I have decided I am going to place a disclaimer on my freelancer page and in my contracts stating that if someone sends me plagiarized work to edit, I will charge a $25 fee and return it to them. If they want to hire me to fix it, they will have to post a new job on Guru, invite me to it, and if I have time I will apply.
Plagiarism is just too nasty to try and fix. It takes up too much of my time. Although I edit 20,000 - 40,000 words per day and I write 10,000- 15,000 words per day, I can only fix about 2,000 plagiarized words per day.
I hope that placing this disclaimer will keep people from plagiarizing, but even if it doesn't it will let me back out of doing the job for them.
The last person I rewrote something for wanted to take it back and rewrite it himself to save money. When I told him I didn't want him to do that, he first told me to take my time fixing it and then demanded it immediately. If I would not have had the editing job with him, I would have given it back to him and said "do it yourself" from the start.
The problem is that I already put time into editing the manuscript before I usually catch plagiarism. For me to hand it back to them without getting payment is causing me to lose money for the time I already put into it. On the other hand, keeping it and rewriting it myself takes too much of my time away from other jobs. I feel this is the fairest way for me to get the money I earned and for them to get the work done in a timely fashion.
What do you think?
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