Monthly Archives: October 2011

Freelancer.com: Where Dreams Go to Die

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Freelancer.com is a place where tele-commuting freelancers look for work and people looking to get odd jobs done look for cheap labour. It’s sort of the Internet equivalent of a bunch of illegal immigrants hanging around the hardware store waiting for someone who thinks minimum wage isn’t minimum enough.

What kind of work? Anything that can be done remotely: data entry, web design, programming, and ridiculously crappy writing jobs. $100 for 400 150-page articles? Seriously? Who’s going to write an article (even a short one) for twenty-five cents? You can’t even use a pay phone for that (where I’m from it’s 50 cents a call now).

But never mind that, the problem with freelancer.com isn’t the low paying jobs; these might actually be a great opportunity for self-employed Indians or Chinese with decent English and a low cost of living. What depressed me today when cruising freelancer.com was the amazing number of cheating students. I quote:

Project Description:
my project proposal is,I want a literature review of word limit 20,000.
my topic is :what is the role of contraceptives in prevention of unwanted pregnancy among adolescents in sub saharan africa.case studay uganda.

QUESTION
What are the factors affecting the use of contraceptives in prevention of unwanted pregnancy among adolescents in sub Saharan Africa?
[project details cut for length]

. . . i would like some one i will work with step by step with frequent communication.i will also require the the first introduction in 2weeks after agreeing.

thank you

The project was listed as “master’s dissertation”. Yeah. Someone may actually get a master’s degree based on the work some desperate freelancer does for them. Someone with atrocious spelling and grammar. Generally, for humanities degrees, the entirety of one’s grade comes from research reports and essays (just as, for science degrees, the entirety of one’s grade comes from tests and lab work).

If you’re sub-contracting that, there’s nothing left. That’s the totality of the skills you’re supposed to be developing. To have a degree in the humanities and not be able to do research or write a paper is like having a degree in physics and not being able to solve problems, perform experiments, or analyze data. Just what can you do, exactly?

Of course this is anecdotal. Fortunately, there have been studies, so we can get a sense of how widespread the problem is: MBA Students Cheat More Than Other Grad Students, Study Finds. Don’t get too smug, non-business majors. Very few groups come off well in that study.

There’s a great story I read last year from the Chronicle of Higher Education, which puts a more human face on this phenomenon: The Shadow Scholar. I tend to sympathize with the ghostwriter a lot more than his clients. “If I don’t write their term paper, someone else will” is not such a compelling defense, but in fact, he offers no defense. He just tells his story.

Though he writes school assignments for money, the students are the cheaters, not him. Unlike, say, a drug dealer, who actually causes the damaging behaviour he profits from, I’m fairly certain the Shadow Scholar does not get anyone addicted to cheating. And I can imagine how much it must suck to depend on clients for work you can barely stand, let alone respect. I’m reminded of the protagonist in Robert Silverberg’s excellent novel, Dying Inside.

The chronicle article is worth a read. The final line is brilliantly depressing.

Book Review: Feynman

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And now for something completely different. I was intrigued and delighted when I stumbled across this rather quirky project from First Second Books the other day. It’s a fresh new biography of the famous Feynman: bongo-playing, girl-chasing, and Nobel-winning; physics god of generations of undergrads, as much for his barroom stories as for the ubiquitous diagrams that bear his name.

This isn’t the first Feynman bio, and it likely won’t be the last. James Gleick’s Genius set the gold standard, cutting through legend upon legend – Feynman picking locks in Los Alamos; Feynman spending a summer sabbatical learning molecular biology and immediately making a discovery about DNA; Feynman the Nobelist rubbing elbows with royalty and flubbing the etiquette – and getting at the real character-forming events in-between.

More recently, physicist and author Lawrence Kraus, feeling there was too little said about Richard Feynman’s significant work in fundamental physics, focused on tracing the development of the scientist’s major professional work in The Quantum Man. Before his death, the enormously popular Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think? collected many of Feynman’s essays, lectures, and well-practiced anecdotes (as told to his friend Ralph Leighton); a few of these greatest hits plus many new ones were later published post-humously in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. And there are many, many more.

As far as I know, however, Ottaviani and Myrick’s simply-titled new book is the very first one to chronicle the man’s life graphically. And it’s gorgeous. Just look at the brilliant cover.

The clean illustrative style seems a perfect fit for Feynman’s light-hearted approach to life, while still being detailed enough to convey subtle facial expressions and body language. Throughout, the man on the page is recognizably, uniquely Feynman, the graphical and textual elements complement each other so beautifully it is like watching the man on video.

But credit also must be given to Ottaviani for weaving scores of otherwise unrelated stories into a portrait of a truly original life. The major source materials for this book are the famous Surely You’re Joking and its follow-up, but these are self-contained recollections, lectures, and musings. Drawing out and tying together the biographical bits and pieces of these much longer stories, and capturing the flavour of each one while quoting only a tiny bit of it requires an inspired touch. Making full use of the visual medium, Ottaviani and Myrick manage to give us all the punchlines in a fraction of the space, meanwhile creating a sense of continuity that is absent in the original, non-chronological story collections on which they draw.

I really like this book. It fills a gap in the Feynman corpus that I didn’t realize was there. It’s not that we need a briefer or more readable version of Feynman and Leighton’s eminently successful books. With Feynman we have something wholly new, a different perspective and focus make this a worthwhile read even for those of us who’ve heard these stories before. Librarians with librarian degrees may want to look into adding this title to their collections. That the first edition of what is essentially a graphic novel is in a beautiful hard cover form was another unexpected bonus to me, as this item has a place of honour on my shelf.

(First Second, 2011)

Article first published as Graphic Novel Review: Feynman by Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick on Blogcritics.

Becoming a Real Writer: Getting Published

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Step one is getting published. Technically, I guess you might argue step one is, say, learning the alphabet, but I’m assuming basic literacy and, ideally, solid spelling/grammar. Spellcheck aside, it’s worth learning the basics well enough to write a clean first draft manually. Therefore, step one is getting published, because it’s hard to judge your own work if you’re the only one reading it.

Note that by published, I mean, published by someone else. I don’t mean paid work, but I also don’t mean self-publishing on a blog. In other words, your work should be going through at least one editor who will hold you to a certain standard. Whatever your level of expertise, find a publication that you think you might be able to contribute to, and either query or just start sending in submissions, depending on their own publishing guidelines.

I started out with my university newspaper. Because writers graduate every year, typically you’ll see a general meeting which is open to everyone. Try to figure out which department or departments might be a good fit for the stuff you like to write, and start contributing. Even better, maybe your high school has a paper, but it’s likely to be published less frequently. Other options are school literary magazines, yearbook (more about photography and graphic design than writing, but still a possible in for something later), and newsletters.

If you’re not in school, start searching online. There are an amazing number of places looking for volunteer writers. Only a couple years into my school newspaper career I stumbled across an online review magazine, and sent in an audition review of a movie I had recently enjoyed. Two years of feature writing had honed my skills enough to get me on board, and they started sending me review material. Although this wasn’t a paying job, I was getting free product, which seemed pretty cool to me (school newspapers may receive freebies, too, actually).

Diversify if you can. Having a wide array of experiences makes it easier to customize your résumé to that job you really want. Any time a place you write for gives you a chance to do something you haven’t done before, breaking news coverage, writing for a different section, interviewing or profiling someone, that very piece may be the writing sample you pull up later to prove you can get a job requiring that skill.

But you can’t start building a portfolio of samples until you have someone to a) give you the assignment, and b) publish it. So get in somewhere, and write just for the fun of it.

Oh, and while you’re at your first writing job, there’s something else you should be doing: get better. Look at the writers, magazines, newpspapers, or whatever that you like, and strive to write something just as compelling. When inspiration comes, and you find you’re writing something a little over the top, just go with it, and edit afterwards.

Experiment with style, humour, and subject matter. Eventually you may write a piece and say to yourself, “Wow, that could have been published in [prestigious publicatilon]”, and it will be one of your go-to writing samples for later job applications.