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This essay explores content, a word and concept now often associated with writing in fields including marketing, journalism, publishing, and technical communication. I present a definition of content appropriate to writing studies and explore a range of issues and practices that the content metaphor can bring to our professional, scholarly, and pedagogical attention.
To work with writing today means to work with writing as content. If, for example, you've composed in a content management system such as WordPress, you understand good writing practice to involve both crafting well-written posts and optimizing these posts as transportable, findable content, by applying categories, tags, and SEO (search engine optimization) metadata. If you teach in a writing studies program that graduates majors or master's-level students, some of your alumni are likely getting jobs as content strategists, content managers, or content writers. Though their rhetorical education prepares them well for such work, they 're likely creating document types you never assigned, such as content audits and editorial calendars. And if you read one of the many periodicals that have been remade in the last decade from print publications to cross-platform repositories of content, you may have encountered within its "pages" a lament on the shift from writing to content. In one such piece, published in the New York Times, the essayist and illustrator Tim Kreider seethes at the many "invitations" he has received to write online articles without pay, which Kreider links to a shift from writing understood as art to writing understood as content:
The first time I ever heard the word "content" used in its current context, I understood that all my artist friends and I-henceforth, "content providers"-were essentially extinct. This contemptuous coinage is predicated on the assumption that it's the delivery system that matters, relegating what used to be called "art"- writing, music, film, photography, illustration-to the status of filler, stuff to stick between banner ads. (9)
Although content is both ubiquitous and contentious, writing studies writ large has said little directly on the subject. I argue in this essay that if our field takes seriously the claim implied in a number of professions, including marketing, journalism, publishing, and technical communication-that writing has become content-then we can open up propositions about digital-age writing for deeper inquiry,...