Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Cool in school, juvenile on the job market

by // 2 Comments

It's karma. Bad karma.

I have publicly lampooned bad cover letters written by young people. Such letters range, not too widely, from the impossibly callow—"I think outside of the box (without even realizing it)"—to the insanely overeager—"I'm wicked good at successfully multitasking."

And I have been roundly excoriated by readers, many of whom see my attacks on these children as mean-spirited. In my own defense, I have wanted to say, "I criticize from a position of empathy! My post-college cover letters were also impossibly callow and insanely overeager!"

But no one would have ever believed that my letters were as silly as the ones I was lampooning. Maybe I wouldn't have believed it myself.

Cleaning out my writing closet last week, I ran across a notebook containing the first drafts of cover letters written by the guy on the right, just out of college. Murryoung

It was the spring of 1992, exactly 20 years ago. I had graduated from Kent State University in December and moved to St. Louis to live with my girlfriend, who was working there, selling shoes. I soon convinced her that we should move to Chicago because I'd have a better chance of getting a writing job there and she could sell shoes anywhere.

I started buying the Sunday Chicago Tribune and answering classifieds.

Dear Sir, 

I am willing to bet that what you're about to read is the first scathing cover letter ever to come across your desk. Please do not confuse the mood of the letter with my general attitude.

At tender twenty-two, I have had it up to here with business. My experience with a single company has provided all the anger I'll ever need. I am a writer, so maybe you already understand. Let me explain, in case you don't.

The other day, I interviewed with an engineering firm [in St. Louis] whose name would only be important if the firm was unique. And if that was the case, I wouldn't bother with this commentary. I'll tell you the story.

The personnel director ushered me into his office … [here, a section is missing, literature lost to history; but the letter continues] …

Obviously, I did not get either the job or even the second interview, only a letter that told me I was "being considered for the position," which I received two days after the secretary told me that the copywriter position was filled.

Nothing I have told you qualifies me for a job at your agency, however I hope something I have told you qualifies me for an interview there. And I hope, again, that you don't construe the angry sarcasm of my commentary as being representative of my attitude.

I want to write for a living. I will do almost anything to achieve that end. What can I do for you? I look forward to your response.

But angry sarcasm wasn't my only rhetorical approach:

Ms. Belknap,

I am answering your advertisement in the Chicago Tribune; my interest is in the writing position, not only for the job itself, but for the goals of the Laboratory as well. As a recent student, I have a great interest in the learning and teaching processes.

At Kent State, I concentrated heavily on sociology and psychology, and recognized both the possibilities and the limitations of both fields; and, though vague, I think there is further connection between my knowledge and your needs ….

When vague connections are all you've got, vague connections are what you use. And my connections with the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory were vague indeed:

Dear Ms. — 

I write in response to your advertisement in the Tribune. The writer position is where my qualifications and interests lie.

What especially caught my eye was your commentary about the goals of NCREL: "bridging the gap between research and practice." As a recent college student (and a fairly recent high school graduate) I have ideas and opinions and feelings where all aspects of teaching and learning are concerned.

And although I understand my duties as a copywriter would not necessarily include the shaping of the organization's strategy, my passion for the subject makes the job all that much more attractive.

Lately I have been interviewing for various positions in the writing field, but I want to say I gave your's [sic] a great deal more thought and attention. (This, if I may admit it, is the fourth draft.) [A lie.]

Currently I am living in the St. Louis area, but can interview at your convenience, and plan a permanent move to Chicago within the month. You could accellerate [sic] that process considerably. I eagerly await your call.

That call never came—she was clearly intimidated by my willingness to shape the organization's strategy— but one of these letters, not in my records, did actually get me an interview, at Ragan Communications. Mark Ragan is the kind of guy who likes a brash young fool.

Mark's dad Larry, not so much. Mere weeks after signing on at Ragan, I proposed that I take over the column, on the front page of the flagship publication, that Larry had been writing for 30 years. "I'm pretty creative," I remember saying as the temperature began to plummet. But four years later—four hard years later—I did take over that column, at the age of 26. I eventually became editorial director there, and then went on to become the illustrious writer whose literary stylings you enjoy today.

So lookee, Young Graduate: Being fresh out of college is a desperate time—probably the most desperate time you'll ever know, and the one reason I would never want to be young again: You've got a degree, you've got some talent, but you have no experience, the economy is crap, and the business world has been getting along quite well without your bright shiny self for all these years.

How can you convince someone to give you a chance? Try everything. Hang in there. Try to keep calm, and remember you only need to find one person crazy enough to hire you. And for heaven's sake, don't listen to assholes who tell you your cover letters are weird.

If I had written sane cover letters, I might have gotten the job at NCREL.

And what would have become of me then?

And perhaps more to the point, what would have become of NCREL?

If your adolescent hates you, it’s probably one of these three reasons

by // 9 Comments

1. You are an asshole: An alcoholic, tight-assed, cowardly, mean, selfish and/or dishonest person who the child sensed from a very early age was bad news. Not much you can do about this.

2. Your child is a creep. Every parent knows it's not nurture vs. nature that makes a personality, it's nurture vs. nature. Children have trackable, consistent personalities from birth, and siblings are born as different from one another as Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. Some kids are Messrs Hyde. Send them to military school.

3. You are a kind, smart, sensible person, and your child turned out very much the same way. And the child, now 14 and 15 and 16 and 17, can't figure out why it is that you still think you know so much more. You tell the kid, "I've forgotten more than you ever knew." The kid says, "No Dad, you've forgotten more than you ever knew." And the kid really does have about 97 percent of the knowledge, the wits, the moral clarity to required to make so-called "adult" decisions. (Even as an adult, don't big decisions feel exactly like it felt when you decided to take your first hit of grass? Equal parts thrilling and crazy?)

What you know is that the remaining three percent of knowledge acquisition is crucial intellectual and emotional sanding and fine sanding and rubbing and polish and varnish, and it takes years and years and years. You get some of it in college and more of it in your twenties and some of it in your thirties, too.

But how could an adolescent understand that? It's a really weird fact of life, and there's really no way for the kid to use the information. My dad used to say, good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from using bad judgment. But of course I had to learn it for myself, over his dead body.

And it's self-serving and mean-sounding for an adult to claim or imply (as adults usually do): Yeah, you've built quite a crackerjack mind for yourself in 15 years, squirt. I bet you think you're really clever. But it'll be another 15 years before anyone in their right mind would put you in charge of anything more complicated than a lemonade stand.

I remember laughing when my old boss Larry Ragan scrawled on a card at a company party celebrating my wedding, at 25, "Wait 40 years. Then you'll know something about love."

Seventeen years later, I'm not laughing anymore. I'm waiting impatiently for more knowledge to reveal itself.

I live in dread of the moment Scout looks at me with those contemptuous eyes that say, "I don't believe you. You're a hypocrite. You're pathetic. I'm smarter and stronger and more honest than you. How dare you tell me what to do?"

Maybe I'll sigh, and tell her to read my blog. And she'll roll her eyes. And so on.

What was it really like to be a communicator back in the day? What is it really like today?

by // 5 Comments

The illusion of progress is lucrative, in the communications business as everywhere.

"Everything has changed. Oh, you didn't know that? I can show you the way."

So when consultants talk about the stone age of communication, I'm always suspicious that maybe the stone age felt a lot like the modern age.

The other day I found myself rereading a personal memoir written by Ragan Communications' late founder Larry Ragan, and I came across a time capsule. He's writing about his first communication job, editing the employee newspaper at the Chicago plant at Ford Motor Comapny, from 1953 to 1957.

Judge for yourself how much has changed and how much has remained the same.

Interviewing for the job at Ford, I was told that the pay was $400 a month. That seemed like an astonishing sum of money; I had been getting $250 or $275.

But—wonders piled upon wonders!—a cost-of-living allowance was paid every three months, and that amounted to $130 a quarter.

Rich at last! Or so it then seemed.

My job was to edit an 8-page monthly tabloid-size newspaper. It was one of 30 similar Ford newspapers across the country. Although I did some writing—safety stories, retirement features, personality profiles, inquiring reporter departments, women's page stuff, occasionally; at least half of the newspaper was written elsewhere, mostly in the headquarters office in Dearborn. We were also permitted to pick up stuff that the other Ford papers used. Besides, to eat up space, we used a lot of pictures, playing them big.

The newspaper was intended to occupy two-thirds of my time, the other third being spent as an organizer and coordinator of recreation activities for the plant's employees. Never was any one person less suited for the job of coordinating the annual golf tournament, the bowling party, the formation of a new bowling league, a picnic for employee children, and a Christmas party for them as well. It was awful.

I worked in the Industrial Relations Department. With me were Employee Relations, Safety, Suggestions, Benefits, Labor Relations. All those jobs were filled by men who had once worked on the line during the depression, some of them as far back as the twenties. They enjoyed reminiscing about the "old" Ford days of a hard-driving assembly line, of no-smoking prohibitions, Harry Bennett's goon squads, inability to leave the moving line to go to the restroom. Now "Young Henry" was running things, the grandson. He turned the company around and provided decent working conditions, with the help and pressure, of course, of the United Auto Workers union.

When I left Ford, I would look back at my experience and shudder. While I was going through it, however, I found the work undemanding and sometimes pleasant.

Why would I "shudder" when I looked back at my Ford days? Probably because of their dullness, their sameness, their conformity. We all began at 8 and all left at 5. Well, almost all. There was an unspoken rule that the executives, and most of the men in our department fit that description, however loose it may have been, were expected to avoid the wild five-o'clock rush to the parking lot. They usually stayed another twenty minutes, if only to polish their shoes or chat with each other. I never bothered with that custom (as I did in my refusal to buy a Ford, because we had a contact that presmuably would sell us second-hand Dodges cheap).

Everyone began at 8. No exceptions, not even the plant manager (2,700 people turning out one car a minute). Almost everybody left at 5. Most of the people with whom I worked there were older and of considerably less education. Once [wife] Jeanne and I went to a small party hosted by a co-worker and were shocked by the extent of the (there is no other way to put it) dirty stories that were a part of the evening.

Maybe what I craved was the possibility of growth, of meeting new people, coping with new problems, working to solve larger problems with others. Instead, I was isolated, on the far southeast side of Chicago, the city limits, working in what came to be a corporate cog that was unfulfilling and, ultimately, dispiriting.

Communicators, as they used to say in the English books, compare and contrast.