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In other related news, my submission was accepted on Writers Access and now I just need to fill out and submit my profile!  [e]: Yeah, there is definitely a warmer and more welcoming vibe to Writers Access than Textbroker. I made a stupid mistake early on in the test on a question I should have gotten right, but otherwise I feel optimistic.  [e2]: Also, my weakest area is definitely (the most) proper use of punctuation with sentence structure and knowing specifically why it works. Would Woe is I or Eats, Shoots & Leaves be good remedies for this? I've heard they are a lot more... "readable" than William and Strunk but still as informative and educational. [e3]: Plus, stuff like this confuses me: quote:The dashes call attention to the subordinate clause and make it more dramatic; the parentheses do the opposite, downplaying the clause; and the commas are somewhere in between, essentially neutral. Um, what? That's what I mean, I can't really explain or articulate English grammar like that. I just seem to have a feel for what works and what doesn't then come up short with an area of grammar I don't have a good feel for. I was an International Studies major, not an English major, so sue me.  [e4]: And it's obvious I'm not too well-informed on SEO. Maybe I should learn some more about it just in case? [e5]: 33/44 questions correctly answered, ahead of the bell curve, baby.  Really hoping this website works out for spare gas and beer money in addition to my normal day job paycheck (not counting on this replacing my day job at any rate). Fingers crossed! Teriyaki Koinku fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 19:09
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The erotica discussion all got closed, I'm mostly leaving the links there for those with archives (which I'll go and note in the OP). Something to do with backlash about writing psuedo-incest combined with SASS doxxing Eggplant Wizard. It was a mess. Writer Access definitely has the best vibe of the writing sites I've found. There's an actual community, one of the admins frequently posts on the forums and not only responds to criticism, has been known to implement changes suggested by the writers. The only problem is how little work there actually is when you're first starting out. I'm at 4 star and I'm on two love lists, and I only see a bunch of lovely review articles that the client limits to one per writer per week, and require posting on the client's site. On the other hand, less work at WA means I'm poking more at Zerys, where I got a nice five star rating on an article I wrote yesterday. Another one or two like that and my rating should hit high enough to see the five star stuff.
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Nov 8, 2013 20:26
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Science posted:I e-mailed them for a ball park, and they told me the wait is around 6 months right now. Holy poo poo, I hate to hear that. I was really interested in Writers Domain.
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Nov 9, 2013 20:07
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Nighthand posted:On the other hand, less work at WA means I'm poking more at Zerys, where I got a nice five star rating on an article I wrote yesterday. Another one or two like that and my rating should hit high enough to see the five star stuff. It's really nothing special, just more of the same. I can't remember any time I saw more than a couple of articles at the 3.5 cent level or above, and they were all pretty much terrible. I keep getting added to love lists that are inevitably full of 1.2 cent articles. Yeah, not so much.
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Nov 9, 2013 21:57
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Have you filled out your categories? The HVAC people switched to only showing for people who have Home & Garden selected. The autos might be that way as well. I have 90 jobs in the 2-3.5 cent column.
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Nov 10, 2013 01:39
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I dislike working on "new clients" for DT because I know a certain QC person is going to be overseeing the projects and I really can't stand her.
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Nov 15, 2013 23:55
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L, C, or the other one?
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Nov 16, 2013 05:11
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Hey kazmeyer, I just wanted to say thanks for all the time you've put into giving people advice in this thread. Even if I don't end up getting into this transcribing work, I'm giving it a serious try now because of all the tips and insight you've made freely available here. Transcribing sounds really appealing to me, as someone who can be nitpicky and perfectionist and keeps weird hours. (and I already spend loads of my time typing poo poo onto a computer, but that goes for all goons I suppose) I just submitted my test for Focus Forward last night, so now I'm going to move onto DT. But before I fill out their form, I saw they had a field to submit a text resume. From what I've read around here, it sounds like the resume isn't too important for a newbie anyway. But I'm left wondering what the hell kind of format it should even be in. Should I just cull the hell out of my usual resume and only mention a couple recent jobs that were office jobs involving typing, or what?
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Nov 16, 2013 07:55
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TheRamblingSoul posted:[e2]: Also, my weakest area is definitely (the most) proper use of punctuation with sentence structure and knowing specifically why it works. Would Woe is I or Eats, Shoots & Leaves be good remedies for this? I've heard they are a lot more... "readable" than William and Strunk but still as informative and educational. Here, I'll translate what you quoted into everyday English. Dashes make a clause stand out more, like screaming. You can't help but notice them. Parenthesis add something on without disrupting what you're writing. Think of them like whispers or an actor's aside used to add information that doesn't need to be highlighted. Then, commas are there just to add pauses around information that isn't important enough to stand out with dashes and not subdued enough to go in parenthesis. Does this explanation help you understand the quote from Strunk & White better? Edit: I've haven't read either of the two books you mentioned, but I did take a college course in grammar, and I can share a couple of the books that were used in class. The first is Rhetorical Grammar. It looks like it should cover the information in both of the books you listed, because it talks about proper punctuation and the parts of a sentence as well as how to use them. It's not especially difficult to read, and it's certainly not as formal as The Elements of Style. The second book is Adios, Strunk and White. It's a fun, easy-to-read book that outlines different ways to make your writing more interesting. It also covers some punctuation (and is where I got the description of dashes, parenthesis, and commas above,) but the information is focused on how to use it stylistically rather than providing a lot of the hows and whys. If you want the Rhetorical Grammar book, I highly suggest you look for a used version on half.com or some other used book seller, where it should be significantly cheaper. It's not necessary to have the latest edition either. You can also search around online for free guides to grammar and punctuation. OWL is a good resource, and if you want to hop in a time machine and travel back to 1995, you can check out The Guide to Grammar and Writing. violetdragon fucked around with this message at 11:12 on Nov 16, 2013 |
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Nov 16, 2013 09:53
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Bifauxnen posted:Hey kazmeyer, I just wanted to say thanks for all the time you've put into giving people advice in this thread. Even if I don't end up getting into this transcribing work, I'm giving it a serious try now because of all the tips and insight you've made freely available here. Transcribing sounds really appealing to me, as someone who can be nitpicky and perfectionist and keeps weird hours. (and I already spend loads of my time typing poo poo onto a computer, but that goes for all goons I suppose) I maintain a really rudimentary resume in .txt format, because lots of places just want you to paste it into an email or something. I also maintain two, one has all my "real world" jobs on it and the other is only writing/transcription, and in most cases I just send the latter. (It's not too spartan, because I've been doing this for a while.) Honestly, I imagine the resume isn't a make or break, but if you've got some decent typing/data entry experience I'd definitely make sure it's on there. Oh, and one thing about nitpicking and perfectionism -- if you're ever applying for a job on Craigslist and they want detail-oriented people and perfectionists and you notice an error in the ad, feel free to point it out to them. Some of them do it on purpose to see how many applicants will pick up on a repeated "the" or something subtle like that. I got on the short list for two of my current gigs because I was one of the few people who noticed a misspelled word in the ad. Just make sure you're right, though, because you don't want to end up looking like an idiot.
kazmeyer fucked around with this message at 10:53 on Nov 16, 2013 |
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Nov 16, 2013 10:50
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Is there any way to get back into DT's good graces after failing their test? I passed Focus Forward's and have been working with them for a while now, so I can do the work. But I messed up DT's test (stupidly thought OpenOffice would work just as well as Microsoft Word and had some layout issues, I eventually got them the correct document though) and never heard back from them after I submitted it.
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Nov 19, 2013 00:31
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I'm interested in giving transcription a shot for a bit of additional income but I work a full time job and would rather not spend all my otherwise free time working. How realistic would it be to find a couple or few hours of work a week on sites like DT or Focus Forward?
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Nov 19, 2013 02:18
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Adnachiel posted:Is there any way to get back into DT's good graces after failing their test? I passed Focus Forward's and have been working with them for a while now, so I can do the work. But I messed up DT's test (stupidly thought OpenOffice would work just as well as Microsoft Word and had some layout issues, I eventually got them the correct document though) and never heard back from them after I submitted it. Did DT actually say, "Thanks, but no thanks," or have you just not heard back? They tend to hire in waves every couple of months so you may not hear back for a while. If they gave you a rejection, I think you can wait a few months and apply again. edit: And you will definitely want to get a copy of Word. You don't need the latest version, almost everybody still wants documents in Word 2003 format.
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Nov 19, 2013 03:06
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AuntBuck posted:Did DT actually say, "Thanks, but no thanks," or have you just not heard back? They tend to hire in waves every couple of months so you may not hear back for a while. If they gave you a rejection, I think you can wait a few months and apply again. I got a copy shortly after FF brought me on. The DT person didn't outright say "No". They just never contacted me afterwards except to ask me how long it took to complete the test. I assumed they were one of those places that just doesn't say anything if they're not going to hire you.
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Nov 19, 2013 03:14
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Yeah, I'm not sure about that, unfortunately most transcription companies can't be arsed to actually reject you. And NewcastleBrown, transcription can definitely work as a part-time thing, though some companies will want you to take a minimum amount of work per week. You might try a company like Rev Transcription where you can pick up work when you want it.
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Nov 19, 2013 03:35
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I feel like a lot of work has been drying up early this month, maybe in a rush to get work done before christmas shopping...?
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Nov 19, 2013 14:19
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It does seem that way doesn't it? Although I urge you guys to look into what it would take to get qualified as a court reporter in your area. A lot of places are doing after the fact, and it's a good way to branch out. I've done it before and the work was actually pretty interesting. If the company had been manned by monkeys/asshats I totally would've kept working for them.
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Nov 19, 2013 20:13
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I passed the Focus Forward test! Just got my tax forms and direct deposit sorted out with them a bit ago, so today I got and finished my first assignment. I've also done their extra test for the timestamp format. This work doesn't seem all that bad (yet)! Maybe after having to replay and listen intently to all these people, I'll get better about not talking so fast and stuttering myself.  I still haven't even got the test file from Daily Transcripts though, is that normal? I heard they might not get back to you about hiring you for a while, but they haven't sent me the test at all yet. Their careers page says "please fill out the form below and you will receive an email shortly which begins your transcriber application process", so I thought it would just be an automated thing.
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Nov 27, 2013 09:00
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Bifauxnen posted:I passed the Focus Forward test! Just got my tax forms and direct deposit sorted out with them a bit ago, so today I got and finished my first assignment. I've also done their extra test for the timestamp format. This work doesn't seem all that bad (yet)! Maybe after having to replay and listen intently to all these people, I'll get better about not talking so fast and stuttering myself. Just go ahead and take the Daily Transcripts test and send it to them, you can find that with instructions here: http://www.dailytrans.com/homet.html And congrats on Focus Forward! I worked for them a few years ago, they were a nice company to work for.
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Nov 27, 2013 10:27
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Hey transcribers, does anybody have any experience with text expanders? I'm looking at the 30-day trial of Instant Text and wanted to know if anybody had any experience with them or other similar programs.
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Dec 1, 2013 05:34
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Been out of the game for a while, but if I need to make a couple grand over 2.5 months working nights/weekends -- is there a place that is consensus 'best' for that? I'm mostly interested in writing and I'd need to be accepted and working fairly rapidly, so anywhere that will hold my application in limbo forever is out.
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Dec 2, 2013 17:29
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AuntBuck posted:Hey transcribers, does anybody have any experience with text expanders? I'm looking at the 30-day trial of Instant Text and wanted to know if anybody had any experience with them or other similar programs. How advanced are your needs? AutoHotKey handles many text expander duties and is free. http://www.autohotkey.com/docs/Hotstrings.htm
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Dec 2, 2013 19:53
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Where was that handy guide for pasting transcripts into two columns? 'Cause I kind of need it, like, by tomorrow, or I'll be making $5/hour and hating the living hell out of the client.
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Dec 3, 2013 02:04
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An Old Boot posted:Where was that handy guide for pasting transcripts into two columns? 'Cause I kind of need it, like, by tomorrow, or I'll be making $5/hour and hating the living hell out of the client. Transcribe in Inqscribe like this: (column 1 content)[TAB](column 2 content) Copy and paste the resulting transcript into a text file. You can try copy/pasting from the text file into your template, but if it blows up, you can open a new Excel file and import the data from your text file, set it to delimit by [tab], and you should end up with two columns. Then copy/paste that into your template and adjust as needed.
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Dec 3, 2013 02:26
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The March Hare posted:Been out of the game for a while, but if I need to make a couple grand over 2.5 months working nights/weekends -- is there a place that is consensus 'best' for that? I'm mostly interested in writing and I'd need to be accepted and working fairly rapidly, so anywhere that will hold my application in limbo forever is out. Textbroker accepts fast, but that'd be tedious work. You can also do constant contact if you have some good ideas, they send out what's most in demand a couple times a week.
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Dec 3, 2013 03:22
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Internet Friend posted:How advanced are your needs? AutoHotKey handles many text expander duties and is free. Not very, since I don't do medical or legal. AutoHotKey is the kind of thing I was looking for, thank you. It looks like I can write as many different scripts for templates and get as spergy with them as I want, and Instant Text, thought it looks like a good program, would have been almost $200 for a permanent license.
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Dec 3, 2013 03:39
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I'm still using the trial version of InqScribe because I'm a cheapass and it saved me last night. It crashed and I had 20 minutes of stuff transcribed but it was able to recover it. I might have to buy it. It's 99 bucks, but if you are a student apparently there's a 60 percent discount according to their site. I also use Express Scribe because I feel it keeps more accurate time on things like mp3 audio but I really enjoy the hotkeys you can bind with InqScribe.
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Dec 3, 2013 04:09
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thylacine posted:Textbroker accepts fast, but that'd be tedious work. You can also do constant contact if you have some good ideas, they send out what's most in demand a couple times a week. NPR listener? (You mean Constant Content, I think.) Textbroker is probably the best option. Zerys and Writer Access have virtually no work right now if you're not on client love lists. TB is slim too, it was down to only 5 or 6 4-star assignments the other day. It's up to a few pages, but still slow.
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Dec 3, 2013 04:27
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Spartan421 posted:I'm still using the trial version of InqScribe because I'm a cheapass and it saved me last night. It crashed and I had 20 minutes of stuff transcribed but it was able to recover it. I might have to buy it. It's 99 bucks, but if you are a student apparently there's a 60 percent discount according to their site. I also use Express Scribe because I feel it keeps more accurate time on things like mp3 audio but I really enjoy the hotkeys you can bind with InqScribe. Kazmeyer originally recommended it (thanks!) and I bought it a year or so ago. I don't use it on every file but it's definitely paid for itself. It'll pick up BITC on some files, which Express Scribe doesn't do. It will also do frames and it's super easy to manipulate timecodes. I've had one or two files that I didn't originally do in InqScribe that needed timecodes adjusted and I just popped InqScribe open and had it done in minutes, instead of having to listen to an entire file and restamp timecode by timecode. There is probably some complicated way to adjust times in Word using formulas or some such but drat if I have the patience to find out. The only problem I've had with InqScribe is it's not as responsive with my foot pedal, there's a slight lag when pressing/unpressing buttons, but that may be my computer. I hope it's not because InqScribe uses a separate program for media playback.
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Dec 3, 2013 04:42
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InqScribe sometimes lags when you're using certain file types. .WMV and .M4V seem to be particular culprits for me. If I get a file that's not .MOV or .MP4, I convert it to .MP4 using something like Jodix or Wondershare and it seems to solve the problem. But yeah, the only issue I've seen that I've yet to resolve is that some mp3 encodings gently caress with its timekeeping; a mp3 might be, say, 30:15 in Windows Media Player but will show up as 30:28 in InqScribe. Haven't worked out an easy fix for that one yet.
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Dec 3, 2013 14:40
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I signed up with Textbroker and I'm not sure what to make of keyword-article requests. Are those the stream-of-consciousness SEO jobs I'm hearing about? I saw a good couple hundred article requests the other day that looked like this: Flying buttresses are common additions to today's modern cathedrals! Write a unique, interesting and informative article about Flying buttresses. The article must contain the keywords: "flying buttress" 3 - 4 times "flying buttress architects in Picardy" 2 -3 times "not vertical buttresses" 1 - 2 - - - - - I've never done this so I'm not at all confident about what they're asking for. Are they asking for something like that locksmith SEO from earlier? Accretionist fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Dec 8, 2013 |
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Dec 8, 2013 01:44
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I went back through a large portion of this thread, and I don't see much (if any) talk about Words of Worth, other than the mention in the OP. Is anyone familiar with Words of Worth? If so, can we have some more information about them? Like, is that site worth a drat? How much work is there? How does payment work? Trustworthy, or no? The grammatical errors in some of their informational sections weirds me out, and the site kind of looks like it was built in 1999.
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Dec 9, 2013 11:49
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I'm getting work fairly regular now from Focus Foward, so I figure I better get myself a foot pedal for Christmas. I was looking at getting the basic AltoEdge one, but I was wondering, you can set the 3 pedals to whatever settings you want, right? I hardly ever use fast-forward, so I was thinking I could swap that out for the slow-mo function. I love to go back and forth between that and normal speed when someone says something weird.
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Dec 9, 2013 17:22
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In InqScribe at least, you can set the buttons to whatever you want.
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Dec 9, 2013 17:27
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Accretionist posted:I signed up with Textbroker and I'm not sure what to make of keyword-article requests. Are those the stream-of-consciousness SEO jobs I'm hearing about? That article was for Writers Domain, not Textbroker. I am personally not sure what kind of content Text Broker wants.
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Dec 9, 2013 17:34
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I've been writing at Textbroker for at least a couple of years. When I see keyword requirements, I just make sure I use the keywords the required number of times within the article. That is seriously all I do. I'm not sure if there's some kind of special placement that's best for SEO, or whatever... but I've never had a bad rating from a client, nor have I had any complaints from Textbroker's raters regarding keyword placement. 
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Dec 9, 2013 18:15
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Sara T. Biggun posted:I've been writing at Textbroker for at least a couple of years. Is this seriously all SEO is?
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Dec 9, 2013 18:21
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In the world of content mills, at least in the recent past, it more or less was. Those sites paid low because they just wanted quickly written content focused around stuffing a few money keywords in fairly organically. But recent Google changes are sort of crumbling that concept so I'd say it's a bit incorrect to say that's all SEO is these days. Search algorithms now look for useful, fleshed out, well written content and not just the repetition and density of targeted keywords in the article. So putting up a few dozen 300-word posts loosely related to and featuring a certain bank of keywords won't rocket anyone up the search results anymore, if anything they'll be penalized for having useless, spammy, keyword stuffed content. That's not to say there isn't still a market for these types of writings, because there is. And many of the articles written on TextBroker and the like are well-written and more than just keyword stuffed stream-of-consciousness stuff. But I put in a lot of time on TextBroker and other mills in the past and from what I saw, for the pay and based on feedback from clients those formerly helpful but not anymore articles were what they were after.
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Dec 9, 2013 18:44
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Yeah, I'm honestly not particularly familiar with the whole SEO business. I just write things about the subject at hand, and use the keywords the client requests. Sometimes there's one of those freaky requests for a 350 word article using one keyword 17 times. I did one of those once, just to see if I could. It was almost impossible to make the article read like normal human speech, and I never did another.
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Dec 9, 2013 18:58
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Sara T. Biggun posted:Yeah, I'm honestly not particularly familiar with the whole SEO business. I just write things about the subject at hand, and use the keywords the client requests. Google's prime directive for SEO is essentially "Provide high quality content for your users and your ranking will increase." Keywords are just there these days to indicate what searches that content should rank for. I tend to avoid projects with horrible keyword requirements, so I don't know what exactly a lot of the mill-type clients are looking for. Presumably they just do what works mill-style as long as they can before their businesses go under because they aren't ranking.
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Dec 9, 2013 20:43
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