I started as a writer for the eSports site CLICKON this week. I was astonished by how easy the process was. I sent in a cover letter and CV, they replied asking for a writing sample, I sent it in and they replied with passwords for the website and instructions for submitting my first article.

The work doesn’t pay particularly well, but it’s an engaging job and thus far my editor’s positive attitude makes it an appealing one. It strikes me, however, that there is an extreme irony in the fact that I’ve found employment in the video game that I play in order to distract myself from my academic work (which I’ve devoted the better part of the last 10 years to perfecting) before that academic work has been able to get me job.

One of the more interesting aspects of the CLICKON writing is the SEO (search engine optimization) metrics that are used to adjudge writing quality. My editor has advised that I disregard these but in looking them over, I cannot help but reflect upon the challenges of academic writing, balancing thoroughness and precision with aesthetic style and accessibility often seems an impossible task. Here I reflect upon a paper that I site often, Sinclair and Grey’s Writing Differently, a paper which urges critical scholars to think carefully about what kinds of writing practice they employ.

SEO metrics raise questions around what kind of different writing we want and how a regime/coded system might realize and measure it. In simple terms, SEO metrics offer up an indicator of how well a piece of writing can be judged by a search engine and, as such, how likely it is that the search engine in question will find it and present it to someone looking for information.

In writing an article for CLICKON the system generated the follow review of my writing.

I am still in the process of thinking through what this means and whether or not it will affect me in the long term but already I am cognizant of making my sentences shorter, using subheadings, and trying to communicate in simpler terms. However, it is all too often the case that we don’t or can’t notice the importance of a system in shaping our interactions with the world, in determining the possibilities of our thought, until its influence becomes malignant. There is also a critique to be developed here about surveillance and control that I may return to in the coming months.