They have a lot of work. Place is a factory. Although I haven’t worked for them for years but I have a couple of friends there full time.
I’ve heard the environment is soul-crushing. Why would they not go freelance instead of full time if they have experience? Wallace pays less than what a full-time teacher would make, if I’m not wrong. My environment is soul-crushing, but familiar, and it pays better for easier work. I would enjoy harder work, but not if it came with a pay cut.
I think you’d have to be a desperate fool to agree to be paid per word, that’s a sure fire way to spend a lot of time and make a little money 
arg I messed that up. I meant legally be a consultant (company). not a legal consultancy haha.
Well the good news is Mr Wallace himself is no longer in Taiwan so it’s a bit better in the office. I mean the gig is for people who don’t want to teach English. Lots of people do it from home. One 10’000 word paper keeps you in beer for the week.
Sometimes though editors complain about papers that are poorly written… but isn’t that why they need editing? I mean if papers come to editors very well written why would it need editors to begin with?
It’s a matter of degree. Some are so poorly written you can’t make head nor tail of them. It’d be easier to write the whole paper yourself in some cases. 
Bear in mind a lot of these papers are not ever going to meet journal publication standards; they’re to meet internal requirements that you must produce at least one paper a year for example. Some authors will actually pay for the Nigerian Journal of Nocturnal Emissions Studies to publish their paper just so they can meet internal requirements.
Sure, but there’s could-be-improved English and bad English and impenetrable English.
The ones that irritate me the most are those where it’s clear the authors haven’t put much effort in at all to write a decent paper (e.g., incomplete or nonsensical sentences, no logical flow, missing bits, plagiarized passages, figures that don’t match the text…). I think some authors think that an editor is just going to fix everything for them so they don’t need to bother, but it makes the job so much harder (and theirs too, if all the editor can do is keep telling them they need to rewrite bits).
It’s all about diapers now. How long does it take most people to do 10,000 words if the writing is as bad as you say?
Funnily, in some post I read somewhere, someone said it was better when Mr. Wallace was in the office.
An editor isn’t responsible for checking that are they? A very long time ago I took an assignment for a company without knowing many details. The first job was to rewrite passages in a document so that it would Copyscape. After beginning, it turned out to be heavily plagiarized and I suspected it was master’s thesis based on a few clues. Their clients seemed to study at University of Phoenix or one of those. It paid well, but I didn’t take any more work from them.
I thought so, but still, no Chinese. Did you mean that generally or specifically for editing-type work?
Unfortunately 39% of Taiwan academics are unable to coherently commit words to paper. To expect them to logically and coherently develop and support an argument over 10,000 words is a bridge two far.
I’d say no, it’s a problem between the authors and the journal/publisher. I wouldn’t specifically check for plagiarism, but I do comment on it if/when I notice it. Which doesn’t happen that often, IME.
I wouldn’t help authors rewrite something they’d plagiarized. One of my main clients specifically has that in their FAQs for authors too. I’d leave a comment suggesting they fix it, maybe do some light editing for typos/consistency (without deliberately trying to reduce the similarity to what they plagiarized from), and move on to the next bit.
Finding plagiarism in a paper tends to make me less interested in doing a good job if the authors themselves can’t be arsed. I’ve had the odd heavily plagiarized paper where finding another plagiarized passage was a relief (because it meant I could get through the paper quicker by mostly neglecting that passage, and I’m still paid the same based on word count), but those were the rare exception.
No, it’s totally unethical. I only finished it because I was halfway through and reneging on the project at that point would have brought negative feedback. It was on Upwork or it predecessor and I didn’t much feedback at that time. I’m comforted in the fact that someone who wrote as badly as the original would either not get their degree or could not go on to a distinctive career.
Both, for multiple reasons. 1 is it is easy to setup, costs a couple thousand to do yourself plus the one step requiring an accountant. 2 is way better tax rates (probably under 8%). 3 is you have protection from liability. 4 is as a consultant you are free to do damn near anything under that umbrella. you are easily able to do other things than editing, but of course editing would be part of your consulting. Unless the government has a different business code for editing.
5 is, as a company the client.ts you are editing.for will take you more professionally on the face and this also is easier to open doors for word of mouth and future work. From the sounds of this thread, finding work and getting poor pay is a problem. being a company can help with those.
This is a major reason why I won’t do it.
They can’t do it in English, but I’m sure their ability to commit Chinese to paper is perfectly fine. They wouldn’t get into academics otherwise.
They should just forget about trying to write anything in English, and write their papers in Chinese and have someone else translate it.
Nope. Some of them got a PhD in an Anglophone university where they possibly cheated to get through, or otherwise got a lot of help, or profs just passed them through. This more common than one might think.
Also, another reason I won’t do research papers, is because I understand enough about research to see major problems with the quality of the work, language aside, and I have had professors blame my editing for their bad research not getting published. I just don’t bother anymore, but I have better ways to make money and don’t need the experience
in Taiwan that’s about 98% 
I’ll keep that in mind if I can make a go of freelancing and want to scale up. Would working as a consultancy allow me to hire employees?
Do you have to specify a type of work, like consulting as an editor? Could I do other types of consulting as well? I have experience with curriculum development, for example.
Yup, that’s the idea you open yourself up (professionally looking) to a way wider audience other than.just editing.
yes you can hire employees. or you can hire yourself as an employer of 1. the only cost you have is the few thousand setup (probably 20k if you hire someone to set it up) and your labor insurance. otherwise your tax is company and sales. unless you need it for a work permit, in which case you would be paying usual income tax on top.
Hard to market, though. Academic editing, fiction developmental editing, and consulting on ESL curriculum development aren’t closely related. I would feel like a company that does so many things isn’t particularly good enough at any one of them to be profitable. I wouldn’t buy bread from a bakery, handmade soap, and furniture store.
Running multiple companies would increase the problems exponentially.