Writer Job Duties

Writers often must do more than write; they edit, design and plan their work.laptop image by Angie Lingnau from Fotolia.com

A career as a writer can take many forms, from the writer who writes novels to the technical writer. While the output of each type of writer varies depending upon the audience for whom he works, many of the duties are similar. Additionally, writers work in a variety of job settings including as journalists, as freelancers, as novelists or as technical writers. For the aspiring writer this is good news, because it means that a writing career exists for just about any type of writing that a writer enjoys.

Writing

This job duty of the writer is the most obvious and counts as the duty on which the average writer spends most of her time. While many different types of writing exists---technical writing, fiction, non-fiction or poetry, for example---the basic job of the writer remains the same. She must arrange words in a logical order to convey a message in written form, according to the Career Planner.

While the writer's words may function as the "storefront" of his work, most writers spend a great deal of time working behind the scenes also. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, research and planning for novels, newspaper stories, technical writing documents, books or screenplays take their place on the list of the writer's duties. In fact, the average writer could not do the writing portion of his work without the research and planning stage. This stage allows the writer to assess what he already knows about a subject and research what he doesn't. In terms of the planning stage of writing, this stands as the time that a writer can meet with editors, make book outlines and plan the changes to a text based on the revisions he has made.

Editing plays an integral role in the life of a writer. Most writers write several drafts of a work before submitting a finished copy of the work to a book publisher, newspaper editor or web editor. The process of revision allows a writer to look at what she has written and make changes to tighten the copy.

With the advances in Internet technology, many writers working today acquire other skills that augment their writing like graphic design, photography and videography. These writers work in multimedia and can produce audio or video from script to recording, take photographs for online slide shows and create visual communication presentation with their graphic design skills, according to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics.