What do I do with my English major?

[LordShiva]

Strategy work with managements.

[TCO]

Hmmm...tell me a little more.

[LordShiva]

Market analyses, strategic planning, competitive analyses, capability assessments, performance benchmarking, etc.

[TCO]

Can you say which firm? If not, hint.

[Arrian]

You appear to be reasonably intelligent and, being an English major, you *must* know how to bull****. It sounds like Shiva's right. Hey, consultants like to make up new words (businesspeak, how do I love thee, let me count the Dilbert cartoons) too, so that should be fun for an English major. Help mangle the language

-Arrian

[LordShiva]

I'd rather not

We're small, though, around 100 people worldwide. You'd probably never have heard of us. But we celebrated our 25th anniversary in 2006.

[TCO]

Well never mind then. I would not know it.

[Odin]

Originally posted by Verto
lolz filosofy

[/asher]

"Literary Criticism"

[Provost Harrison]

Use it to go and get a proper degree!

[-Jrabbit]

LordShiva's on the right track, though you're a bit wet behind the ears to set yourself up as a consultant. The key skill you (presumably) have is writing. That -- and time to scrounge for clients -- is really all you need. First, get past "technical writing" and look at general business writing. Tech writing is the worst-paying, most boring area of business writing. While I do the occasional User Guide, I make a lot more cash and have a lot more fun in other areas. Examples:

Trade magazine articles. These can run anywhere from 600 to 3,000 words, generally using a viable news angle to promote a client's product within their industry. You treat it like feature journalism -- doing interviews, creating a narrative, etc. So while it's ostensibly a story about "designing a uniquely complex infrastructure for the hot new nightclub/city hall/megachurch," the point (to your client) is that the design firm chose his hot new technology/product to make it happen, and that will be mentioned prominently. Trade mags pay OK, but corporate clients much more -- for the same work. I started with the former and now do mostly the latter.

White Papers -- Much like authored articles, but more technical. White papers are designed to make a company look like an expert on a topic, and are usualy published on their webvsite as downloadable PDFs. If the audience is management and sales folk (as opposed to engineers), it's basically translating jargon to English. Hard work, but the pay is good.

PR -- Learn to write press releases. If you have a journalism background, it helps.

Website content -- This is the motherlode. Loads of companies have nice, big websites driven by content management systems (CMS) so they don't have to staff a webmaster. Inevitably, they either (a) fail to update content altogether, letting their sites go stale, or (b) decentralize content creation to their marketing and/or sales managers, resulting in embarrassingly poor writing, inaccurate information, random site areas getting ignored, and lack of a consistent corporate voice. You'd be surprised how many companies would love to have a good outside wordsmith come in periodically to create continuity and consistency for their websites.

I work exclusively via cellular and laptop. The world is my office (as long as there's a Web connect).

Obviously, getting started is the hard part. You might get your foot in the door with proofreading or editing services. If you live rural, you might look for nearby firms who have online stores. You might also donate services in-kind to local charities or your alma mater to help build a portfolio.

Just remember, content is king. If you can write well, that's really all you need to make a decent living in the US. You need a thick skin (because you WILL be edited, often brutally) and an ability to work alone (deadline-driven). But corporate clients tend to pay well and in a timely (30 day) fashion. So what care I for bylines and ego? That's for fiction work, the stuff that feeds your soul. This is different -- a mercenary game, plain and simple.

BTW, I left the corporate world less than 2 years ago and now make in the low six figures.

[TCO]

Explain this writing well thing...

[-Jrabbit]

If your client pays your invoice, it's well written.

[Elok]

Like what? It's irrelevant since I'm done with my education, end of story. But outside of English, you have various sciences (no talent for them), social sciences (far more BS than anything in English outside of lit crit, and not much more useful), foreign language (learned Spanish plenty of times now, not interested in being a translator), and business management (see the bit about consulting earlier in this thread). Oh, and also history, music, drama, and other things which are less useful than English from a career perspective. Effective communication is a rare talent, and I've heard that employers of all stripes are interested in English majors, but I don't know where to begin.

I don't have a great deal of fondness for philosophy, really; I just took a lot of philosophy courses since philosophy profs tend to worship English majors' writing abilities. After reading Kant and Aristotle for years, they begin to think that dense and illucid babble is the norm for writing, so anyone who can write intelligibly is a demigod. I noticed last semester that I only needed one more course to pick up the minor, so what the hell, I took it.

I have a fierce hatred for obfuscation, though, which would make me unfit for buzzword-tossing. My talents include picking apart other people's arguments, being abrasive and unsociable, and writing quickly without typos. I'm looking for a stopgap, really, not a long-term career.

EDIT: This was an xpost, addressed to PH's "proper career" jab. To clarify, I can write an essay on most topics in two hours, all in one go, and get better grades than classmates who took a couple of days. So the stuff -Jrabbit mentioned is right up my alley, I think. Now I just need to figure out where to start looking. Google?

[Fake Boris]

Originally posted by Elok
After reading Kant and Aristotle for years, they begin to think that dense and illucid babble is the norm for writing, so anyone who can write intelligibly is a demigod.

Kant is quite intelligible. Aristotle not as much granted. But that's beside the point. Your assertion about philosophy and profs is horse****.

[Provost Harrison]

Originally posted by Elok
I have a fierce hatred for obfuscation, though, which would make me unfit for buzzword-tossing. My talents include ... writing quickly without typos.

I'm looking out for an opportunity now to quote that back to you