Sometimes the benefits and costs of program interventions can be estimated through experimental and quasi-experimental designs.1 This chapter first describes experimental and quasi-experimental designs, indicating how they are used in estimating the impacts of social programs in policy areas such as health, education, training, employment, housing, and welfare. It then describes how these impacts are incorporated into CBAs of employment and training programs, illustrating how concepts developed in earlier chapters can be used in actual cost–benefit analyses. The case study that follows the chapter examines CBAs of a number of employment and training programs that were targeted at welfare recipients.

Table 14C.1, which appears at the end of this case, presents summary results from CBAs of 26 welfare-to-work programs.1 These programs were all targeted at single parents who participated in the Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, which at the time the CBAs were conducted was the major cash welfare program in the United States. Most of the programs were mandatory in the sense that AFDC benefits could be reduced or even terminated if a parent did not cooperate. The CBAs were all conducted by MDRC, a well-known non-profit research firm, and used a similar framework including the classical experimental design with random assignment to treatment and control groups.

What is advertising?

Advertising is the profession of developing, and buying placement in the media, controlled messages designed to influence the behavior— typically the purchasing habits— of current and potential customers or users. Advertising, in various forms, is as old as civilization and as new as the latest technology.

Advertising is distinct from public relations in that the message is purchased by the advertiser as opposed to being “pitched” for free coverage; and can choose its location and form of presentation. Advertising is distinct from “direct marketing” because it is non- personal— that is, it is not directed at specific individuals, only at types of potential customers with shared characteristics.

Advertising is currently a $600 billion industry worldwide, making it the single largest venue for professional writing in the global economy.

Why advertising?

Advertising enables the advertiser to fully control the content, the experience and the venue of the message. Once an advertisement is accepted by the delivery platform, its content will not be changed before it reaches its audience. This means that, unlike public relations and most other forms of corporate communications, the advertiser has complete control of its messaging, removing the risk of an intermediary (reporter, editor, blogger, broadcaster) intercepting the message and changing, or even reversing, it. Advertising also takes advantage of the ability of the media to take a single message and scale it to millions of people simultaneously.

History of advertising

Advertising is as old as writing— indeed it might even be older: we can probably assume that Paleolithic man carved or painted a message in a high- traffic area to promote a service. We do know for certain that painted advertising began in India in about 4000 BCE, and in books in China about 1000 BCE.

As signage from Pompeii shows, the ancients made heavy use of signs, posters and various forms of early billboards to promote their businesses and manufactured wares. The rise of printing was almost instantly followed by printed advertising— handbills, posters, pages in books, then newspapers and magazines.

What is an essay?

An essay is a venerable form of nonfiction writing that endures because of its power to influence readers. Essays are typically short (500– 5,000 words), tightly constructed, attack a single and comparatively narrow theme and drive the reader quickly and directly to a conclusion. Typically, essays have an obvious structure, reference larger outside forces and are topical and timely.

Essays can take a number of forms, including many found in the other professions described in this book, including art and literary essays, political tracts, one- off columns, extended blogs, opinion pieces and editorials.

Why write essays?

Because essays are so powerful. All the great minds of the last three thousand years have written in the essay form. Some essays (see below) have changed history. Part of their appeal is that they are the equivalent of a compressed argument transformed into print. Another reason is that they are comparatively brief: for writers, that means essays can be written quickly and can be sold to magazines and newspapers. For readers, a lot of the appeal is that the average essay typically can be read in a single sitting and doesn't require the commitment of, say, a nonfiction book. Finally, because they can be turned around so quickly, essays can be timely, and hooked to recent events, in a way impossible for longer formats.

For writers the biggest problem with the essay is that the form is inevitably bound up with bad memories of having to write “essays” in school. This is unfortunate, because the true essay has almost nothing to do with that debased form, which is little more than a form of punishment. The trick is to not let those bad memories deter you— there are few more enjoyable and rewarding forms of writing.

History

The essay— or at least a prototype form of the essay— can be traced to the Greeks, in particular to the post- Socratic philosophers. Plato's dialogs, such as The Republic are structured as conversations in which Socrates is prompted by interlocutors into extended monologues that are almost indistinguishable from short essays. This is particularly the case with his celebrated “Parable of the Cave.” Aristotle, in turn, achieves the essay format with his Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics. Other essaylike writings from the era include Epictetus's Golden Sayings, a founding document in Stoicism.

As we have just seen, corporate writing careers are characterized as much by the job of being an employee of a larger enterprise as they are by the actual writing work itself.

By comparison, writing jobs in the media typically put the writing work first. If you consider the creative writing process to be of prime importance in your career, this second type of work may prove more appealing, and satisfying to you.

You will also notice that this part is the biggest of this book. Writing for the media is by far the largest source of employment for professional writers— ranging from a blogger sitting at a computer in a spare bedroom and writing for a loyal audience of a few dozen readers, to writing the screenplay of blockbuster movie that costs a half- billion dollars to make and destined to be seen by 100 million viewers. Media writing careers also range from the most precise and formalized nonfiction to the most obscure experimental fiction.

In fact, there is almost no kind of media- oriented writing that has sparked your interest that does not present at least a small chance of your earning a living from pursuing it. What that means is that you should not just scrutinize one of these chapters to learn more about the tricks of your own current trade, but perhaps should look through the other chapters as well to see if another type of writing captures your imagination. It may be a side, or even second, career to which you can aspire.

Note that several of these chapters include additional sections that take a closer look at specialty careers within these professions. In those cases, such as investigative reporter in the news- reporting chapter, the main chapter is the typical gateway into the specialty career, while the added section is devoted to a top practitioner in the field.

Finally, personal experience has shown that while you may need to pay more dues— and get paid less money— to be successful in these careers than in corporate life, these kinds of jobs are uniquely emotionally rewarding. A creative life can be a very satisfying life.

What is editing?

Editing is the improvement— for reasons of space, accuracy and/ or quality— of existing written, audio or video content. Editing is an openended process: it can be continued forever. So, there is also a time factor in the editing process.

Editing work is both a feature of writing and a career (part- time and full- time) in itself. There is little career training available; rather, editing as a profession typically draws people with a love of language and an aptitude for grammatical precision. As a writing feature, it is treated as a skill that is part of the professional writer's toolkit and is learned on the job.

Generally speaking, editing takes two forms:

Why edit?

Because even the best writing can still be improved. Perfection is endlessly elusive. And even a small mistake that survives the production process and reaches the end reader can raise doubts about the accuracy of the entire work or the author's writing skills. Particularly egregious errors can lead to everything from bad reviews to lawsuits. In heavily empirical works— textbooks, operating and repair manuals, reference books— errors can cause catastrophic results.

If there is one message that you should remember from this book, it is that professional writing is a business. It is a craft, a career. Your job is to get the work done in a professional manner— and, with talent and luck, the art will follow.

As with any business, the actual content is only a fraction of the work. You also must deal with bookkeeping, taxes, marketing, promotion, and sales. It is the last— the writing version of sales called pitching— that is the subject of this chapter. And just as with sales in other industries, the process includes qualification, contact, selling, negotiating, and closing.

Small business understand this. If they don't they go out of business quickly. But freelance writers, like other professionals in the arts, often seem to have the attitude that they because they pursued creative careers to escape the rules of business, that the rules of business won't pursue them.

No such luck. If you don't treat your writing career— especially freelancing— as a business, you will soon discover that there is a personal version of corporate Chapter 11 bankruptcy. And, suitably humbled, you'll have to go in search of a real job, one that, ironically, will also require you to perform some other version of pitching, negotiating and billing.

The good news is that being a good writer and being a good businessperson can be easy. It just takes practice, until the basic business work of writing becomes second nature. Until then, console yourself with the knowledge that you really have no alternative— at least not if you want this career.

It's important to understand that pitching a story to a publication, web site, or television series (we'll look at book pitching later) is not just a matter of sending an email or letter suggesting they buy your idea. It is, in fact, a multistage process— one akin to military planning or preparation for an athletic competition. Let's look at each in turn.

Preparation

This step is about improving your odds of acceptance by giving editors at your target publication exactly what they desire. You accomplish that by learning as much as possible about the publication, its editorial style and congruence (but not overlap) between recent stories and the one you propose.

Speechwriting is among the oldest of writing professions, likely dating at least as far back as the birth of written language. Indeed, it's quite possible that some Neolithic chief or priest memorized his speeches— or had someone create them for him— in strictly pre- writing verbal form.

More than any other form of language, speeches have changed the course of history. We remember the words of great figures millennia after they were spoken, and more than any other form of writing those words still have the ability to thrill us today. Think of Cicero in the Roman Senate, Leonidas at Thermopylae, Lincoln at Gettysburg, Chief Joseph as he surrendered to the US Cavalry, Winston Churchill standing before Parliament in 1940, Martin Luther King on the National Mall. Even many of the greatest moments in other literary forms appear as speeches: the St. Crispin's Day speech in Shakespeare's Henry V and Hamlet's soliloquy, the Nantucket minister's sermon in Moby Dick and Tom Joad's exit in the movie version of The Grapes of Wrath.

Great speeches can turn certain defeat into victory. They can galvanize people to act or to steel themselves for an impending challenge. They can explain, appeal to duty, draw upon the conscience— and, in a few words (“Carthagio delenta est”; “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”; “that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth”), bring inchoate thoughts into a tight focus that everyone can instantly understand.

For all these reasons, the speech is often considered the queen of writing, and thus the profession of speechwriting an exalted one. But it also comes with sacrifices, especially in our age. In an older, slower time great and powerful men and women wrote their own speeches. One can picture Cicero walking slowly through a temple, using it as his memory theater as, in his mind, he attaches vivid images to every statue and fixture while composing his next speech to the Senate. Or Lincoln, sitting in the guest bedroom of a Gettysburg house, composing the famous last paragraph of his Address.

Before we can even talk about writing careers, we need to do two things. First, look at how to gather the raw material for writing— that is, information in its many forms. Then second, look at the nature of writing itself and approach that subject not simply as communicators of our native tongues, but as people who use writing as their professional livelihood.

The reason we do this instead of just leaping into the much more exciting topic of making money from writing is that to do the latter you must be adept at the former. And that is a problem, because few of us are taught anything (other than “go to the library”) for the former.

As for the latter— that is, our K– 12 English education— most of what we are taught is misdirected, mis- oriented, wrongly prioritized, and just plain dreary. The truth is that most of the best writers we know were terrible English and grammar students, still can't parse a sentence, and could start a chain reaction with all the infinitives they split. So, in the course of a few pages, we are going to revisit and relearn your first 12 years of writing education.

Don't worry. It won't take long, and we'll try to make it fun.

This book is about the work— the craft— of professional writing. It is written for those who make writing their career and those who hope to do so.

There's an endless number of books about finding your inner writer, about how to write elegant sentences and how to call down the Muse to help you pen your novel. This book is about none of those things. It takes as a given that you know how to write, that you care passionately about writing, and that you make— or want to make— writing the centerpiece of your career.

It is that commitment to being part of the unofficial guild of professional writers that informs this book. It is not your typical textbook. For one thing, while it has an explicit structure, it is written in a more literary style than you may be used to. It also contains stories and anecdotes, both good and bad, from my own checkered career. Why? Because when veteran writers of every stripe get together, they swap stories. For the apprentice sitting in on one of those conversations the acquired wisdom conveyed in these stories is far more important than, say, the rules of grammar. They teach how to live as a writer: how to start your career, how to manage it and how to end it.

Central to this book is the belief that writing really is a craft. As such, all writing you do as a professional is the same, whether it is a press release or an experimental novel. Up close— which is where every writer finds himself or herself when writing— all writing is words and sentences. How much art you imbue those words with depends upon your talent and your ambitions. But first comes the work of writing: If you don't complete the task before you, you will fail. And you won't get paid. And you will have to find another career.

The craft of writing is about not letting that happen. It is about having the right tools and techniques to carry you to success and having the insider knowledge to guarantee that success over and over through the course of your career.

I am a college professor, but I am neither an academic nor a textbook writer. Rather, I have been a professional writer for forty years, much of it as a freelancer.

What is technical writing?

Technical writing is the careful use of language to make the complexities of technology and science— especially the application of the former and the understanding of the latter— comprehensible to users, students, professional peers and other interested parties. The applications of this writing discipline include explaining the operation and repair of products and devices, instruction in the use of a service or application and, in the case of technical and scientific papers, the sharing of new knowledge.

What makes technical writing different?

More than most other forms of corporate writing, and certainly more than writing for media, technical writing gives priority to clarity of communication over art and style. And whereas accuracy is vital for all forms of media writing— especially for all forms of journalism— for technical writing absolute accuracy is nearly an obsession. And for good reason: make a mistake in instructions for, say, the repair of an airplane engine, and the results can be catastrophic.

Therefore, those individuals who gravitate to technical writing are different from their counterparts in the writing professions, even from those in other corporate writing jobs. Indeed, technical writers seem to exist in a different reality from those counterparts, with their own training (there are far more technical writing programs than there for all other professional writing careers combined), professional organizations, conferences and seminars.

Because the priorities of technical writing are so different, potential professional writers who care most about writing, rather than content; or about style over clarity, would be well advised to steer clear of the technical writing profession or they will be doomed to unhappy careers. Conversely, writers who give priority to explanation, and to helping others understand, may find a comfortable home in this profession.

Types of technical writing

As a rule of thumb, technical writing takes as its province those tasks that involve a complex process or a difficult topic that must be transformed into a linear and highly organized narrative or series of steps that are explained in plain language mixed with accurate terminology. Thus, the most common vehicles for technical writing are texts that deal with the operation of complex systems (how to fly an airplane, how to operate a gas chromatograph), the repair of such systems (diesel engine repair) or procedures for working with a complex methodology (computer programming, surgery).

Being a professional writer means not just being a writer, but behaving as a professional. In other words, the writing is necessary, but it isn't sufficient. You must also be a businessperson as well— and if you intend to freelance, you must go still further and become an entrepreneur.

But even if you have a stable job as a writer at a large media corporation, such as a television network, you still need to keep records of your expenses, pay your taxes, stay updated on your tools and market yourself to potential future employers. If you choose to be self- employed you need to understand that you are running a business, with all that entails, including licensing, bookkeeping, employee tax withholding— and most of all, billing. Fail at this work and it won't matter how good a writer you are.

In this final section we look at the details of the work of a professional writer, from the “finishing” work of editing, to the business work of pitching ideas and invoicing and, finally, to the life's work of creating a happy and successful career.

Narratives are conclusions

A narrative is a collection of words, sentences and paragraphs that have a structure, a direction, and a start and a finish. It also has a point— a lesson or a piece of enlightenment or an increase in knowledge, or it advances a conversation or offers an explanation of an event. If your writing doesn't have that point; if it doesn't make some well- thought- out statement, then you are doing something wrong.

A question commonly asked by amateur writers is: Do you have to know what the conclusion will be before you get there? No, you do not. And even if you do have such a conclusion in mind, you may find that in the course of developing your narrative its logic will take you somewhere else. But what you do need to know is that you will reach a conclusion. That you will know that conclusion when you get there. And that the narrative won't be finished until you have arrived there.

Types of narrative—Narrative, being the basic form of creative writing, comes in a multiplicity of forms, fiction and nonfiction, and is as diverse as human culture. Here's a short list: