As we talk about the seasonal professions, photography is one of them in Pakistan. However, content writing is yet another seasonal profession. Through many years, fresh graduates or students earn up to Rs. 30,000 per month by doing freelance writing.
Some of them are writing generic content, where the content for a certain website. The problem occurs when a person is writing an academic paper. Producing an academic paper on behalf of another person is illegal. You may have seen that in Pakistan, people are doing assignments for people in other countries. I do not say that they plagiarize their paper, but asking someone else to do your assignment is very unethical.
For the generic content, the writer is paid 0.15 – 0.5 per word and the academic writers is paid Re. 1 per word. Our country has seen a lot of labor exploitation. Not only this type of labor exploitation is limited to the writing profession, but also people from other countries hire many freelancers in different departments from Pakistan because of cheap labor.
Most of the students want to earn pocket money and so they really do not care about the content as well as their employer. The important thing is to eradicate the concept of academic writing and come up with actual academic writing, which is writing a research paper yourself. Secondly, if anyone is writing generic content, he or she deserves a high pay grade.
RIDAH ZAFAR,
Islamabad, April 3.