7 Myths About Freelance Writing Online

7 Myths About Freelance Writing Online 7 Myths About Freelance Writing Online 7 Myths About Freelance Writing Online By Ali Hale You want to earn a bit of extra money. Or youd love to be a published writer. Or youre looking for an exciting and rewarding career. Whatever your reason, youve started to think about freelance writing online. It sounds like a dream come true: you could work from home, at any time of the day (or night), and get good money for writing about topics that interest you. Except somethings stopping you. Youve started believing one – or more – of these harmful myths. Today, I want to show you that these myths just arent true. Theres no reason to let any of them hold you back. #1: Its too late to make money freelance writing online All the good jobs are already gone, right? And bloggings dead anyway Wrong. The fact that huge numbers people are making money online as freelance writers should encourage you. Theres plenty of work out there – and as more and more businesses realize the importance and the potential of the internet, new writing jobs are appearing every single day. In fact, now is a great time to start freelancing. Writing online is a growing area, particularly as more and more print magazines fold, and as the demand for online content grows. #2: Online writing gigs dont pay as well as print ones This is a gross generalization, without much truth in it. Some print publications dont pay anything – local newspapers and specialty magazines often rely on volunteers, because of printing and distribution costs. But online, even tiny operations can afford to pay writers, since their overheads are so low. Some online writing gigs pay very little – but there are others which pay a hundred dollars or more for a short article. Its up to you what jobs you take, so you never need to work for a low rate. In my experience, online writing gigs pay very well in terms of time spent. They may pay less per word – but they often dont require the same level of research and fact-checking that print publications want. #3: You need technical knowledge to freelance write online This myth puts off a lot of people. Theyre convinced that online freelance writing requires technical skills like knowing HTML code or being a whizz with different systems. The truth is, you almost certainly already have all the technical skills you need: Ability to use email (to send articles to an editor) Basic word-processing skills (e.g. using Microsoft Word or Open Office) Ability to use search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo) for research It really is that simple. Of course, there are some gigs where youll be at an advantage if youre comfortable with uploading content into your clients software – for instance, WordPress – but there are plenty of writing jobs which dont require anything techy beyond the ability to create a document and send it by email. #4: You need an English or Journalism major to be a freelance writer Maybe you majored in math or a science, or maybe you didnt go to college at all. It doesnt matter. All that editors care about is your ability to write – whether or not you have a degree makes no difference to them. If youve studied English, Journalism or a related subject, youll probably be a confident and fast writer – which will serve you well. However, you can easily develop your writing skills outside the college world – and academic writing bears very little resemblance to the sort of writing that online gigs will want! #5: Receiving payments is hard. Youll need an accountant and a merchant bank account This myth really frustrates me, because its so out of date! All you need to receive money online is a PayPal account – almost every single online gig Ive ever had has paid through PayPal. The one gig which didnt, with an online magazine, sent me a check which I just deposited straight into my bank account. Opening a PayPal account takes minutes, and allows you to receive money in many different currencies without having to pay the hefty fee that your bank would charge for a foreign transaction. #6: Only people living in the US can become successful freelance writers Im living proof that this is untrue – I live in the UK, and have worked with editors in the US, in Canada and in Australia. I know of many successful freelance writers around the world. Most online gigs will take writers from anywhere. All that matters is that you can write good English. If you live in a country with a low cost of living, then youre actually at an advantage – as youll be getting paid US rates for your work. #7: You need to be an expert in one field before you can find freelance jobs You already have certain areas where youre knowledgeable, just from your life experience. For instance, you might have children – and there are scores of jobs looking for people who can write about parenting. Many online gigs are open to any writers, and dont require any particular expertise. You might have to do extra research to begin with, but if you keep writing on similar topics, youll soon become a self-taught expert. So – seven myths busted! I hope youre feeling more optimistic about your own chances of freelancing online. Writing is a great way to make a living (or just make some extra cash on the side) and theres always going to be a demand for good writers and new content. Notice: Due to popular request we have finally released our Freelance Writing Course. Come check it out if you want to get started freelance writing online. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Freelance Writing category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:Creative Writing 10130 Baseball IdiomsOne "L" or Two?

Star Wars Day! 4 Great Grammatical Mistakes from Hollywood

Star Wars Day! 4 Great Grammatical Mistakes from Hollywood Star Wars Day! 4 Great Grammatical Mistakes from Hollywood To celebrate Star Wars Day – slogan, â€Å"May the 4th Be With You† – we’re delving into the murky world of Hollywood movies. And while Tinsel Town might be a â€Å"Dream Factory† where fantasies are brought to life, it hasn’t always been a good grammatical role model. For example†¦ 1. Eight Legged Freaks Punctuation is often the first thing to go in a movie poster. Examples include the comma-less Burn Hollywood Burn and the missing question mark at the end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. However, more worrying is the hyphen absent from Eight Legged Freaks. Maybe the spider dislodged the hyphen with its foot? (Warner Bros. Pictures) If this was a movie about giant spiders, as the poster suggests, the title should be â€Å"Eight-Legged Freaks.† But it isn’t, so we can only assume it’s about eight freaky people instead. The Pogues, maybe. 2. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids The more you think about it, the weirder â€Å"shrunk† sounds. (Walt Disney Pictures) We’ll give Honey, I Shrunk the Kids credit for knowing how a comma works. But this title still falls short. This is because â€Å"shrunk† is the past participle of â€Å"shrink,† while the simple past tense is â€Å"shrank.† As such, it should be called either Honey, I Shrank the Kids or Honey, I’ve Shrunk the Kids. In protest, we refuse to acknowledge Rick Moranis in any other role until this has been fixed. 3. Into the Wild While there’s nothing ungrammatical about the title of Into the Wild, the poster does feature the cryptic statement â€Å"Screenplay and Directed by Sean Penn.† What could this mean? â€Å"Hey guys, I’m just busy screenplaying this screenplay.† (River Road Entertainment) â€Å"Screenplay† is a noun, so â€Å"Screenplay by Sean Penn† would simply mean Sean Penn wrote the screenplay. And â€Å"directed† is a verb, so â€Å"Directed by Sean Penn† would be easy enough to understand. But put these together and we’re left with two unfortunate possibilities: Sean Penn thinks â€Å"screenplay† is a past tense verb. The poster designer didn’t care about grammatical parallelism. Neither option give us a lot of confidence in Hollywood’s proofreading. 4. Star Wars: The Force Awakens It’s Star Wars Day, so this list wouldn’t be complete without an appearance from the famous sci-fi franchise. And we’re going to pick on Star Wars: The Force Awakens. This movie is interesting for the lack of commas around â€Å"Luke† when they identify Leia’s brother in the opening text crawl. (Lucasfilm Ltd./Bad Robot Productions) As this article points out, we use parenthetical commas to add non-essential details, such as a name when we already know who a sentence is about. So, if Leia only had one brother, the opening crawl should say: She is desperate to find her brother, Luke, and gain his help†¦ The commas here show us that the name is an extra detail: we know who â€Å"her brother† is without saying â€Å"Luke† because Leia only has one brother. But the crawl in The Force Awakens says: She is desperate to find her brother Luke and gain his help†¦ And this opened up the possibility  that Leia had additional male siblings somewhere! Was J. J. Abrams hinting at something in the future of the Star Wars series? Unfortunately, the answer is â€Å"no.† Despite some excitement on the internet, it was just a punctuation error. But that’s still a more satisfying twist than the ending of Lost, so maybe we can give J. J. a pass on this one.

The Struggle of Past Identity in Modern Lebanon Essay

The Struggle of Past Identity in Modern Lebanon - Essay Example Using methods from both the sciences and the humanities, anthropology helps us to understand the world around us. Anthropologists work in a wide variety of settings around the globe, including rain forests, high-altitude environments, rural villages, and large cities. (Headrick 2007) Anthropology studies all facets of society and culture is it tools, techniques, traditions, language, beliefs, kinships, values, social institutions, economic mechanisms, cravings for beauty and art, struggles for prestige. This includes, by way of example, but is not limited to Linguistics is the study of human languages, their synchronic structure,and their diachronic evolution, and linguists dedicate themselves to the description and documentation of live and extinct languages. Linguistic Anthropology is the study of the interrelation of language, culture, and human cognition. It describes the impact of humans on other humans. It basically studies human characteristics generated and propagated by humans themselves. Cultural Anthropology: for anthropologists and other behavioral scientists, culture is the full range of learned human behavior patterns. The term was first used in this way by the pioneer English Anthropologist Edward B. Tylor in his book, Primitive Culture, published in 1871. Tylor said that culture is "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society." Of course, it is not limited to men. Women possess and create it as well. Since Tylor's time, the concept of culture has become the central focus of anthropology. Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile phenomenon. It is constantly changing and easily lost because it exists only in our minds. Our written languages, governments, buildings, and other man-made things are merely the products of culture. They are not culture in themselves. For this reason, archaeologists can not dig up culture directly in their excavations. The broken pots and other artifacts of ancient people that they uncover are only material remains that reflect cultural patterns--they are things that were made and used through cultural knowledge and skills. It provides in depth studies of and comparisons between living cultures and traditions. It also studies the social organization of people by studying and analyzing the language, economic and political organization, law and conflict resolution, patterns of consumption an exchange, gender relations, kinship and family structure, individuals and their relationship with the past. Different subfields under this category include