Having mentioned in my previous post that I work at home full time, the question that naturally follows is "What companies in the Philippines let moms work at home full time on a regular salary basis?"
Well, to be honest, I know of only one: inWrite. That's where I work as a copy editor.
inWrite proofreading services 
inWrite is a Danish company whose editorial team is based in Makati City, Philippines. It offers outsourced proofreading services, as well as copy editing, copy writing, article writing, and technical writing. Unless the client has its own specifications, we use as our default style guide the Chicago Manual of Style.
(For those familiar with the CMS, please note that I do not always use it for my personal blog. See the spaces before and after my em dashes? It's my way of separating my work life from my personal one.)
The inWrite work process
The work process looks pretty simple: The clients send us their manuscripts. Then our senior editors distribute the manuscripts to us copy editors. We edit them according to the clients' specifications. Then we send them back to the senior editors for quality assurance.
The interesting part is memorizing the rules and applying them rigorously. When do you use a semicolon instead of a comma? An en dash instead of a hyphen? An em dash instead of an en dash? When are quotation marks unnecessary? Which compounds are hyphenated? Which are open compounds? Which are closed?
I must say, to do this job well -- or to do it at all -- one needs to be afflicted, to a certain extent, with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. Every comma, semicolon, hyphen, ellipsis, and other punctuation marks that you never even knew existed -- they all need to be correctly used, correctly placed.
One punctuation mark at a time
It's really great fun and very satisfying. Switching your display setting in MS Word from "Final Showing Markup," which displays the tracked changes, to "Final," which shows the clean final view -- that must be the epitome of instant gratification. You feel like you've made the world a better place one punctuation mark at a time.
And in fact, you have.
For those of you Filipino moms who find the greatest pleasure in changing which to that and vice versa, you can call us directly to ask about inWrite career opportunities.
UPDATE: From what I last heard, inWrite no longer accepts home-based editors. But they still accept office-based ones. Office is in Makati.
May 3, 2010
My Home-based Copy Editing Job at inWrite
