Musical imagery adds a lot to writing when it’s done right. The only trouble is that so many writers get it wrong. They misunderstand the terminology or the capacities of the instruments. Music is a big part of my life, so it especially bothers me when references to music are full of mistakes. Here are a few pointers which could be useful.
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A few days ago I came across the “Writers’ Zone” on DZone. It looks like a very useful resource for people who, like me, do freelance writing on technical topics. Two different skills intersect in our work: expertise on technology and the ability to present a compelling message. A good developer or sysadmin understands the stuff, but most of them find it a challenge just to write understandable comments. There are freelance writers who can research anything, but it’s not the same as really knowing the issues. We bring the technical knowledge and the writing skill together in one place.
Writers’ Zone has articles from many different perspectives. There are pieces for customers and editors, articles on how to write better, suggestions on tools and how to use them, and — as is their right — regular self-promotion. It’s a site any technically oriented freelancer ought to bookmark.
Just by the way, DZone loves it when people submit articles. However, they don’t love it enough to pay.
Occasionally I hear from freelance writers who mistakenly think they’re employees. Some even list clients as employers on LinkedIn. I don’t think I’ve ever run into the reverse. In the United States, there’s a clear distinction between the two, and it’s important to know which you are.
If you’re an employee, you filled out a W-2 form for the IRS, and your employer deducts taxes from your paycheck. If you’re a contractor, you’re self-employed. You get a 1099 reporting your income, and normally the IRS collects the tax through estimated tax payments or with the 1040 in April. You get the privilege of paying double Social Security tax. On the positive side, you can deduct business expenses, perhaps even a home office.
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Did you know that a laptop is stolen every 53 seconds? It must be true, it’s all over the Internet! The oldest mention I can find of that factoid dates from 2009. At the time, the supposed source was the FBI, without any citation. Lately it’s usually Gartner, still with no citation.
Recently a customer asked me to include that “statistic” in an article. Fortunately, it wasn’t a requirement, just a suggestion. The customer also wanted all links to be no more than a year old, so citing a nine-year-old figure didn’t really seem like what they wanted. Even if the figure was once accurate, the theft rate is sure to have changed over the years.
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A piece called “Confessions of a Fake News Writer,” by someone using the name Winston Wordsworth, recently came to my attention. You can look it up if you want; I’m not giving this scumbag any “link juice.” He says in the article that he currently accepts money to write lies, so there’s no strong reason to accept anything he says as true. But by Russell’s Paradox, if he’s lying, he’s telling us the truth when he says he lies. And there must be people like this. They deserve to be spat upon.
Winston says he’s “prostituting myself out.” That’s an insult to prostitutes, who mostly deliver honest value for money.
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Small minds are attracted to zero-sum thinking. They believe that anything that benefits someone else must hurt them. That’s where the myth that sites should never expend “link juice” comes from. The idea is that if you have any links in your articles, the site you link to will gain in search rank and you’ll lose correspondingly.
How much influence do these people think they have over search ranks? Unless they’re operating a leading site in the field, their effect is negligible. Besides, presumably they aren’t linking to their competitors, so giving another site a slight boost doesn’t do them any injury.
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Writers in every country can run into governmental censorship. The USA is among the freest, but there are some areas where businesses can get into legal trouble for publishing truthful statements that aren’t state secrets. The FDA is one of the biggest censors of truthful speech. With certain products, it isn’t enough for the manufacturer’s statements about them to be true. They have to be approved. More precisely, making certain truthful statements about smokeless cigarettes, which contain no tobacco, miraculously turns them into “modified risk tobacco products” which are subject to tobacco regulations.
I can say what I want about e-cigarettes on this blog, since I don’t produce or sell them and I’m not getting paid by anyone who does. But if a business that sold them asked me to write something for them, I’d have to be careful. I might not be able to say that they don’t contain tobacco, even though they don’t. I couldn’t point out that they’re far less dangerous than real cigarettes.
Legal writer Jonathan Adler, in the Washington Post, writes about the prohibition: “FDA regulation of e-cigarettes is not only bad for public health but also is likely unconstitutional. Insofar as the federal Tobacco Act, and the FDA’s implementing regulation, prohibit product makers and sellers from making factually true statements about their products, they likely violate the First Amendment.”
Nonetheless, A lawsuit against the FDA lost and, as far as I can tell, ran out of appeals. The ruling is long, and I can’t figure out from it how it justifies the speech prohibition. It seems to just take it for granted. The part of the ruling which claims to show that products with no tobacco are “tobacco products” is preposterous hand-waving, so I shouldn’t expect much sense from anything in the ruling.
It’s very unlikely the FDA would go after me personally for anything I wrote for a customer. (But don’t take anything here as legal advice.) The issue is that to write something which the customer could safely publish, I’d have to be careful to state only government-approved facts. Companies sometimes run articles past their legal departments to minimize the chance of regulatory trouble. This could result in nitpicking rewrites or even rejection of a perfectly good article. If you get into this situation, understand that the customers are just protecting themselves.
The tobacco industry loves it when e-cigarette makers can’t tell people all about their products. So do the nannies who think people should be prohibited from taking any risk, even if it’s a smaller risk than they’re currently taking. Tacit alliances like this happen more often in the crony system than you might think.
You have to be aware of the potential for trouble when you write on those topics. You can’t be a legal expert on what statements are allowed or not, but you can be aware that your work could face delays and rewrites.
Thanks to Tom Schwing for the forum post which called my attention to this issue.
Is a professional writer just someone who makes money writing? Then we might as well call anyone who gets paid for doing anything a pro. The word implies more than that. It means a commitment to producing the best results possible. It means not just being paid for work, but being paid for good work.
Professionals know that a career is an ongoing effort, not a leap to stardom. It’s a matter of constantly developing better skills, both at doing the work and at marketing it. Jeff Goins’ “7 Things Professional Writers Know That Amateurs Don’t” makes some excellent points on this topic. He explains that “success in any field is more about commitment to a process than it is about finding one magic trick that will make it all come together.”
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The blog Making a Living Writing recently posted an article on “Middle-Man Agency Platforms.” None of the sites listed are ones I’m familiar with, but they could be an interesting way for writers to expand their markets.
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Some people see nothing wrong with writing dishonest articles. A discussion in an online forum recently reminded me of this.
Let me start by clarifying what I mean by dishonest writing. If you’re writing on someone else’s behalf, you can argue for a position which you don’t personally agree with. It’s legitimate if there’s some case for the position and you use accurate facts and valid arguments. You’re helping the customer to present a position in a reasoned way, and there’s nothing wrong with that even if it’s not your position.
It becomes dishonest when your argumentation is dishonest. If you cite sources which you know are unreliable, use arguments which don’t hold up, and present “facts” with no source, you’re serving up counterfeit goods. If the customer is unaware you’re spewing nonsense, you’re cheating the customer. If they do know they’re asking you to deceive, you’re collaborating in cheating the reader. In some cases, it could count as fraud under the law.
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