What Exactly Is My Job, Anyway?
On content, and copy, and communicating, and what you can get paid to write
I’ve been at a new job for about six weeks now, and I’ve been spending a surprisingly large amount of time telling people what exactly my job is. I get that most folks haven’t heard of a “content designer” before, and it’s not a role the company had before now, but surely my company should be telling me what I’ll do for them, not the other way around?
Anyway, it’s gotten me thinking about how there are so many kinds of writing jobs that are all slightly different from one another, so I thought I’d put together a guide. If you need to hire a writer but aren’t quite sure what type, or you’re building a writing career but don’t know what you want to specialize in, let’s chat.
One quick aside before we get into it: These are all writing jobs that exist in standard corporate America. We’re not going to get into the folks writing books or movies or TV shows or podcasts, or the industry-specific roles like grant writers, proposal writers, medical writers and travel writers. And journalism is of course its own thing as well.
So I suppose we can call this…
Office Jobs for Writers
Copywriter
When you see the term “copywriting,” it almost always refers to marketing. These are the folks writing emails, ads, direct mail and style guidelines for brands.
They typically report into a Creative or Brand Director or even a Head of Marketing. The vibes are “make our product look good,” “stay faithful to the brand” and “sell, sell, sell.”
Content Writer
Content writers produce most of the words you read on the internet. They write product descriptions for anything and everything, informational articles that you find while googling and anything else designed to ping a search engine’s interest.
In my experience, these roles are disproportionately freelance contracts.
Content Manager or Marketer
Content management works in the same space as content writing, but with a larger focus on the strategy of what gets published and when, when it gets refreshed and how well the overall website is attracting users via SEO (search engine optimization).
Content managers and marketers sometimes also write content, sometimes they don’t. A “Head of Content” role typically refers to this category of writing.
UX Writer
UX writing is incredibly nitty-gritty: Think error messages, the labels on forms and the words that take you through a transactional process like making a purchase online. While UX writers do care about performance, their primary goal is making the user experience as smooth as possible using their words.
Sometimes the term “UX writing” can be a little broader and inclusive of the overall experience across a website or app, but these days, that’s more often called a…
Content Designer
Both UX writers and content designers sit under the UX Design or Product Design team, and typically a company only has one or the other. But generally, when you see the term “content design,” it’s referring to the task of considering the entire user experience from a words-first perspective.
It’s deciding what information to share when, what messaging to prioritize and how to use copy to help users solve problems. Sometimes it’s honestly not that much writing at all and focuses more on strategy.
Content Strategist
So then what on earth is a content strategist? I have found this title can mean a lot of different things.
Sometimes a job description for a content strategist sounds exactly like a content designer; sometimes it sounds much more like a content manager. I had a job for years where we used the title “content strategist” but were functionally copywriters.
I suppose what a content strategist should be is a person who looks holistically at content across all of these functions—UX, SEO and performance marketing—and comes up with the best way to approach all of it. In practice, though, just read the job description to understand what a company’s actually looking for.
Content Producer
If someone’s talking about “producing” content rather than writing it, you can assume there’s a substantial video component, and they’re probably focused on social media. Content producers are often in charge of everything that goes into creating social content, from planning posts to scripting videos to filming them.
It doesn’t really feel like a writing job to me, but if you enjoy this kind of work, good for you.
Technical Writer
Technical writing focuses on producing documentation for technical occupations—often software engineers and developers, but it can also sometimes refer to hardware as well.
You usually need to know some coding to be a technical writer, which is a significant barrier to entry. Otherwise, the role isn’t terribly different from UX writing, just focused on an internal audience of engineers rather than an external one of users.
Communications Manager
If you see “communications” in a job title, it means PR (public relations). Communications folks write press releases and company boilerplate, but they also have to do a lot of interfacing with members of the press to get them to write about the company instead.
Sometimes they’re also responsible for internal company communications, i.e. how to best tell your employees news they don’t want to hear. This is another type of work I hate but some people thrive in. You do you.
It really does surprise me how fragmented the writing industry is, and we’ll see how the AI hype train shakes things up (even though AI is not actually good at writing). Maybe people will start considering the “AI prompt writer” a type of writing job, since you have to do so much work to write a good prompt for a large language model that you might as well have just written the work yourself to begin with.
In any case, I am excited at the growth of content design, because solving thorny experience problems only using the written word is absolutely my jam. If it’s yours too, I highly encourage digging into it more.
Did I miss any more corporate writing gigs? Let me know!