By Elijah Odhiambo
As the year starts, everyone always has their new year resolutions. As a student, do you have a resolution to start a business that will boom and make this year the best you ever had ? Well, you should worry no more for I have got you covered.
Academic writing can help you a lot from the stress of constantly asking for money from parents, relatives or friends.
Are you addicted to writing and have the natural urge to write? Maybe you have been writing for fun and sometimes writing long posts on your WhatsApp status, Instagram or even Facebook page. Don’t waste that talent. You can earn huge amounts of money from that. You can establish yourself as a content writer, freelance or academic writer earning handsomely.
You can use your knowledge in crafting blog posts, writing press releases and web contents to write for companies that will pay for your services.
Freelance academic writing is one of the healthy paying jobs one can do at the comfort of their bedrooms, vehicle, hustling place or just anywhere. It is very simple, all you need is an active internet connection and a laptop.
Many youth, mostly university students have made use of this gold mine and minted a lot of money that some have used to pay their school fees, pay school rents, help siblings pay school fees, uplift their families, buy phones and even buy cars.
How to get started.
Before you venture into this business, you have to ensure that you are well updated on the various writing styles that most writing companies employ. This will ease your work when writing because you shall have acquainted yourself with the various commonly used writing styles.
Most commonly used writing styles in academic writing are MLA and APA.
MLA style of writing is the style recommended by the Modern Language Association (MLA) when working on academic projects or course works.
The styles is most commonly used in Arts, English and Literature, History, Cultural studies among other foreign languages.
The following are the basics to master when using MLA format.
(i) Use Times New Roman
(ii) Employ the use of 1″ page margin
(iii)Use title case Capitalization for headings
(iv) Double space the texts
(v) Use font 12
(vi) Margins should be set to 1 inch on all sides
(Vii) Indent the first line of each paragraph to one half-inch from the left margin by using the ‘tab’ key to push leftwards.
(Viii) Include your name, your instructor’s name, course title, name of your institution, date of submission
(Ix) Center the title and don’t underline
APA format of writing
The APA style was started by the American Psychological Association. It provides various pieces of information to be included in the body of a writer’s composition.
The most useful information to include are the last name of the author; the date of publication; and if necessary, the page where the information was found are all placed within parenthesis after the information which was sourced from it.
When using APA format, throughout your paper, you need to apply the following APA format guidelines:
- Set page margins to 1 inch on all sides.
2 All your texts should be double-spaced, including headings.
3 Indent the first line of each paragraph by 0.5 inches.
- Use font Times New Roman 12pt or Arial 11pt. In some cases, they’ll specify the format to use.
- Include a page number on every page.
How to start working
After thoroughly learning the writing styles above, one is now ready to start working and earn his/her money. But how do you get started?
One can start looking for paid writings by:
- Registering with academic writing platforms that pay for every work written.
The most trusted and paying sites are Upwork, edusson, essaypro and writersbay.
After registering, you will be exposed to a variety of work samples from which you order or bid for any work you can handle.
- Joining telegram academic writing groups. The groups posts loads of jobs on a daily basis on various subjects such as Engineering, biology, chemistry, history, English, literature, business, accounting, economics among others. One chooses work depending on his area of specialization.
Payment modes depend on the agreement made with your employer.
Most academic writing platforms pay Ksh250-400 for a page of content written. And imagine you can write up to 20 pages a day. Just do your calculations how much you can earn per month.
You should sleep on an empty stomach no more as a student.
Get started.
