Those teachers, I gather, explained this rule as a way to give “color” or “interest” to your writing. It is not. The content professionals assert that readers have an easier time with consistent terminology. However, consistency can’t trump meaning. It goes back to audience and purpose.

Say your company sells dog food. Switching from “dog” to “pet” to “canine” to “pup” to “mutt” on a catalog page is likely to feel more forced than colorful, is not search engine friendly, and adds no meaning. Teacher: 0. Content pro: 1.

Now imagine you are writing (for the company’s blog) a personal essay about your evolving relationship with the stray dog your son found in the backyard and convinced you to keep. The animal enters the story as a “mangy cur.” You realize she’s “just a puppy.” You accept her as a “canine family member.” Finally she earns a place in your bed — “man’s best friend.” Now suppose, in addition, that the strategy of the piece involves using a narrator who remains unaware of the gradual shift in his feelings; the changing words clue the reader into what’s happening. Teacher: 1. Content pro: 0.

You can take writing out of artistic contexts. You can’t take the art entirely out of writing.

I have become increasingly irritated by the buzzword “content.” Gates’ words give me heart. He focuses, as one would expect, on commercial opportunity. What he does not do is erase the creator – and creativity itself – from the construct.

This essay speaks of three distinct phenomena and three corresponding opportunities arising from the precipitous drops in costs related to producing, duplicating, distributing, and storing textual, audio, video, and graphic material.

One is the opportunity for creators to become publishers:

“One of the exciting things about the Internet is that anyone with a PC and a modem can publish whatever content they can create. In a sense, the Internet is the multimedia equivalent of the photocopier. It allows material to be duplicated at low cost, no matter the size of the audience.”

Another is for suppliers – producers, publishers, broadcasters, and distributors – to operate at greater scale.

“But the broad opportunities for most companies involve supplying information or entertainment. No company is too small to participate.”

A third is for people with specialized interests to bypass “publishing” and simply share.

For example, the Internet is already revolutionizing the exchange of specialized scientific information. Printed scientific journals tend to have small circulations, making them high-priced. University libraries are a big part of the market. It’s been an awkward, slow, expensive way to distribute information to a specialized audience, but there hasn’t been an alternative.

These days, those ideas are hopelessly conflated.

Certainly, creators must learn to use the tools and navigate the markets of our time. In both cinema and television, for example, artistic innovation has followed technological innovation – from the talkie to the multiple-camera sitcom to CGI. However, “content development” will never replace singing, composing, acting, writing, filming, or drawing. That’s the case whether the purpose is fine art, entertainment, or marketing.

Gates again:

“Those who succeed will propel the Internet forward as a marketplace of ideas, experiences, and products – a marketplace of content.”

I think it’s no coincidence that the “golden ages” of film and of television came when the technology was new and enthusiasm was high for novel modes of expression and the ability to reach more people. Watch an old Milton Berle show on kinescope; you can feel the excitement. The ubiquitous buzzword “content” has become an indicator of a cynical vision: lots of people and companies making lots of money by bombarding the public with anything at all; lots of other people making money by facilitating the transmittal; the ideas, experiences, and products we want and need turned into commodities and creative workers into cheap labor.

Perhaps we should go back to the kind of language we used before Bill Gates’ essay gave us a new term to abuse, when marketers commissioned videos, corporate spokespeople wrote white papers or opinion pieces or columns, nonprofits sent out newsletters, researchers released reports, and the creative products of artists went by their everyday names — specific words that refer to the substance of what we make and consume.

I’ve learned two big lessons about working with content, though:

1 – Collaborating on documents does not require tracked changes. I was afraid to let it go. I’ve found my collaboration teams work fine without it.

2 – Somewhere along the line, people came to expect that everyone should demonstrate “power user” skills in every communication. In fact, it makes much more sense to get information down in the most minimally formatted text that will do the job, and have the last writer or editor ad the formatting at the end. It is ridiculous to have two or three colleagues in a row staying up late to make nice looking documents whose flourishes cause it to crash on the next editor.

“Work more and better,” Woody Guthrie allegedly commanded himself on the eve of 1942. More compelling than pursuing balance, simpler than following a passion, more self-determined than any quest for a satisfying “career.”

Here are three principles for making your work your own:

Your work is your work — whether or not you ever commercialize, monetize, or professionalize it. Paradox: take your work seriously enough and it will eventually pay.

Doing something for money doesn’t make it your work. Don’t exchange the right to define your work for a paycheck.

Be ruthless and clear about how you need to be compensated. What do you need from your job? Money? Structure to hang your day on? Social contact to balance solitary work? Beware of arrangements that hijack your reward system by promising you an identity, a social position, or a mission.

I am deep in the section where he talks about writing and language. His primary metaphor, a workman’s tool box. The earlier sections of the book describe King’s working class childhood, various dead end jobs, and his stint as a (low-paid) schoolteacher.

To my friends’ annoyance I often fantasize about being a plumber or janitor. I usually compare such a path favorably to certain prestige jobs I’ve held and hated (and that will remain nameless here!)

Truth is: I am a klutz with my hands and would probably suck at a skilled trade. I probably would also be bored. The source of the fantasy is that writing as an activity (including business writing) feels to me more like a construction job than like anything people do in cubicles and suits and matrixed teams.

In certain past career experiences, I’ve felt as if I walked in the door to fix the sink only to be escorted to a dressing room, asked to change into uncomfortable clothes, and then expected to adopt demeanor entirely foreign to me and irrelevant to my work.

I visited my high school for the first time in eight years, this time to see students perform the ten-minute play I submitted for the school’s one-act festival.

Employees typically get benefits – health insurance, shuttle buses, and employer-sponsored social and professional development opportunities. Though they may be employed at will, the assumption is that employees can make plans that rely on working with the company for the long-term. Permatemps are excluded from all that.

Consultants, contractors, and freelancers trade off those benefits for flexibility, variety, and higher rates. They usually control their hours, pick their projects, and serve multiple clients. They may be reimbursed for travel time. They can write off expenses that employees can’t, including transportation to work and some business attire. They can also write off the premiums for the private health insurance their customers don’t provide. Again, not so for permatemps.

The permatemping phenomenon even diminishes the advantages of old-fashioned temping. Jobs that were previously temp-to-hire become permatemp instead. There is less freedom for temps to take time off and move from assignment to assignment over the course of the year; agencies are moving away from providing that kind of staff because servicing permatemp customers lets them stay on autopilot.

My suggestion for avoiding this pitfall? If you want to be matched with a tough-to-find opportunity, work with a recruiter, who earns a commission or fee for matching you rather than earning a percentage of your hourly labor. If you just need to find a relatively routine gig, cut out the middle man. Supplement your personal networking with the same sourcing venues the agencies use: comb Linkedin for companies and contacts.

A final thought: These agencies’ cut is about a third of what they bill the customer – forever. You can probably hire a professional to polish your resume and Linkedin profile for under $1,000.