Is there a correspondence writer's market?

[Kire]

I worked for three years at Barnesandnoble.com as a Technical Support Representative in a busy call center. The job description was mostly, take calls, answer questions, solve problems, but most of all: exceed expectations!

We all had our own areas that we excelled at, or some of us didn't and were booted out the door.

I got pretty adept at exchanging emails with almost every other department telling them that something was wrong with the web site and it needed to be fixed. We were, after all, on the frontlines with the customers. There was no other way for most of the programmers and Network Operators to know what was going on. I developed a rapport with them through this correspondence. I bloody well had no idea how to write a line of code, and they bloody well didn't want to deal with a million customers in their ear all at once. So we complemented each other. He scratched my back. I scratched his. It's a give and take, and it's very rewarding. To me, anyway.


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Correspondence writing is where I think my strength lies. I'll tell you why:

I have recently been working with Deli Meat, a long way from a rising star at the second largest internet bookseller in the world. But, since an incident occurred at work on Saturday night, my subsequent letters and emails appear to be handing the case to the prosecutor on a silver platter. (I wonder if he can read?)

My family members and friends I've been forwarding this very personal stuff to for proof-reading and general historical preservation, have told me I'm "quite a writer" and "this is what I really should be doing".

But, I don't know quite what "it" is. No one talks much about correspondence writing. Are there classes? Community groups? Are you just born good at it? I certainly wasn't. Through practice and trial and error, and figuring things out, well, I learned it somehow. And, I'm not looking for pen pals, exactly. They're a plus, but I'm looking for something that will pay my rent and a little bit more. Does anybody have any ideas?

BTW, you probably don't understand a word I just said. Do you? What a snob!!! He says he can write.

Feedback! Please. I. must. have. feedback.

[MrModerate]

1. During the dot-com boom . . .

One of the thing I did was write the canned responses to user questions that our Member Support Reps would issue to help members use our software, promote our product, or direct their complaint/problem to the right place.

This went into a textbase of about 1,000 chunks (from sentence size to several paragraphs), and the Member Reps would stitch together an answer to a user query by a pretty nifty system of text retrieval hotkeys using one or more of these chunks.

My challenge was to craft text modules that were properly focused on the users' needs, and which would be coherent when assembled in any one of a billion different ways.

That sounds like what you're talking about.

However, what you're really talking about is a subset of technical writing -- which is at root just explaining things to people -- for which there are classes galore, and even certificate programs at most community colleges and universities.

It's creative work, it pays well, and while it's sometimes hard to get a job (you most frequently work as a freelancer), sometimes it can take you to strange and wonderful places. While I'm not actually writing that much anymore, being a tech writer has taken me to about 20 states and 15 countries so far in my career.

[Kire]

2. yeah, we used templates, too

you call them "canned responses", same thing

I was never so advanced, me oh my, to create crafty "text modules" (that's programming, right?)

thanks for the response!

[MrModerate]

3. The text modules were just plain ASCII text . . .

. . . but were considered modular because each one was meant to fit with the others in a consistent way so that the user actually got a quasi-custom response.

[Kire]

4. hmmm, i guess it's simpler than it sounds

like it usually does, right?