Write or Wrong? Is the Pen Dead?

Writing skills used to be super-important

I received some resumes yesterday and the cover “letters” read more like bad tweets than pitch notes. I’ve noticed recently that, although I’ve always written,  I struggle now to come up with more than 250 words of prose (unless I’m analyzing new products, writing a website, or talking about my long life). And my penmanship (remember that?) is not quite as tidy as it once once (although I’m a beast when it comes to swiping on my Android or tapping the keyboard keys).

Education media goes so far as to say we have a “writing crisis” in America. Yet, I don’t see mass protests in the streets. Sadly, the illiteracy rate in American hasn’t changed in ten years.

The average writer’s salary is $51K. Compensation and benefits managers (the people who decide how much other people get paid) earn an average of $119K. And the people who put other people to sleep (anesthesiologists) bring in a whopping $246K.

So, although we may all agree that knowing how to communicate through the written word is a valuable skill, we live in a world where it isn’t taught well or rewarded.

And now I’m at roughly 200 words, so I’m going to sign-off and go back to tweeting and making memes (and searching for a marketing associate who still knows how to write!)

About writing…

	How to write (mostly about fiction, but many of these rules apply to proposals and marketing copy!)
	Hack your next writing project.
	The worst first sentences of novels.
	Texting isn’t writing at all, according to this TED talk.