Writelife

There are writers among us but they are sometimes not easy to recognize.

Writing, often viewed as a profession of the lower orders, traditionally pays rather poorly. In order to escape this ghetto-ish trap, a writer will often call himself  by some other term. Currently, in my present position, I am a communications analyst.

What is the difference between a communications analyst and a writer?

A communications analyst can often be paid a good middle-manager’s salary, plus benefits. As a general rule, a writer cannot. He or she must be freelance and used sparingly, in times of crisis, and released from his or her labours as quickly as possible (in other words, when the budget’s gone).

For reasons like this, writers disguise themselves. In one job, I was actually called an audio-visual operator though I don’t recall any technical responsibilities accompanying the job. But the people I worked for needed someone on staff who could write.

Unfortunately, they had to disguise me because the company did not hire writers. They preferred to go through ad agencies. This allowed them to pay three to four times as much as an in-house writer would have cost them. It also gave them leave to run about like mad headless chickens when the writing from the agency came back and … well, sucked.

(This isn’t to say ad agency writing is bad - it just costs a lot more. When the writing isn’t up to snuff the reason is because the best writers are working on the biggest, most lucrative accounts. If you’re not one of these accounts, the odds are good you’ll get someone who is just learning the ropes. But this, too, doesn’t mean the writer can’t write well. Quite often his or her poor writing isn’t poor writing but poor information. No one can write good, effective copy that meets the client’s objectives if he or she doesn’t have the right information. But that’s a topic for another day …)

Some of the other terms for writers? Well, there is the communications director or creative director. And then there’s the creative analyst. Titles, in fact, are a mix and match affair. Communications, analyst, director, manager … these are all good terms to fudge with and align in a variety of ways. The word creative use to be a good term but seems to have fallen from favour in recent years.

A good if long winded term is Director - User Experience and Communications. This suggests a toe in the field of usability and cutting edge marketing even though all you will essentially be is a writer and editor. But that’s okay. No one you’ll work with will know a damn thing about the customer experience or usability so whatever you say about it will probably fly.

Final note: though I make light of usability and customer (or user)  experience as terms, they are incredibly important to success. If a writer is smart, he or she will get up to speed on these areas because they have a profound impact on what you write. Or at least they should.

But again, that’s another day’s topic.

Listen to this podcast

Bookmark to:

Hide Sites