the service description, Company B also has much better copywriters. A company’s web site is its public face: any errors on that page will be reflected back on the organisation and not on the site creator. Unfortunately, Company A makes some fundamental mistakes. The first sentence is far too long and complicated. It would be better if it were split into two parts. The second begins with an incomplete phrase, which should be joined with the overly-long second sentence. This paragraph also has spelling errors and missing capitalisation.

Consequently, the main message transmitted by Company A is that any written content on a site they design will quite likely be badly formulated and erroneous. The message – the most important part of any writing – will be lost in rambling phrases. This is a real shame as most customers won’t stop to consider the possibility that the site structure and functionality may be excellent. With a little extra work and effort, Company A could have had as much chance of winning a contract as Company B.

Once again, the lesson to learn is to examine your work carefully before publishing and to have it checked by a third party. An occasional mistake in an article is inevitable, but marketing text requires a great deal more attention to detail. Missing an error can cost you your client, or even your whole business.

[Originally published on www.wordophilia.com]

I don’t keep track of a lot of blogs. There are folks out there who do, who follow dozens of them or at least subscribe to the RSS feeds of several that the masses consider important. Personally, I prefer my daily run through a random selection of sites on LinkReferral to that: most of the ‘important’ blogs bore the crap out of me, are completely uninteresting or are just trying so hard to be trendy that they make my teeth stand on edge. It’s like the whole somethingawful.com thing – back around 2000, it was darned funny. Then absolutely everyone started saying “teh best {whatever} EVAR!!11!!!!!1!!” and, within the short space of a few months, it ceased to amuse me at all.

Back around that time, I had a personal blog and kept a blogroll of maybe eight or ten sites. These days it’s down to one or two, if any. However, I do subscribe to a couple here on Orble (by email) and this one by RSS. That’s it – three blogs total for the moment. I’m sure that number will grow over time!

So anyway, back to this week’s Phile. The site I would like to point you to is called Sex, Lies and Dating in the City. It has occasional mature content since the author, SINgleGIRL, is (in her own words) “a 38 yr old single girl in NYC who dates a lot”.

When I first visited, I had a terrible fear that, given the name’s play on the TV series and film titles, this would be one of those horrible blogs that tries to be clever and cool, pontificating like the aforementioned series but failing dismally. In fact, it’s wonderful. SINgleGIRL writes openly and honestly, updates regularly and certainly doesn’t beat around the bush. She writes conversationally (and well), says what she thinks, discusses her views with her visitors and manages to keep the whole thing really interesting: though I hate the expression, she is true to herself and her subject.

It’s a real ‘inside view’ of the modern dating scene, written by someone who’s smart, honest, funny and friendly.

[Originally published on www.wordophilia.com]

To kick things off, I thought I’d start with a job application I noticed on a site I frequent. The job calls for fluent English writers to produce high-quality content. Samples were to be pasted into private messages sent to the publisher.

Id love to provide regular ongoing article writing services, but cannot do more than 5 a day, 7 days a week. If that might work out, please consider. We are USA St Louis, MO We write and speak excellent English language. {…} Min ten {articles} at a time.. payment with Pay Pal upfront. I have the best article writer in the world. All will be high quality, proper english and pass copyscape.. guaranteed. Dont waste money on poorly written articles. It will not help your Google or PR ranking. We know what SEO is all about. Some Samples: {eHow link removed} My name is {name removed} aka {username removed} eHow only accepts original copyscape cleared articles.

As job applications go, this one is awful. The first sentence alone is enough to convince the publisher not to look any further. A missing apostrophe in the first word is followed by a negative statement of how much work the individual can produce: he would have been better off saying something like “and can do five a day, seven days a week”.

Following this with a sudden change to the plural “we” confuses whether the individual is the writer or is the representative of a team – or, for that matter, if he is applying on behalf of the entire population of St. Louis. “We are USA St Louis, MO,” he writes. Some kind of hive mind, perhaps?

Presumably meant to be reassuring, the statement that the individual has “the best article writer in the world” does the opposite. Not only is it a ludicrously inaccurate claim (assuming he is not the agent for all the Pulitzer winners still alive, among others), but the use of the singular “writer” makes me – a cynic – wonder just how bad all the other authors he represents are.

Finally, he goes off into a bit of marketing talk, insulting the publisher with a presumed ignorance of SEO, then provides a URL to online articles rather than pasting copies of his (or their) work into a private message as was specifically requested.

So what can we, budding freelancers that we are, learn from this? Here’s four things, off the top of my head:

1. Keep it short. The publisher asked for private messages with samples, so most of the marketing talk and background information could be included in there instead of in the limited-length field for the application text.

2. Check spelling, grammar and punctuation. Two different capitalisations of “English”, missed capitalisation of “Copyscape”, “Pay Pal” as two words, missing apostrophes and several other errors could easily have been avoided.

3. Don’t make inaccurate statements and presumptions.

4. Follow instructions: if the publisher wants articles pasted in a message, paste them. If they want them by email, send them.

Publishers will reasonably assume that the finished work will only be as good as the application. By making sure the initial contact is direct, polite, concise and in correct English, writers dramatically increase their chances of employment.

[Originally published on www.wordophilia.com]