What do you do at work, Daddy?

I have always made a living off my writing, just not my freelance writing. I've worked almost a decade in the newspaper business, and when I've not been in newspapers, I've done media/public relations. Which for me mostly means writing press releases and editing newsletters, brochures, etc. At Texas State I get to write some of the most interesting press releases... well, that's not entirely accurate. Technically, they're press releases, in that they're intended to generate buzz about the university in area and state media. But in fact they're feature stories. I write them like feature stories, striving to keep them away from the dry-as-dust fact sheets or overblown hyperbole that characterized so many of the releases I saw when I was on the other side of the media aisle. And I've been rewarded for this approach by seeing many of my stories run verbatim in area papers, or mined heavily for information and quotes by larger, statewide or even international publications. That's quite gratifying.

New Clean Room opens doors for Texas State students

SAN MARCOS – The new clean room in the Mitte Complex at Texas State University-San Marcos hasn’t even been open a year, but already it’s making quite an impression.

In just a short period of time, both bipolar and metal oxide silicon transistors--the first complex electronic devices ever created on the campus--have been produced, proving the lab’s capabilities. Transistors, the workhorse within a computer’s circuitry, are a mere half-micron across. To put that in perspective, the diameter of a human hair is 75 microns.

All the more impressive once you realize the students working in the clean room are just as likely to be undergrads as they are graduate students.

Read the entire article here.

If you don't think it's hard to cram approximately 16 tons of technical jargon into an 800-word article while making it both comprehensible and accurate, well then, you're welcome to try it yourself. This release fought me every step of the way, but in the end it turned out to be a pretty good piece. And that's part of the fun and challenge that makes the job so appealing.

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