It Should Go Without Saying!

I find it sad that employers looking for contract work have to specify writers use ORIGINAL content.  Honestly, shouldn’t that be obvious?

I recently completed an e-book regarding health and nutrition.  My clients initially believed this to be a short and sweet assignment like so many I’d done for them in the past.  The two prior e-books I’d ghost written had taken a few weeks from beginning to final edit. 

We completely underestimated this project and it ended up taking almost four months.  I wasn’t the first writer they hired since I was already working on a separate assignment when they put this one in process.  I was given the original writer’s work because it wasn’t even close to what they’d envisioned.  My directive was to “clean up” what she’d done, taking the 18,000 words she’d accumulated and make it make sense. 

Within pages, I realized she’d fully copy/pasted articles from the web and after a two-hour conference call, it was decided that I needed to start from scratch. 

I’m intelligent enough to know that if you don’t fully grasp a topic, you have to research and learn until you do.  Needless to say, I spent weeks educating myself about antioxidants, the human body, and how they interact regarding your overall health.  When all was said and done…50,000 words consisting of an introduction, twenty chapters, a conclusion, and a glossary of terms I could gloat about for hours. 

I quoted 171 references to sites like the Mayo Clinic and the US Library of Medicine but I actually read close to 1,000 articles and research papers to understand my total topic.  If I came across a medical term I didn’t know, I drilled deeper until I understood not only the term but how it related to what I was writing.  I questioned everything.  The final product was the result of weeks of reading and learning. 

If I had to take a college nutrition course right now, I believe I could pass it.

I’ve never put my work through plagiarism programs because I write from the hip after I learn the subject I’m writing about.  Any writer who doesn’t work that way should be ashamed.  Isn’t that the entire point of hiring a writer?  To get something fresh and new on a topic that 100 other people have already written about?  To bring a spin no one else has to your project? 

I offer accuracy, creativity, and a unique voice to every word I write.  Don’t settle for rehash.