Dear company
You recently emailed me some writing exercises to do in order to obtain an interview with your engineering consulting firm. I accepted the challenge and completed the first two exercises rather quickly. One was standard editing of an article that was riddled with passive voice problems. The other was a standard press release for a ribbon-cutting event at a bridge. The third was to write a more opinion-based piece on the benefits of government agency collaboration. I’m glad you had a phone number there for me to call for more information.
Luckily, I was able to call the number just before the guy went on vacation. In the course of our conversation, we shared pleasantries, common connections to lake country, and a working definition of what collaborations means in this instance. I found it helpful and rather illuminating. I have enough info to write a basic piece about the benefits of agency collaboration.
The guy, an engineer, also shared that there were 200 applicants for this position. I was in the final 20, but not the final five. However, those five did the writing after their interviews and none of them “blew us away.” So you went back to the 20 and emailed the rest to see if there was still interest. The engineer said that your committee felt you could write as well as the previous submissions, and you are looking for some sort of wow factor in these articles.
About a ribbon cutting.
And government collaboration.
Now, lest you think I’m some sort of complainy mccomplainersonpants, esq., I want you to know that I love to write fun, interesting pieces. I love making complicated subjects interesting and exciting to a broad audience. I love speaking to experts on DNA extraction, or people who run the hot dog stand their grandfather started, or engineers who helped plan the interstate highway system. But there are limits to this. Sometimes, a lot of the time, actually, you have the standard, info-laden articles that exist simply to impart information. You spend the time saved on whipping these articles out to focus on the articles that can be improved by feature or narrative techniques.
I’m at a loss here, since part of this ribbon cutting assignment hamstrings the writer by giving them a set of bland facts and saying “Wow me.” It makes me think you have been watching a lot of Gordon Ramsay, Simon Cowell, or other rude British realty stars.
I am tempted to make things up. An alien landing, perhaps, that city leaders at the ribbon cutting are shocked by despite the prior warnings they had received from a scientist and the local sheriff to “get people off the bridge! These aliens are feeding machines, Mayor, and you’ve just filled the trough.” But no, you had to have your ribbon-cutting event, you fool. And now look who has alien eggs all over his face!
To put this in engineering terms, not all bridges are the Golden Gate. A vast majority are workman thoroughfares not meant to be noticed. They simply get people from one place to another. Likewise with many articles – the info needs to get to those who need to know, and there isn’t much point in gussying it up unless you want to trick people into reading something they honestly don’t care about. Then they grab their pitchforks and awkwardly type angry online comments about that darn media system and all it’s stupid bias blah blah blah, and they hate you with a passion. Why do you want people to hate you so?
So in the end, I’m going to put together some basic articles on a ribbon-cutting event and the vague government collaboration thing. I could put some time into it, but you have written that this should take no more than two hours, and calling up a city engineer and taking up his time from trying to keep Fargo from flooding so I can have a nice feature piece to maybe nab me a job seems like a poor use of taxpayer dollars. It also would require me to spend some time with a that engineer, make him a central character in the article, incorporate agency cooperation facts and savings, all of which takes more than two hours and would definitely stretch your 250 word limit.
I think it would be interesting to write for an engineering firm, but I am concerned about the misconceptions concerning articles and press releases. If you expect every piece to be Golden Gate Bridge, your expectations may need some tweaking, particularly if the writer has little but 100 words of facts to go on.
Anyway, I thought you should know this before proceeding to the articles I wrote, because while they aren’t anything to send in for award season, they do what you want them to do. They get the reader from not knowing something to knowing something without confusing him. A lot of the time, that’s what we writers do, and even that is a challenge.
So enjoy the articles, and for Pete’s sake, stay off that bridge!
Fargo Jones
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