The Writer’s Quest Continues
When this blog goes for any length of time without an update it’s normally because I have succumbed to my tortoise-like nature and become incredibly lazy, but this time it’s mostly because I have been incredibly busy.
What follows after the jump is a brief summary of my last five months or so, what I have learnt about myself, what I have done and what I am doing.
I am earning money as a freelance writer
If you want to employ a freelance writer, please drop me a line on davidDOTofDOThingATgmailDOTcom, replacing the capitalised DOTs and ATs with their relevant symbols.
At the moment I’m probably not quite earning enough to give up the day job, which is a shame, because I gave up the day job, but that just means I need to find another day job in the near future.
I am now (results pending) a fully qualified NCTJ journalist.
I did a full time course set by the NCTJ (National Council for the Training of Journalists: An acronym that I still embarrassingly enough get muddled up whenever I say it) that finished a couple of weeks ago. I met some fantastically talented people there, some of whom will undoubtedly be the next big thing in your favourite paper, on your favourite website or your favourite news broadcast programme. The rest are probably sick of journalism right now and will need a break because the course is rather intense, unrelenting and tends to beat the journalism into you so hard that some of it will occasionally go right through and come out the other side.
Incidentally, if anyone reading this is interested in a career in journalism, do an NCTJ. You won’t realise how little you know until you do. I did mine at News Associates, who have centres in London and Manchester and although they are pricey by comparison, it is the first piece of education that I have paid for that I feel I not only got a good deal but probably didn’t pay them enough for all the work they put in.
Process Maps
A process map is meant to make a process more obvious by displaying it in a visual form. I occasionally have to do this in my current role.
Things like this baffle me:
A process map apparently can't just have two boxes. That's less of a process and more of an event I suppose.
This is not from my company and I’m not saying who it’s from, other than it’s from a regulated financial services firm, all of which are potentially facing some slightly stricter complaint handling requirements fairly soon.
 It seems mostly unnecessary. The obvious diagram for me would just be “complaint received” followed by “log complaint”, but maybe that’s just me.
I see this quite a lot at the moment. Documents that have a purpose and are a business requirement often take so long getting to the point and so much longer talking around the point that by the time they’re finished and published, nobody in their right mind is ever going to read them, much less update them. In fact, the only people that will read them are going to be regulators inspecting a business, by which point you have provided your own noose by producing process documentation that nobody has read, nobody updates and most likely does not reflect your current business practises.
All the same, inexperienced staff like myself look at these things for inspiration on how they should be doing things and feel their productions are inferior if they don’t have a similar word count, so the cycle repeats.Â
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