I write between 5 and 10 articles per week for wiseGEEK and spend the rest of the time writing for Suite 101. It’s not a bad way to make money for a stay-at-home mom.

There are a wide range of topics to write about and some are pretty lame, as the last commenter said, but there are always around 500 topics in the database. That means I never have a hard time finding something I either know something about already or would like to learn about.

This has been a great experience so far and I feel my writing has improved since I started with them.

When I questioned how I could be so good at the job for so long and then be so bad, I was informed that perhaps Jenn had become too “relaxed” in editing and that, combined with my sudden and inexplicable lack of writing skills, had made my writing unacceptable.

I felt that explanation was pretty lame but, alas, I was fired this morning. Therefore, I am warning everyone: Don’t trust these people. And, as has been mentioned in other posts, they expect their writers to treat the readers like they have the education and mental capacity of a third grader. I was chided for using the word “concurrent” instead of “while” with the former being called “too formal.” WHAT???!! Another instance of idiocy was when I wrote an article about the Delmonico steak and was told to edit the line, “….named after Delmonico’s, the New York restaurant where it was first served,” because Delmonico’s was “non-unique” content. I had to change it to something like, “….named after a man whose surname was Delmonico who had a restaurant that he decided to name after himself.”

The titles at Wisegeek are very weird as well: What are trousers? How do I get a PhD in psychology? How do I deal with a drama queen? How do I cure food poisoning? Not only is the first question just stupid, the second is self-explanatory (and it was repeated ad nauseum for every BA degree available), the third is sophomoric and the fourth is ignorant because there is no “cure” for food poisoning.

Anyway, that’s my opinion of Wisegeek. I’m crushed because I really enjoyed researching and writing on a range of topics.