Until recently, I taught technical writing and editing at a local college. The program required no prerequisites or particular skills for students to apply. All they needed was a reasonable grasp of English and access to a computer that could produce .docx files. That’s it. There were no requirements that they have a university degree in English or a professional background in writing. Interest and motivation were the only qualifications.
As a result, I always had an interesting and eclectic group of students with fascinating backgrounds. Some were already working as writers, some had writing responsibilities thrust upon them in their non-writing jobs, and others had never written anything in their lives but had a burning desire to do so. I had some students who were such accomplished writers that I questioned whether I was qualified to teach them. In some cases, I probably wasn’t, but they wanted the certification I could provide, so there we both were.
Since my students had such richly diverse backgrounds, I often wondered: what is a modern business writer? What background do today’s business writers need to have to make a living? There is no shortage of academic programs out there in professional communication. You can study technical communications, marketing communications, internal communications, crisis communications, public relations, as well as the tried-and-true university degree in English literature. But is any of that necessary?
Thinking about this question made me think about my own life in writing. I recently heard someone say that “careen” is a much better description of their professional life than the word “career,” which seems about right in my case. Writing was always something I could do basically well enough as a kid. I went to university for music, where I combined music with writing in an attempt to be a fancy scholar. This didn’t go well, but it did give me some excellent research skills. When I left university, I did a number of writing certificates, including technical writing, creative writing, and marketing writing. I worked a number of different writing positions in my professional life. I documented legal and compliance processes for a while, I worked as a technical writer, I became interested in taxonomies and worked as a knowledge manager, and I currently work in marketing. My skill set is a smorgasbord of academic writing, technical writing, business writing, marketing writing, legal writing, and probably some others I’ve forgotten about. My grammar is fine, which helps me get work as an editor, but I’m not a nerd for grammar, and I don’t think it’s necessary that a good writer be one. I belong to a few grammar groups on LinkedIn, and I find them interesting for the first few posts, but my interest wanes as the discussions devolve into increasingly arcane elements of the English language. When the discussion reaches into the depths of Latin as a precedent for English grammar, I usually bow out, and I don’t think my professional career is damaged by having done so.
While I’m not rich, I manage to do well enough writing in today’s marketplace. My experience, however, doesn’t really help to answer the question about what sort of background today’s writer needs. My writing pedigree is neither illustrious nor particularly pure. There’s a bit of everything going on in there.
Asking the Right Question
Perhaps the question is best posed like this: what is modern business writing? Over the last decade or so, the field of business writing has changed enormously. The barriers that separated fields like technical writing, sales enablement, and marketing have become blurred to the point that they don’t really exist anymore. It used to be the case that technical writing meant you wrote manuals customers would use once they’ve purchased a product. Now, when customers can go online and download technical documents as they’re making purchasing decisions, those documents become part of the customer journey, which means technical documents are now sales enablement material. Single-sourcing solutions like DITA mean that writers can now create microcontent that can be distributed across multiple channels and practices, which means your audience could be prospects, customers, sales people, or even regulators. In many ways, the fact that almost anyone can access any content at any time means our possible audience is nearly infinite. While this can be exciting in terms of the number of people you can reach with your message, there is also something daunting about writing content to meet these complex needs.
With all this in mind, if a student today were to ask me what they need to be a writer, I would probably tell them they need nothing more than a desire to take in as much information as they can and to learn how to arrange it in a way that delivers clear information to the people that need it. That’s it. I wouldn’t recommend any particular program or course of study that could give them this. Being a writer today, I believe, means having the ability to apply some fundamental, easily learned principles of writing in a multitude of voices and formats to a potentially infinite global audience, as well as the humility to recognize when you haven’t hit the mark and need to completely rewrite it and try again as often as necessary.
Now that I’ve stepped away from teaching for the foreseeable future, I’d like to use this blog to record and convey some of the things I’ve learned about how to survive by writing in today’s marketplace with the mix-and-match toolkit I’ve assembled over the years. If someone can find useful ideas that help them get on in their writing careers, that’s great. In the next few blogs, I’ll talk about how I do my research, my approach to planning writing projects, and some of the writing tools I use every day.