Q: That’s great.

A: Fourteen years.

Q: Can you please provide a very brief description of your primary job functions?

A: Sure. My primary job functions include creating and writing all the content for our marketing material, so this includes flyers, brochures, product summary briefs – because we’re a technology company, and we sell our products through a dealer channel – so I create all the sales materials and things that our dealers use to sell our product to their end users. So it’s B to B to C, in a way.

Q: B to B to C – business to business–

A: Business, to business, to consumer.

Q: To consumer. Okay, great.

A: So I write consumer-facing pieces that you give to a consumer if you go to their home and you leave a flyer behind about the products, and I write dealer-facing pieces that are more educational, so talking about product features, and what it can do for your business, and that sort of thing. So it runs a gamut from 12-page to 16-page brochures, to one to two page flyers, to trifold booklets, bifold booklets. I kind of determine what that piece will look like in size, and work with the product teams to create that content. Ultimately, a lot of times taking really technical pieces of writing that a engineer might have written or a product manager might written, and in a lack of a better term, dumbing it down, for consumers and for people to understand who are not technical in nature. That’s one part of my job. The other big part of my job is communications aspects, so I do all of our outbound email marketing to our dealer channel. So any emails, which can include a monthly newsletter, and any product announcements, and program announcements that we have that go out throughout the month or year. So probably anywhere from two to three emails a week to our channel. They range from, like I said, different products and features as things come out, to programs and services that we offer our dealers to help them sell – so whether that’s training materials, or marketing programs that help generate leads and help them market to their customers, and just news and updates on the company.

Q: Excellent, thanks. How frequently are you required to write in your job? If possible, could you estimate in an average week maybe what percentage of your job requires writing?

A: One hundred percent [laughter]. Maybe if I’m being honest, it’s like 95 percent, and then five percent of that is maybe like data analysis and kind of number crunching, but it’s very minimal [laughter].

Q: Okay. And we sort of answered this – what forms or types of writing do you most often complete? I feel like, unless there’s anything– great. Could you describe the primary to which you write, and the primary purposes that you’re writing?

A: Sure. So I hit on this in my previous answer, but there are two distinct audiences. It’s our consumers – so this is anyone that may or may not be interested in buying a smart home security automation system in their home. I think as a company, there are three different target audiences that we push our messages to, and it’s new homeowners, new younger families, wealthy, older individuals who many have second properties, and then highly tech-savvy kind of middle aged area. That incorporates a lot of people, but that’s our consumer base. So the writing to consumers is more I would say copywriting, where it’s very short, succinct, to-the-point, high-level, “What can our solution do to make your life easier and better?” – and putting it all in those contexts. Then we have our dealer-facing pieces, which are for our dealer channel, so this is security dealers in my profession. The security industry ranges anywhere from small mom-and-pop shops all across the country, to really large national companies, so the audiences range. We gear most of our stuff that we write kind of in the middle, because a lot of our bigger clients are familiar with everything and have one-on-one access to training and resources within the company. They don’t necessarily rely upon having the product summary or the brief there that they have to learn from, whereas our small dealers, that is their only source of getting information. I don’t know if you need like demographic-wise, but it’s US and Canada, we have a whole other international team that translates for our international dealers which range all over the world. It can range in education level, I would say that probably that most older security dealers are not college-educated, so you’ve got to keep it very simple and easy to understand. I don’t know, is there anything else? Is that good?

Q: No, it’s perfect. That’s great. Were you familiar with those types of writing when you were a student in college? And if so, how did this affect your approach to them once you got into the workplace?

A: Sure. I think in college, I was more– I was a marketing major, so I was familiar with copywriting and advertising, but doing the kind of writing that I do now is very different from actually advertising copy, which is even more niche and smaller and to-the-point. But I would say in college, probably was not super familiar with writing a brochure [laughter]. If I had to think about it, I don’t think that was something that we ever did in a class. I think we talked about things that we would provide or do, we did mock advertisements, but I can’t remember specifically ever being like, “As part of the marketing plan, we’re going to create this collateral, and these are the things that are– and here’s a mock of it. Here, I’ve written something that promotes this,” or something. So that was very much on the job training [laughter].

Q: And how did you approach it, those new genres, when you got into the workplace? How did you sort of teach yourself or– ?

A: I think just by kind of being a consumer already, you see that stuff. For me anyway, it was just kind of copying what I had seen throughout my life, and being like, “Okay, well this is what a brochure looks like, or this is what a trifold looks like.” I’ve actually never gone into a company or job situation where a previous piece hadn’t already been created, so you could kind of look at what someone else did, or what the industry standard was, or what that company was typically doing, kind of go from there. Then over time it’s evolved, like I think if we were to look at something– security dealers like to use trifolds, which are a 8.5 x 11 sheet that’s folded three ways. So those are kind of like industry standard, that’s what they like to use; if you have a security dealer come to your house, that’s what they’re going to leave you. So I think if you looked at a trifold that was created in 2011 before I got there and one that I’ve done recently, you would probably notice that there’s a lot less copy and they just get shorter and shorter, and more high-level. Whereas before I think there wasn’t necessarily a marketing team in place, it was a lot of product people doing marketing functions, so they were writing as someone who is very passionate about the product. So they put every single detail and thing that they had been working on that they thought was important, without really thinking about the end user, and what is truly important to the consumer, and also that people don’t really sit there and necessarily read everything that’s in a brochure. When you flip through a brochure, you’re probably looking at the pictures, looking at the highlighted text, looking at the big headlines, and that’s about it. So that’s where you have to focus the message. And that was all just kind of learning through time. I think throughout my professional career I’ve also taken training classes that focused on copy writing, which, not in the advertising sense, but in just the general writing for work sense. So that’s helped too, to really ingrain that, like, got to focus on the short message sort of thing.

Q: Could you describe your writing process, including how writing assignments or tasks are given to you, how you prepare, and the steps you take from the start of the project to the end? And if it’s useful, you could pick just a typical project that you do.

A: Yeah. Well I think for me, the first part is getting the information from the product team, because nine times out of ten, whatever I’m writing about is usually feature or product specific to something that we do. So a lot of times if it’s a new product or feature, I’ll need to work with the product team, they put together what they call a product brief, which will kind of outline the features, advantages, and benefits of what it is, what they perceive the dealer pitch to be, and what they perceive the consumer pitch to be. So, of course, what they think it is versus what they marketing team might think it is could be different, but nine times out of ten it’s probably right. So looking at that, and then, I don’t know, I don’t have like a real process. I just sit there, I read the product brief, and then I just kind of hit go, and just start typing. I’ve been at Alarm.com for probably a little over four years now, and I think I’ve kind of standardized on the format that we use for everything. So it’s like, if I’m sending an email about a new feature, you lead with what it’s going to do for the dealer and their business, what it does for the customer, where they can get it, when it’s available, pricing if that’s something we want to include, and call us for more details or whatever, move on. So it’s kind of like this outline in my head that I go by every time. Same with product summaries, it’s starting with, “This is the product, this is what it can do for you, this is what it can do for your customers.” And then from the consumer standpoint, you think about what it does for the customer, and what is the main purpose that this is bringing. “Ease and comfort to your life, save on energy,” – and just kind of focusing on those key headlines with quick sentences that tell what you can do. Not getting into the minutia of how you need to do it, how you need to set it up in the system, what the devices are that you need to use, it’s just this is what it is, and why you want it. So yeah, I wish I had a better process, but that’s really it [laughter].

Q: No, that’s great, that’s great. If your documents go through revisions or multiple drafts, how do you approach making those changes or improving the piece from one draft to the next?

A: So oftentimes, and I’ve worked in two different companies that I’ve done a lot of writing for, and most companies have a very different process when it comes to review and revision. The first company that I worked for previous to Alarm.com, you had your draft, you had a list of people that it needed to review, and it routed around to everyone that needed to review, and everyone marked up the same piece. Then you got them back, all the edits, and you had to go line by line and decide whose edits you’re going to take and whose edits you’re not going to take. Some made more sense, some don’t, it’s very subjective, I guess is the right word. Then ultimately you– I just remember picking sometimes or being like, “Ah, that doesn’t make sense but I’m going to go with this.” And then clean up the draft, and then it’s usually a final review for the key decision-maker, usually my boss. Alarm.com is a little different because the revision process is, I write it, and then I send it to the product team, they review it, give me their edits. Then I send it to someone else on my team to just proofread, and then I’ll make their edits. And then I’ll go back and then give the final to my boss, who will then review and sign off. But then she’ll have edits, and then make those edits, and then it’ll be final. So it’s very long and it’s a very difficult process, and sometimes you feel like what you end up is a bastardization of what you started with, but you just have to not be married to your words [laughter].

Q: How long do you typically have to complete a writing project?

A: Well, it varies. In our particular company, in a technology company, we’re constantly evolving and innovating and we have new builds every week. So a lot of times–

Q: Sorry, could you clarify what “new builds” means?

A: So a build is, when you have a engineer-based company, a build is typically what will go into your computer back end servers to push everything live. It’s fairly common jargon amongst the engineer set, I just learned what it was when I started at Alarm. So every week there’s new stuff coming out, and it’s every Monday. I meet weekly with the product team to discuss their roadmap, and where things are, and dates are constantly changing. One thing you thought was coming out next week actually isn’t coming out for another month, or something you thought wasn’t coming out for six months is suddenly coming out in two weeks. So then you’re kind of scrambling, and that literally can change within the week. It’s really quick turnaround usually, especially for the email communications. I try and do things as far out in advance as I can because the review process, like I mentioned, is cumbersome, and I don’t like to rush people for review. But sometimes you find out about something and two days later, you need to send something out. Or it could be you have a whole month to work on something. So it really just varies on what it is and what needs to happen with it [laughter].

Q: What is at stake in your writing?

A: What is at stake in my writing – I guess the perception of the products to our dealer community. Ultimately, the email communication is how our dealer channel learns about what our company is doing, and learning about the products and the solutions that help them sell and serve their customers. It really is the first line of contact with dealers on a week to week basis. Some of our bigger accounts obviously have more touch points with their sales team and their technical representatives. Because they’re more putting on more accounts, they get more attention. But there are smaller dealers that those email communications are the only thing that they see from Alarm.com, and if they don’t log in to our dealer portal, they’re not going to necessarily even know what’s happening unless they’re reading the email. Same with the consumer-facing stuff, I mean, that is really provided to our dealer channel as an added bonus. We present our marketing team to our dealer channel as a full-service marketing agency.

Q: Can I ask a clarifying question? So it’s not that you are sending emails direct to consumers, it’s that you’re providing the emails for the dealers to send?

A: Right.

Q: I missed that. Okay, great.

A: So there is those emails, but I also send directly to dealers, but then we provide things for dealers. We provide email content, we also provide all the marketing collateral that they could possibly use. We have what we call our “marketing portal” for our dealers, they can go on, select a trifold, throw their logo on it and their information, print it out, and they have a trifold brochure that they didn’t even need to do. You basically don’t need a marketing or sales person to start a security company with Alarm.com, because you can just use us. We’ll give you a website, we’ll give you email, we’ll give you collateral, we’ll give you a mobile app to go sell, and you go do it. We’re giving you all the things that you need to do to sell what we’re producing. So yeah, I don’t know if that answered the question.

Q: It does, it does, yeah. The next question you’ve half answered. The first part of it is who oversees your writing – so you mentioned your boss and the product engineers. Could you give a brief title and description of your boss’s role?

A: Yeah, so my boss is the senior director of partner marketing. She oversees our whole partner marketing team, which is solely focused on providing tools and resources for our dealer channel to go sell Alarm.com products and services.

Q: Perfect. How would you say your boss judges the success or quality of your writing?

A: [laughter] Million dollar question. I don’t know, necessarily. I don’t get reviewed on that. Her writing style and my writing style are very different. She often has a lot to say on anything that is written. So I don’t know how to answer that.

Q: That’s fine, that’s fine. Not knowing is an answer [laughter]. You mentioned earlier that you’d taken a couple of copywriting or copywriting adjacent training classes. Could you just tell me a little bit about any writing training you’ve had since graduating from college?

A: Yeah, so specifically one course that I took while I was at CEA (? 20:57), and it was called Content Writing for Marketing Managers, or something like that, I forget. It was like a two-day professional writing thing in DC. The guy was kind of cheesy but it had some good points about talking about being concise and using different words and kind of– it had been the first time I had had any education in that realm since college, so it was kind of nice to get some good tips and tricks for how to approach writing.

Q: Excellent. So what challenges did you face when you entered the workplace as a writer, and what steps did you take to overcome those early writing challenges? We talked a little bit earlier about, you said as a consumer you paid attention, and you looked at previous documents. Are there other strategies that you took to sort of orient yourself as a workplace writer?

A: Yeah. Well, I didn’t enter the workplace as a writer [laughter], I actually never considered myself a writer at all until I happened to fall into that position and became suddenly in charge of email marketing content at one of my previous companies that I worked for. It was very unsure of my abilities. So I looked a lot as a mentor to a older colleague that I had who also did– she was the contractor that did just writing and did a bunch of stuff with the website and stuff, so she would always– I would write things and she would review them, and give feedback, like constructive feedback, that I could actually learn from. It just kind of progressed from there. And I think with that, I just kind of gained more confidence over time. And then now, suddenly that’s most of my job [laughter]. Without really, I mean I do have a marketing background and I was a marketing major, but I will say that my training and schooling in marketing was not content creation heavy. At that time, this idea of content being king wasn’t truly felt and this idea of always needing to generating things on the web and for social and having all of this stuff wasn’t an idea at that point, so there wasn’t a ton of focus on it. Like I said, I was mainly in advertising and that was it.
Q: Excellent. Are you able to identify a change in your writing between college and now, and do you attribute that shift to anything beyond the feedback that you talked about and the class that you talked about?

A: Yeah, I don’t know, because obviously writing in college is so much different than writing in life [laughter]. I think maybe I’ve learned to be less wordy and I think I would probably be a little bit more long-winded probably in college, just because it seemed like that’s what you should be. Whereas now, it’s like, get to the point, I don’t need to flourish it. I even do that I noticed that in my emails to colleagues. I’ll write something and it’s like, “Well, I just wanted to say this about blah blah blah blah blah, and blah blah blah, can you do this?” And then I look at it and I’m like, “I need to cut like half of– Can you do this please?” [laughter] and you just send it, which is a skill into itself.

Q: Excellent. In what ways would you say you were unprepared as a writer entering the workforce?

A: Sure. Well I think in college I really can’t remember having a grammar intensive study in college. I went right into freshman year of school having passed through English 101 in highschool and just going straight to Literary Studies, which I don’t think had the same emphasis on grammar. I think there was like, you know, you got marked up on your papers, but you weren’t sitting there learning about different things. I don’t think I really ever took advantage of writing centers and stuff in college either, I just kind of wung it. I just said, “Okay, see what happens,” and just, I think, lucky me, by natural default, I was just able to make it work because I read a lot of books as a kid, and I honestly believe that’s the only reason why I can get through and it’s sort of grammatically correct. I’m sure I probably don’t have commas in the right places all the time, but halfway there. So I didn’t have any of that study in college, so going into the workplace, again, I kind of just write the way I speak. So for better or worse, that’s what you get [laughter].

Q: Okay, excellent. The last two questions: would you say you’re a successful workplace writer? Why or why not?

A: I would say I was successful just because I haven’t gotten fired yet [laughter].

Q: That’s one way to mark success [laughter].

A: And people come to me for writing advice and say, “You know, what do you think of this?” I feel like I must be some sort of subject matter expert at this point [laughter]. That’s probably not a great answer.

Q: That’s a perfectly fine answer. Absolutely, okay. And the last question: what skills do you think are most central to writing in your very specific role?

A: What skills – well I think having a decent sized vocabulary, and knowing how to read something that’s very technical and taking it and understanding it. And if you don’t understand it, knowing how to talk to people that do understand it and making them explain it to you in a way that you understand it, and then translating that. I think that’s a difficult skill and especially not something that is taught, because you need to have the personal communication with someone to be able to talk to them and get out of them what it is. Because sometimes engineers and marketers are two different types of people, and they think very different ways. So yeah, I think that probably helps the most.

Q: Alright, thank you so much.

Q: Excellent, okay. Could you provide a brief description of your primary job functions? We don’t have to get into too much nitty-gritty, but just the sort of overview of what it is you do as a realtor.

A: Well, I am a residential realtor, so I work on buying and selling residential properties. So I have buyer clients and I have seller clients. For the sellers, I list their house and sell it; and buyers, we go looking at houses and find one and once we get it under contract, we go through the whole process with the attorney and inspections and all that stuff, and then when we’re all done, we have a closing and they go to the courthouse to record the deed, and they own the house.

Q: Excellent, okay. Great, thank you. Can you describe the primary audiences to which you write and for what purposes?

A: I have two main audiences: clients and other realtors. So when I’m having a transaction with somebody and I’m representing either the buyer or the seller, on the other side is another person who’s represented by a realtor, and that realtor and I do the talking. So that’s really the two types of people that I deal with. Are you looking– what else did you ask?

Q: What is the purpose of those kinds of written communications, most often?

A: So with the buyer, it’s helping them look for a house, getting them information, finding out about what they liked or didn’t like about certain houses and it’s all a way for me to kind of fine-tune what they want. And then when they go under contract, there’s a ton of questions like, “Do you want a survey? Do you want to get an inspector? Do you want a pest inspection? Do you know what radon is?” –  it’s all this stuff. So I’m sending them information, educating them about things, and then they need to make a decision on what they want to do. So with clients, that’s a lot of what is happening throughout the whole process. With the other realtors, sometimes it’s informational like, “Can you tell me how long the roof has been on the house?” and sometimes it’s a negotiation thing, like I say, “My client offers $200,000,” and they say, “We won’t take less than $210,” and I say, “$205,” and those type of things. The way that it works when you put an offer on a house, your initial offer you fill out an offer form, an offer letter. It’s this long legal form, made by the Real Estate Commission and the state bar association, and you fill it out and you send it in. So that’s when I say, “We’ll offer $200”. If they come back and they say, “We want $210,” or something, that part is done verbally or either on the phone or email and sometimes even texting. So I’ll talk to my client and say, “Can you do $210?” and then they say, “Yeah, that sounds good,” so I let the other realtor know, “Yeah, they can do it”. So there’s that negotiation. And once the house is under contract, when they do an inspection and they find things that need to be repaired, and we ask the seller to do it, that’s another negotiation. They can say, “yes, no, we’ll do half of it,” blah, blah, blah. So I would say kind of informational, negotiating, and kind of educating and advising people.

Q: Great, great, perfect. What forms or types of writing or kinds of documents do you most often complete? So you talked a little bit about that initial form and emails, are there any other types of writing, types of genres of documents that you work with often? Or are those pretty much limited to those?

A: Well, there are a ton of legal documents throughout the whole process. Since I’m not an attorney, I’m not allowed to write any language in those documents. I am allowed to fill them out and I’m allowed to explain them to people. So a lot of that is sitting down with this 13-page offer letter and explaining to the people, before they sign it, what it all means. So I’m not actually writing anything there, but I’m usually telling them that verbally. But, you know, if somebody’s out of the country or something, which happens sometimes, I can do some of that on email, but that can be like an hour-long conversation, so it would be rough on email. So that’s one, these legal forms. And then a bulk of my writing is just emails to and from the attorney, the listing agent or the buyer’s agent, and my clients – tends to be the bulk of it. So I’m dealing with them a lot. Sometimes we do text, sometimes we do Facebook Messenger, it really depends on whatever the client feels most comfortable with, and then I have to use that method, because that’s how they like to receive their information. So part of my job is figuring that part out, like, do they want me to have them come to the office and sit down and I talk to them and show them? Or do they just want a phone call, do they want text, do they not want any explanation, they just want to sign the thing? And then, as far as written communication outside of those people, I’m doing certain things like, when I list a house in MLS, there’s a part that says “agent remarks” and “remarks”, and that’s where I say, “Come see this beautiful two-bedroom cottage, nestled amongst the Eno River, and close to downtown shopping,” and blah, blah, blah and stuff like that. So you have that kind of thing, and sometimes that writing will get repeated in other things, like I might do a flyer for an open house and I’ll just use that paragraph again. There’s that type of stuff too. I mean, that’s the bulk of it really.

Q: Great, okay, awesome. Were you familiar with any of these types of writing when you were a student?

A: Well, email and texting didn’t exist, so no. We didn’t do anything in school with phone calls or really any type of verbal communication. I remember I took one speech class, it was like, Public Speaking 101, or something like that, and that was– I was in there for a semester, and that’s all I ever had. So everything that I’ve learned has been just through experience and on the job, just doing it for years.

Q: Okay, great. How frequently are you required to write, and if possible, could you estimate in an average week, maybe what percentage of your job requires writing?

A: I write every single day, seven days a week, could be five in the morning, could be midnight, doesn’t matter. There’s certain times that things have to be done and you just have to do them. As far as the percentage of my day spent writing, probably about a third or so, I would say. Probably about a third writing, and then a third dragging around and showing people things, and a third shuffling papers and dealing with contracts and stuff like that.

Q: Gotcha, okay. Could you describe your writing process, including how writing tasks sort of come to you, what steps you take from the start of the project to completion? And I know this will vary a little bit depending on what kind of thing you’re writing, but let’s maybe start with emails. What is the writing process like for that?

A: Well, one thing I always try to do is think about who my audience is. I’m a realtor, I want people to feel comfortable with me. So if somebody writes me and they’re a friend of one my hip friends downtown, and they’re also 25 to 30 years old, and they say, “Tell me a little bit about yourself,” then I would say, “I love Durham, I go to Motorco all the time, and Fullsteam Brewery, and Ponysaurus, and we go out to this restaurant and see live music over here,” and that’s how I kind of deal with it. If it’s a little old lady who lives in the country here, that is a, “Dear Mrs. blah, blah, blah,” and much more formal, and usually would be more likely to need a face-to-face meeting. I even dress differently for customers, because if I wear a suit to some young hipster, he’s going to think I’m a nerd [laughter], and if I wear a jeans to a little old lady’s house, she’s going to think I’m a child, or something like that. So, it’s part of the whole– writing and how I write to them and how I phrase things and all of that is just dependant on who my audience is.

Q: If your documents go through changes, how do you approach those changes? Is there a drafting process with those emails, or is it a sort of, you write it once, it’s gone?

A: Certainly with emails and texts, you write it and it’s gone. It’s important for me not to look like an idiot [laughter], it helps me in my job. So, I try not to have– I’m a pretty good speller in general, but if I see any– well, let me back up. I’m a good speller, but I do a lot of typos, and so I have to go back and make sure– I reread everything once before I send it, just to make sure it’s saying what I want it to say, because I have misspelled words in the past, and I’ve also just done dumb things, just like wrote the wrong, totally unrelated word because I was thinking about it. So it’s really a lot of proofreading, as far as that goes. I even do that with texts. I don’t use textspeak too much, I generally write in sentences. Yeah, does that answer your question?

Q: Definitely. Yeah, perfect, thank you. Does anyone oversee your writing?

A: No, except for the people who receive it [laughter], because they’re– I don’t really have a boss in this job, except for if I do something wrong, I could get sued or I could get into legal trouble, or trouble with the Real Estate Commission. So there’s that to think about. But then beyond that is how does my client receive it, and I am communicating what I need to communicate? Because if I don’t, that can come back to bite me later on. If they misunderstood something and they signed an offer letter they didn’t mean to sign, that can go down a bad road pretty quick.

Q: Yeah, that actually leads perfectly into my next question, which is, what is really at stake in your writing? So that’s certainly a big thing, are there other things at stake that you could identify?

A: Yeah, for instance, realtors have to disclose anything that they know that is majorly wrong with the house. So, let’s say I was selling a house and it was the middle of summer, and I knew the heater didn’t work. I couldn’t just not tell people – I have to tell them. I have to say, “Oh, by the way, the heater doesn’t work”. If I don’t tell them that, and they buy the house and then winter comes around and they turn on the heater and it doesn’t work, they could come back and they could sue me personally. I could lose my license for certain infractions; I could get fined by the Real Estate Commission. And so what I say could really be helpful, or it could hurt me if I say the wrong thing. So there are times when I’m not sure about how to respond to something, legally. That’s when I can go ask the person in charge of our office or one of the other long-time agents, like, “Hey, what would you recommend I say here? I don’t want to get myself into trouble, I don’t want to break any laws, I just,” you know. So that’s probably the closest I get to a peer review – it’s just going over stuff with experienced agents.

Q: Could you give me an example of a situation like that? Like when you say a potentially legal situation that you’re not sure how to handle, is it some things such as, “Is this a big enough deal that I have to disclose it?” like an issue with a house, or are there other issues that come into play there?

A: Yeah, so for instance, I have a house that is listed and it’s in a really low part of the water table, and the town runoff goes through their back yard. When it rains a lot like during a hurricane or something like that, that water rises, and it’s actually flooded part of her house before. So she had to pay to get that fixed – spent thousands of dollars putting in drains and stuff like that, but because she’s so low, it’s still wet underneath the house. So my question is, I don’t have to disclose things that used to be wrong, like I don’t have to tell people that the house floods if she paid to fix it. But, my question to my boss was, “But it’s still wet under there, it isn’t necessarily from the flooding, it’s from something else. What do I have to tell them?”. So I was kind of a little unsure about that. She told me that it would probably be a selling point to disclose the work that you have done, and feel free to tell them about the problems in the past and tell them you’ve solved it, and explain why it’s still wet now. So, I think the answers tend to often be– if you ever think you’re hiding something, it’s probably a good idea just to tell them.

Q: Got it, okay, that makes a lot of sense. So because you don’t have a boss, this next question is a little bit different than it might be for someone else. But how would you say that the success or quality of your writing is judged? Or maybe, how do you judge the success or quality?

A: Well, how I judge it is if can get my point across in a way that is not too verbose, kind of straight to the point. People don’t read that closely, especially in email and especially in text, so I can’t bury the good information. So sometimes if I have two important things to ask a client, sometimes I will ask them one in an email, and a couple minutes later, send them a second email with the other question in it. Because if I list multiple questions, sometimes they’ll answer the first one and then then they never answer the rest. And texting, I found out, you can’t ask two questions in the same text. You can’t say, “How are you doing today? When are you coming to see me?”. They’re going to write back and go, “I’m doing fine!” or, “I’ll be there on Tuesday!”, but they will not  [?19:13]. And then, my clients often, when the process is all over, they give me recommendations. The thing that I keep seeing over and over is, “Steve is so helpful, he explained things to us, made a lot of sense, he took this process that we didn’t know anything about and he made it easy,” – so that’s kind of how I judge myself. Because at the end of the day, if my clients are happy, then I’m fine.

Q: Great, okay.

A: But if they’re unhappy, I’m not.

Q: Right, okay, that makes perfect sense. Have you had any training that is specific to writing since you’ve graduated from college?

A: No [laughter]. Except having a wife who’s a college English professor, and will tell me if I do something wrong, but yes.

Q: [laughter] It’s its own kind of training, okay, perfect. Do you do anything to prepare to write? This sort of goes back to that question about your writing process, but is there anything that you do in preparation to sit down and write?

A: Not too much, really. Of course, there’s certain topics where, for instance, if I’m explaining to somebody in an email the good and the bad and the ugly from their inspection report, I’m going to have to have that report with me and reference it, and then I comment on it and then I attach it to the document, or something like that. But no, I’m kind of– in this business you have to respond very quick, and that means you might not be home, you might be on vacation, you might be whatever. So just being quick and clear, and answering their questions in a most succinct way as possible is what works.

Q: Gotcha, and that sort of speaks to my next question – how long do you typically have to complete a piece of writing for your job? You said “pretty quick” – what does pretty quick look like, on average?

A: Usually just minutes. I don’t ever write anything and set it aside and come back to it later. Even when I’m listing a house, that paragraph about how great the house is – that isn’t something that I work on, really. I sit down and then I just write it, and then I read it over and I edit it, and then it’s done.

Q: Perfect, great. What challenges did you face when you entered the workplace as a writer? Are there ways in which you felt particularly prepared or unprepared?

A: When I very first entered the workplace, the communication was all phone, and I was very uncomfortable with that. And then email came about and I was really comfortable with email, and could really be clear and thoughtful and all of that stuff in an email much better than I could talking. And then when it came to texting and stuff – half the time I don’t even know what people are saying to me, because they use so many abbreviations, but I look it up and figure it out [laughter]. I don’t know if that answered the question?

Q: It does, it does, yeah. And do you face any challenges in your workplace writing now, beyond what we’ve talked about, sort of the timing issue and things like that?

A: Well that paragraph that I write about why the house is great – after you’ve done this dozens and dozens and dozens of time and you see houses all day long every day, it’s kind of hard to make that paragraph very interesting [laughter], or unique, or just something so that people will pay attention. It really tends to end up being less flowery and more fact-based, like “new roof, new water heater” – like that kind of almost like bullet points. I feel like we’re getting closer to the point in our society where everybody just wants bullet points for everything, whether you write them out or talk them or text them, or whatever.

Q: Yeah. Are you able to identify a change in your writing style between college and now, and if so, what do you attribute that change to?

A: What’s interesting is that when I was in college and before college, I didn’t really have a writing style at all. I did the five paragraph essay in highschool, and I wrote the term papers, but didn’t really do much beyond that. And it wasn’t until I got out and especially when– I used to be big into those email listservs, like on music, or whatever, and I would meet a lot of people, and we would write all day long. I’ve never had any training, but just the constant, for maybe 27 years now, of constant reading, responding, writing, over and over and over, I mean you just get better at it, it’s just [laughter]. But I don’t really think– the only thing that I feel like school, including college, taught me was just the groundwork, the basics, like grammar, spelling, how to form a sentence correctly. Because like I said, when I’m talking– if somebody from an English professor from Duke calls me up, I better at least spell my words right [laughter].

Q: Okay, and other than– you sort of referenced paying a lot of attention to emails that came across listservs and things like that, and sort of seeing– so are there other practical things that you think you’ve done since you’ve been in the working world to overcome writing challenges or to improve?

A: I think it’s just repetition really. I didn’t really utilize any tools or proofreaders or anything like that. Just kind of trial and error, and trying to figure out– for instance, sometimes I write postcards, and I send them out to a neighborhood, and I say to people, “Hey, if you want to sell your house, let me know, I’m a realtor,” basically. And there’s many different ways to say that and you can be long and verbose and say where you went to school and blah, blah, blah, or you can just be like, “Do you need a realtor? Call today!” or whatever. So you have to make those type decisions, and trying to figure that out. And sometimes with those things, you’ll phrase it in a way and you’ll get a better reaction. And then you’re like “oh, okay, I’m going to start doing that now and not the other way”. So, just a little trial and error going on. It’s not direct feedback, they aren’t telling me what they think about my writing, but it is feedback that I can use.

Q: Absolutely, okay. And two more questions – would you say you’re a successful workplace writer, why or why not?

A: Yeah, I think I am. People usually understand what I’m talking about, and sometimes these can be pretty complex. Like if I ask you if you want to get your basement checked for radon, most people don’t even know what radon is. So I have explain that to them, and I explain the pros and cons of it, and why it’s important to do it, and et cetera, et cetera. And I go through it that way. Did I answer the question?

Q: You did, great. And then the last question: what skills would you say are the most central to writing in your very specific job?

A: What was that again?

Q: What skills would you say are the most important in writing in your job?

A: I think just phrasing, really. I’ve talked a lot about trying to write succinctly and straightforward, so a variety of people understand them and all of that, and that’s what I think about the most. When I’m writing I’m not really thinking about spelling, because I can generally spell all right and all that stuff, and I’m not necessarily thinking constantly about the goal in mind, it’s really just thinking a lot about the phrasing, how I write it so it’s clear. And I guess I learned that from school too, probably, but it wasn’t from a specific class, it was just from doing a lot of reading and studying. But really, these years of just communicating with people in a written form, that has made my writing better than anything.

Q: Alright, thank you!