Fact Checking (?) Textbooks

chelle said:

I have a Bachelor of Science and would like to obtain some freelance work checking the accuracy of science and/or math textbooks. Can anyone tell me if this is even a job - or are the writers responsible for ensuring all of their facts are correct? Any advice would be appreciated.

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You might find some editing work at a place like elance.com

The pay wouldn't be very good, but you can put a few notches in your belt.

Generally though, I believe writers are generally responsible for the accuracy of their text. Why don't you try writing a textbook?

I've written biology and nursing textbooks for textbook publishers and textbook packagers. The way it has worked for me is that someone at the publishing company puts together a list of standards (state standards for junior high and high school texts, more general standards for college texts). Next, one or (usually) more experts in the field develop an outline for each chapter. Using the outline for one chapter, a writer and graphic artist put together a chapter based on the outline. This is often an in-house effort. This chapter goes out for review to people teaching in the field and they comment on its readability, accessibility, content level, etc. and make suggestions. The suggestions get incorporated and the chapter gets fine tuned.

Using the chapter as a sample, the publisher/packager hires writers, usually people with an advanced degree in the field, to write additional chapters working from the experts' outlines and using the sample chapter as a guide to reading level, text chunking, etc. The requirements are usually quite specific and do not allow for a lot of deviations. This writing is then edited by an in-house editor who usually, but not always, has a degree in the content field. This editor is supervised by a higher level editor who is often an expert in the area (science, math, economics, etc) often holding the highest degree granted in their area of expertise. Photos and graphics are added or at least their content is indicated at this point.

Once the in-house people are finished making the ms conform to the standards and guidelines they have developed for the book, it goes out to one or more experts (usually professors, physicians, etc.) who review the content and approve it or make corrections and suggestions. This can take several rounds of back-and-forth discussions. When the approved ms retuns to the publisher, the publisher does all the ordinary publisher type things like more house editing, then copyediting, proofreading, indexing. Somewhere along the line, the publisher also may hire a writer to do a teacher's manual and often to do end of chapter review questions. Sometimes a writer is hired to do textbook features if there are enough of them. These are the one or two-page spreads that are usually enclosed in boxes and amplify the text (think big sidebars). My first textbook job was doing textbook features.

So far as I know, fact checking takes place all along the way, with in-house editors questioning some facts and the experts reviewing others, but there is no specific fact checker the way there is for non-fiction books and magazine articles. If there is, I'm pretty sure it is an in-house job and is probably rolled into another job title.

My contract always says something about the content being based on verifiable research, meaning that as a writer I might get something wrong, or the interpretation of data might change or be a little off, but I made a good faith effort to get it right based on the current research and thinking in the field. Many others also review for content throughout the evolution of the ms. Textbook writing is a long, complicated process. Even college professors who write their own textbooks go through quite a lot of reviews and edits and generally get help with the writing and graphics.

I've worked for a couple of different publishers. Each organization has its own little quirks and differences, but the overall pattern is pretty much the same. Your best chance of working on a textbook is if you have at least a master's degree. People with advanced science and math degrees who can write to specification and on deadline are in demand and the freelance pay is good.

I wonder, then, why I always used to see 'text book writing' jobs up for bid when I used Elance? Could they have been looking for english text books for other countries?

They might be bait and switch for term paper mills. I don't know ANY reputable textbook publisher that uses elance.

I've written a couple of textbooks. I'm responsible for the fact-checking, but the publisher also hires some subject matter experts as reviewers. (I always hate them). There are facts, then there are opinions...

I work for McGraw-Hill/Glencoe in their Science Editorial department. We definitely use fact-checkers. If you to go mcgraw-hill.com, you may be able to find some job listings.

Otherwise, what Tish says sounds right.

That's interesting, because I have written textbooks for both McGraw Hill among other publishers and no one ever came back to me with fact checking questions, but when I've written non-fiction books for high school, the fact checkers at Scholastic came back with a whole list of questions. Did you contact the writer or the expert when you found a fact disparity?

Tish Davidson said:

That's interesting, because I have written textbooks for both McGraw Hill among other publishers and no one ever came back to me with fact checking questions, but when I've written non-fiction books for high school, the fact checkers at Scholastic came back with a whole list of questions. Did you contact the writer or the expert when you found a fact disparity?

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Maybe because what you wrote was correct?

I'm an ancillaries tracker, so I'm not sure how the process actually works, but I do know that there was a mad scramble for fact-checkers recently.