I, WRITER

My manager described me as a ‘professional writer’ today. That does seem strange, but it is technically true - that is what I am.

The trouble is that at functions, when people swallow an awkward pause and say, “So what do you do then?” I feel a bit pretentious saying, “Oh I’m a writer,” and instead I go for the more palatable, “I’m a software engineer” route. I think mostly that’s to quash the notion that I sit in a shed, twiddling pens and drinking whisky. I’m not that kind of writer.

Another term that gets slapped on us sometimes is ‘wordsmith’ - perfectly valid: a person who uses tools to craft words and sentences into a usable form. However, I think even that’s been overcooked by some people. After all, we all use words every day, bashing them into shape every time we pick up our phones. In the medieval village, the blacksmith wasn’t just the best at metalwork; he was the only one who could do it. So the idea of a ‘wordsmith’ to describe people who write for a living seems a bit redundant.

I do do that though. I have ‘writer’ in my job title, after it was surreptitiously changed from ‘technical author’ by the Americans. No daydreaming of novels for you Brits; get on with the writing what we tell you to write. And so she’s right: I am a writer, maybe in the same way that a pen is a ‘nice writer’ or a typewriter converts the brilliant thoughts of a quick fingered developer into printed ink. Less inspired, more toolbox.

Well. I’d like to write books. It would be interesting to be paid lots in advance to come up with something engaging. I’d almost certainly leave it all until the last week though, and then spend every waking moment in the whisky shed.

Joke. I don’t like whisky - it might as well be paint-stripper. Oh and I don’t have a writing shed either, so the Hemingway Method might be for someone else.

My manager was trying to build my confidence in a subtle kind of way. It is hard to push back the developers’ sincere attempts at writing customer-facing content, and she was reminding me that I am a writer, and that I know what I’m talking about when it comes to effective writing. I can’t review their code but I sure can correct their grammar.

By the way, I don’t hate being called a ‘wordsmith’ - it’s quite endearing. I won’t ever call myself one though. I am a technical writer; I write about technical things. And a whole bunch of other non-technical things in my spare time of course (this is blog #1793) but I don’t get paid for that. What I do get reimbursed for is being a very professional and somehow highly experienced explainer of concept and procedure, and there’s no bottle nor shed required.