Maybe I am not as smart as I used to be.

As the lockdown began for the Pandemic, I began looking for remote copywriting work from home. My online searches required researching more than a few definitions for the bewildering number of new (to me) terms listed in the job descriptions. I have been a copywriter for many years, but now I am considered a content writer. That is just the beginning of the new vocabulary I am slowly getting my head around. In the 1990’s, we learned new meanings for bit, boot, chip, undo, memory and storage and thought we were savvy with dial-up internet on AOL and Windows 97. I was practically a genius because I knew Control/Alt/Delete and Copy & Paste. One bright spot in my search for work online is that I have received several very cordial rejections by email. I seriously appreciate being notified that they “have gone in another direction”, but wish me all the best in my job search. Nothing like a cheery missive about my unemployment from someone I have never met to make my day. 

Let’s take a look at the new language – which is really the old language reimagined for the world of the screen. The most frequent you will come across is of course, SEO. (Put the emphasis on the “S” and maybe he is a friend from another country?) Search Engine Optimization is not new per se, but is the metric now demanded for websites and Ecommerce today. Isn’t that a version of teaching to the test? Good search results become successful selling and are hence good grades for the writer of SEO content. In addition to SEO, there is TOFO, CPM, chatbots and SaaS. Once explained, these are not difficult to understand but who wants to let on that they had no idea that TOFO was just an abbreviation for the top of a funnel? The image of a funnel is used as a way to represent numbers of clients, buyers, readers, etc.

Today there are words that while I was asleep, became part of computer-speak. Words like python, conversion, drip, whisk and cloud may havemultiple meanings. Such as split testing that is not a test for doing a split. Or onboarding that does not require a ship and a global menu has nothing to do with food or the globe.

We live and we learn, and we adapt to a new form of literacy. So, I continue to allow myself to feel unsure and uneducated and to figure out the code. Literally. Me? I still much prefer a pen and paper to a keyboard. I have never had to be put on hold with tech support because my pen was wasn’t working. But since I never know when a job as a content writer might appear…