Looking for a Formatter

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Clarissa

January 31, 2016

People, I need suggestions. The publishing house requires us to submit our pieces in the Chicago Manual format. And my article is in the MLA format. I don’t have either the time or the mental fortitude to subject myself to the aggravation of changing MLA to Chicago. So I want to hire somebody to do it.

Question: where do I go to find people who do this kind of freelance work? The article is ~ 24 pages long, in English with some quotes in Spanish, I don’t need any editing, just the citation format. Are there websites for people who want this type of work?

And please don’t say “students.” The whole point for me is to spend no time on this at all, and teaching a student how to do this will take me straight to retirement age.

Also, has anybody done this kind of thing and can tell me what a good price is?

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15 responses to “Looking for a Formatter”

Evelina Anville

January 31, 2016

I know you said you were interested in asking students. But I got a mature undergraduate (English major) to do this exact thing for me and she did it beautifully. She was a student worker for my department and was paid to help with things like this. So it was free for me. But I did acknowledge her in the publication and she added a line to her resume/CV.

I just gave her the Chicago manual, told her what I needed, and she did it. I double checked the citations and everything. But she did it perfectly. It’s mostly grunt work: so most 21-22 years olds are capable. It might be worth looking in to.

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1. Evelina Anville
  
  January 31, 2016
  
  Edited to add. “I know you said you were NOT interested. . .”
  
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  1. Evelina Anville
    
    January 31, 2016
    
    One more thing. I want to emphasize that this took NO time from me. I just told the student that it had to be perfect and exactly follow the manual. Other than 1-2 minor questions, she did the conversion completely on her own.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      January 31, 2016
      
      I love our students to death but I know them and. . . I just don’t see it at all.
      
      Besides, I’m on sick leave, and I don’t even have access to any students right now.
      
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      1. Pen
        
        February 1, 2016
        
        I am a student. However, I do have a Chicago style manual, and I’ve done Chicago style citations before. I’d be willing to do it.
        
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        Clarissa
        
        February 1, 2016
        
        I have no doubt you can do it, you are brilliant. But you are a bit exceptional, too.
        
        And hey, if you have time and are interested in making some cash (through PayPal) with this project, send me an email!
        
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        Pen
        
        February 2, 2016
        
        I did send an email, by the way. 😀
        
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        Clarissa
        
        February 2, 2016
        
        Ah, good to know. I haven’t looked at them yet. I’ll be home soon and then I’ll respond, ok? Sorry for the delay.
        
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Stringer Bell

January 31, 2016

If it’s just citations, I figured it could be automated. Quick search on google yields several results for automatic conversion among different formats, though I have no idea how good they are.

Top 3 results:

http://www.citationmachine.net/
http://www.easybib.com/
http://www.citationconverter.com/

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1. Clarissa
  
  January 31, 2016
  
  That’s interesting, I’ll try it. Not having to interact with anybody at all is always the preferred way. 🙂
  
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2. Dreidel
  
  January 31, 2016
  
  If you do use an automatic conversion program, proofread every converted page carefully. Unless format conversion programs have improved dramatically over the last few years, they sometimes make isolated, easy-to-overlook errors.
  
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Evelina Anville

January 31, 2016

I think that perhaps the Editorial Freelancers Association will be your best bet then. You want what’s called “style editing” (i.e switching from one “house style” to another.) Here is there website. Its a bit primitive but easy to navigate once you get the hang of it. I recommend just doing a search for “style editing.”

http://www.the-efa.org/dir/search.php

I am going through something similar right now because I’m trying to hire an indexer. In my opinion, those who are legitimate tend to join professional associations. I don’t know about style editing but indexers charge roughly $3.50 a page.

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paranoid

January 31, 2016

I know you don’t want an editor, but this acquaintance of mine was flexible for many types of work, including this, when she was a master’s student: http://www.thepolishingpen.com/

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Anonymous

January 31, 2016

Maybe you could hire Evelina Anville’s student.

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E (The Third Glance)

January 31, 2016

I don’t know if it applies directly for you, but as a scientist, every. single. darn. journal has a different reference and citation style, and it becomes quickly quite difficult to reformat all of the references every time I submit a paper to a different journal (or I change my mind about where to send it during draft form, etc).

The solution I have is a reference management software that I paid for (though I’m pretty sure there are free ones), called “Endnote”. It’s a reference manager that stores all of your citations in database format, and it just “knows” the formats for thousands of journals, and also includes options Chicago and MLA formatting (I just checked). It syncs directly with microsoft word, and I can insert citations in the text that I have saved in my endnote library (easily imported from basically every academic site, google scholar, library, etc.). It builds a bibliography however you want it to, also within your document, and updates it as you add more citations. When I need to change citation format, I literally click on the dropdown menu, and pick the new format. My computer thinks for about 5 seconds, and then my entire document gets updated to the proper format. It is basically magic.

Endnote isn’t perfect – sometimes it makes mistakes or misses fields (usually due to an incorrect entry in the database), and it doesn’t always play nicely with collaborators all putting in different citations into the same document, so you do have to do a quick check. But it has saved me a considerable amount of time, effort, and headaches in formatting references for everything from term papers to professional journal articles. I’ve even used it for my dissertation, and I plan to use it or some other citation manager, for the rest of my professional career. So I do highly recommend this sort of tool. Of course, that doesn’t help with this particular instance, but it would prevent this from ever being a problem in the future 🙂

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