Just the Facts, Mom

In the course of raising children, you as a mom no doubt have learned to deal with textbooks and reference material like encyclopedias as much as your children have. Of course, since you came up through the school system and maybe on into college, how textbooks are written is something that is very familiar to you. One thing that can drive a mom crazy when helping a child study a subject is to find a mistake in a textbook. Of course, the writers of textbooks do all they can to keep errors out of those books as well. The process they go through to assure that everything in the textbook is correct is also a great work at home opportunity for you.

Textbook fact checking is a work at home business that is both profitable and fascinating. When you get established as a textbook fact checker, publishers will send you books on a regular basis. Since textbooks are full of very specific facts, it will be your job to make sure every detail of that book is correct. If you have an eye for detail and a love of books and learning, this is a great work at home job for you.

Like all work at home jobs that are well suited for a mom, fact checking can be fit around your schedule. If you have a full textbook to check, that will take many weeks to complete. But the pay is good and the process of studying every page, every illustration, every reference and every link in that book and validating that the book is 100% error free will give you an exposure to the topic that is educational and fascinating.

Each publisher will have specific ways they want you to document your work. Often they will have you work from a photocopy of each chapter of the book. You will make copies that are expanded so there is plenty of margin room for notes. As you check each fact, you will document that it was validated and what source material you used for that check. If you find an error, you will note that error and what the correct fact should be. You will also note the reference book you used to find the proper fact so the publisher can confirm that the error you found was really an error.

There should be no fact that escapes your notice. You will check dates, names, spellings and events that are documented in the book. If there are pictures with captions, the captions must be factual. Any error, no matter how small is important to be caught and fixed by you. You are the last line of defense for that publisher to make sure that textbook is perfect before it goes to presses to go on to be used in the education of young people in classrooms across the country and the world.

You can find textbook fact checking jobs by going to job boards that focus on education and writing. You can also go to the web sites of the publishers of textbooks and specifically look for jobs for fact checkers. If you don’t know what publishers to research, go to the bookstore of any college campus in your area and go through the store noting publishers and any details you need to land jobs doing fact checking with them.

Fact checking is fascinating and highly satisfying work and it is an excellent work for a work at home mom. You can do your research online or using the local public library and work around the schedules of your kids. And by making sure educational materials are perfect, in a way, you are being an educator yourself. Next to the pay, that may be the most gratifying thing about textbook fact checking as a work at home job.

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