Is all writing copywriting now?

Nate Silver's piece on the New York Time's website, 'The Economics of Blogging and The Huffington Post' makes the following statement:

"I’ve also done a fair amount of uncompensated or undercompensated writing — there is certainly a time and a place for it, particularly if you’re trying to establish or re-establish your brand."

This conflation of reputation and brand is intriguing. It seems to me that if you follow this line of thinking it suggests that somehow all writing is advertising that exists to reinforce a writer's 'brand'. For me, self promotion has never been the point of writing and I expect many others would bristle at this conceptualization.



Bookmark this on Delicious

Edward Said on Inventio as reassembling

Therefore, one invents--in the literal use of the Latin word inventio, employed by rhetoricians to stress finding again or reassembling from past performances, as opposed to the romantic use of invention as something you create from scratch--goals abductively, that is, hypothesizes a better situation from the known historical and social facts.

Said, Edward, "The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals", The Nation, September 17, 2001 http://www.thenation.com/doc/20010917/essay/4


Bookmark this on Delicious