Why I’ve written more words about writing than I have about anything else

Last week I did a rough mental inventory of my personal output.

Blog posts, opinion pieces, LinkedIn articles, the stuff with my name properly attached to it rather than buried in a CMS somewhere.

The result was mildly incriminating.

I have written, at length and with apparent enthusiasm, about editorial judgment, AI content quality, FAQ performance, the future of the profession, how to find work as a writer, and what makes content worth reading.

I have written considerably less, under my own name, about broadband routers, WordPress plugins, personal finance, or any of the other things I spend most of my actual working hours on.

The person whose most substantial visible body of work is about the act of producing work is, I’ll admit, a specific kind of funny.

Why it happens

The obvious answer is expertise. I know more about writing than I know about any single topic I’ve written about for clients.

The WordPress knowledge is real but borrowed for a project. The understanding of why a piece works or doesn’t is accumulated and mine.

So writing about writing is the thing I can do with the most authority, which makes it the sensible place to build a visible body of work.

Entirely reasonable. Completely circular. Both things at once.

There’s also a visibility problem that shapes this more than most writers admit.

Client work disappears into other people’s brands. That’s the job and it’s fine, but it means the work that carries your name is almost definitionally not the work that demonstrates your range.

The rise of NDAs and simila4 agreements often means you can’t even mention the clients you wrote for. Which is a shame as there are some good ones in my history!

The email marketing article that ranked for two years and drove meaningful traffic doesn’t have my byline. The 800 words about editorial judgment on a quiet Friday afternoon does.

The record looks like I only care about one thing because the record only captures one category of output.

The expertise trap

Writing about writing is also, if you’re not careful, a way of performing expertise rather than demonstrating it.

There are a lot of people producing content about content who have produced very little content about anything else.

The meta layer is infinitely available because it requires no brief, no client, no approval process and no subject matter knowledge beyond the act of writing itself.

I’m not exempt from this.

Some of what I’ve published here is genuine working-out of ideas I’ve been sitting with for years. Some of it is also the path of least resistance, dressed up as reflection.

Knowing the difference and being honest about which is which, is part of the job.

The test I try to apply is whether the piece says something I’d have found useful, or at least interesting, when I was a newbie in the industry.

If it’s just articulating things any experienced writer already knows, in a way that mostly flatters the reader for already knowing them, it’s decoration.

If it’s making a call that someone could reasonably disagree with, it’s at least doing something.

What client work actually teaches you

The other thing worth saying is that the topic diversity of client work isn’t incidental. It’s where a lot of the useful material comes from.

Many years of getting up to speed on unfamiliar subjects, finding the angle, working out what matters to a specific audience, then writing something that doesn’t read like someone who learned this last Tuesday, that process is where the editorial instincts actually develop.

The meta posts are possible because of the WordPress or email marketing articles.

All the articles I create are better because of everything else. They feed each other in ways that aren’t always visible from the outside, including from my own content archive, which looks like a person who thinks about writing and nothing else.

It isn’t a perfect record. It’s a partial one. Most of the work is elsewhere, unattributed, doing its job.

This is what’s left with my name on it. Make of that what you will.

If any of this sounds like the kind of thinking you want applied to your content, get in touch. Low pressure, genuine conversation.