Practice makes perfect!
Acting on advice given to me at work, I’ve been practicing my journalistic writing style recently.
With more opportunities to write in a professional and technical capacity, more and more of my writing has been exposed people in my workplace. While receiving generally positive remarks, it has become clear that my style could be made more palatable for corporate consumption.
My forays into the world of corporate communication really began back in the summer of 2009. While on placement with my current employer, I was given the opportunity to participate in the organisation of a launch event for an offshore wind farm collector platform. Being exposed to activities outside my normal engineering remit, I met and made an impression on many people within the company’s marketing, government, and communication teams. We worked together to produce presentations, literature and visual aids framed within a gala event that showcased the business’ success in building what was, at the time, a novel and innovative structural solution. We were joined by coleagues, clients and partners from all over Europe, and the event was a massive success.
As I moved into the business proper, I settled down into a team following a year and a half on a graduate training scheme. Based on the reputation I had garnered both from my events management experience and my sheer volume of writing, I was given a task: Raise the profile of the group through a quarterly newsletter. No other department had yet tried this, so there was much interest when the newsletter finally did come out.
The publication soon attracted attention from not just colleagues at the team-level, but from directors and managers from higher up the business hierarchy as well. By this time, the communications department had been re-shuffled and streamlined, with a new manager who had earned the job from his successes in another part of the business. Seeing an opportunity to use the resources available, he called me to his desk and offered me the benefits of his experience.
I gladly received his advice, and have been applying the lessons he has taught me to my factual writing where I can. Most recently, I did so in writing a report for the company-wide newsletter on a recent event organised by our team. I’m not quite there yet, so you can probably expect to see more posts written in this style; As always, I’ll be very glad for any feedback you might provide!
M.
Please, please don’t use that ‘corporate’ style in your blog posts! I adore Elf Blood and I enjoy your writer’s voice. There’s a reason all the stuff that management puts out goes unread; it’s verbose and boring!
I’m genuinely touched, thank you! Perhaps Elf Blood isn’t the best place to practice and test out the corporate/journalistic style… But I do wonder if I can apply the structure lessons I’ve learned to keep my posts’ style while making them more interesting!
I know this is a story so things in the real world don’t have to apply, but wouldn’t all of them being exposed to such a traumatic change in pressure in such short amount of time leave them with some really nasty side effects or kill them outright?
Earlier on, the ruins were described as being in ‘relatively shallow water’, but I suspect you’re right; Certainly Mara, Mint, Cecelie and JL would probably be injured as their lungs collapsed under the crushing pressure of the water. I don’t think it would be INSTANTLY fatal, but they would require hospitalisation if they somehow made it to the surface. Helga, Rudy and Anita would be fine, assuming that they could expel the air in their lungs before breathing the seawater, as the pressure of the water in their lungs would match that of the water outside. Millie would be fine from a pressure point of view, but because she is a freshwater breather, she would suffer from severe poisoning; In Elf Blood’s rules, this manifests somewhat similarly to an airbreather breathing in a cloud of irritant gas, but in real-world rules her cells would rupture.
However, in the interests of storytelling, exposure to the deep water without acclimatising to it hasn’t killed them straight away…
Technically there shouldn’t be a pressure change. They swam down there with air in their lungs etc. and when they entered the place I don’t remember a pressure change/aclimatisation stage. Therefore to keep the water out (or minimise stress on the structure) the air pressure on the inside should be equal to the water pressure on the outside. So the water pressure shouldn’t affect them any more than going into a swimming pool etc because they’re already at that pressure.
The problem they do have is that a flipping Megatonne (equal to the volume of the room/facility) of water is landing on them. Without isotopic forces from a Newtonian fluid (like water) to support them they should be knocked out/squished from the impact. However as it appears the structure had suffered a gradual fracture the water simply pours in saving them from any sudden forces.
This is where having friends that can breath underwater comes in very handy