Hack-check: A self-test for professional writers

In my last post, I referenced Ragan's Corporate Writer & Editor magazine. I write a regular column in that magazine, and my April effort includes a self-quiz that I've adapted for speechwriters. It strikes me as just as useful for speechwriters as for any other corporate or political writer.

Here's the premise:

Writing in the busy-bee world of workaday business and political organizations is a hazard to serious writers who promised ourselves in college we would always take seriously the words we wrote. We would always devote ourselves to the truth. We would never become that which we'd been taught by our English or journalism professors to despise: a hack.

And so every once in a while預nd preferably more often than that謡e must do what I call a "hack-check." Answer the following questions as honestly as you can, true or false:

1. You often wonder what's the point of doing a second read when the spell-check will do it for you.

2. You'd rather make the PR VP's artificial deadline with a pedestrian speech draft than miss it in order to turn in something much better.

3. You take tremendous pride in always meeting the speaker's expectations to the letter.

4. When worrying over a phrase or a word-choice, the question has occurred to you: "Who cares?"

5. You can't remember the last time you stood up for an idea or a passage in a speech.

6. When you try to work on a serious writing project, you find yourself racing through it as if it's another bullshit ceremonial talk.

7. The first filter you use to decide whether to write a speech or farm it out to a freelancer, "How easy is it?"

8. When you read a great speech by another speechwriter, you think bitter thoughts. For instance, "I could write like that, too, if I was a selfish drunk."

9. When you read the old pro's quote, "I'm better than writers who are faster than me, and faster than the writers who are better than me," you are filled with admiration.

10. Everything you write these days seems to wind up as some kind of numbered list or some kind of bogus "quiz."

Here's the answer key:

If you've answered none of these questions "true," you are either a big fat liar, or you are not making any kind of a living as a writer. If you have answered every one of these questions "true," you have become a hack, and your only recourse is to be the very best hack you can be.

And if you're somewhere in between, you're in just the tenuous territory every corporate writer finds him- or herself in葉he financially safe but intellectually dangerous place where, if we're lucky and careful, we'll spend the rest of our careers.