It’s a question Friedman asks regularly in his book, and it’s fun to answer, so I’ll give it a whirl.

First a few a pre-flat inklings.

1990: I was an undergrad and working as a consultant and database designer for a small PC company.
Windows 3.0 had just come out. I’d been working there for two years, and I realized (as I started to use a mouse in earnest) that this PC thing was a whole lot easier than it used to be. I suggested that we should really think about a home user market (at that point we were mostly focusing on retail–point of sale and inventory control). There was this home security software and hardware and I had this idea of the PC as a "Fortress," securing the home and personal information. Anyway, for various reasons it wasn’t to be, but I struck me then that something was going to change. Of course the Internet wasn’t around, just a few lonely online communities. Two years later I’d be teaching writing in a computer lab. Five years later I’d be building my first web page. Had no idea then.

But it really hit home much later in

2003: My wife, Rhonda, and I had started a freelance writing business. OK, it was mostly her. She was working out of the home with our two kids, aged two and three at the time (sound fun?). We were on this website bidding for jobs doing editing and copywriting. The problem was that there were all these folks from Asia who would beat us to the bottom every time, and most of the customers on the site were looking for price. In the end, we did pick up a few clients who appreciated our level of expertise (though eventually the kids got older and Rhonda went back to work full-time as a community college professor).

Still it was an important lesson for me as a professional writing teacher. You can make a living as a freelance writer and/or editor. My sister-in-law does it. Obviously you need impeccable writing skills and the ability to produce clean copy. You need to work quickly and in a timely fashion. But your potential employers can get those qualities from someone on the other side of the world for a price way below anything you could do in America. Plus, if your in India making a couple hundred bucks a month as a writer, you’re doing well and happy to work at that pay scale. Here you’d be disgruntled and cursing out your clients. Hard to produce your best work in those conditions.

And this is true not only for strictly freelance writers, but ultimately the case for any writers, as Friedman details in his example of Reuters (or is it AP, I forget) employees in India. Writing is easily flattened (in fact one might argue it is the first flattening technology). You have to have more, which, of course,is what Professional Writing seeks to provide–not just the ability to write but the rhetorical ability to make writing powerful.

More than ever developing that rhetorical ability will be crucial to our students’ professional success. But then I think I’ve been saying that in a dozen different ways for the last few months.

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