One day last week, a woman contacted my tutor e-mail looking for an English/Writing tutor. She explained that she was not a student, but that she had to do a fair amount of proofreading and editing for her "PR" job and that she wasn't very confident in her skills.
I told her I thought I could help her get up to snuff and to contact me if she wanted to set up tutor sessions. So yesterday, I received another e-mail. In that one, she had cut and pasted a rather wordy sentence and asked if I could fix it.
I figured she was checking up on my editing skills before deciding to hire me. I found a couple of errors and fixed them, but also revised it altogether to something I thought made it easier to understand.
We continued to e-mail back and forth (I was just sitting here in my "office", drawing a french horn...). Would I be available to do more revising over the computer? Did I have a per-page rate? Could I do that and tutor her in addition? Her e-mails "sounded" anxious, about keeping her job ("I just signed a lease.. and I'm single!")It became clear to me that she was at work at the time, and the original sentence she'd sent was one she was supposed to fix.
Okay, so this isn't a typical tutor request, but it sounded kind of fun - sort of a "help desk" / "ask the expert" mode. I could see her sitting at her PR job, turning in newly revised and edited documents with her supervisors being none the wiser!
Ghost writer. Something new for the resume'. Just in time for Halloween.
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5 comments:
There was an article in Reader's Digest a few weeks ago written by a person who wrote college term papers for students. For money.
The anonymous author was very candid in his/her ability to make F students look good, the point being that it's commonplace for students to present themselves as true academics when they are most certainly not.
It was quite disturbing, actually.
Could be the start of a whole new career. Not everyone has the talent to write well and if you can help her out, why not. Although, it sounds a bit like a Cyrano de Bergerac tale.
Your list of accomplishments continues to grow: Engineer, Mom, Teacher/Tutor, Lunch Lady, Community Organizer, Traffic Enforcement Specialist, Ghost Writer.
Awesome! Good for you (but kind of sad that she's faking her way through a job.)
At first I thought it was going to turn out that she was just trying to get you to do her work for her. Glad to hear she's actually hiring you. Hopefully her lessons will help ease her job stress.
That's kinda funny. People are so desperate. You're a trooper.
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