by David Kubicek
My strangest writing job didn’t have characters and a story. It had numbers and equations.
At one time in my career I was doing lots of writing and photography contract work. I wrote brochures and newsletters for businesses and took photos for a Nebraska Department on Aging brochure. One guy hired me to write a letter of complaint to one authority or another–I forget what he was complaining about. During the 1990s I copy-edited and inserted codes (for boldface, italics, etc.) into many CliffsNotes manuscripts and even wrote a Notes on Willa Cather’s My Antonia.
The Notes editor, Gary Carey (who told me he had a brother named Harry), asked if I was interested in doing a project that was out of my wheelhouse. I would be working with another editor because this was out of Gary’s wheelhouse, too. It was an entirely different division in the company. The project would be to write the mathematics section for CliffsNotes software to help people study for their General Educational Development (GED) exam.
I met with the other editor about the project and agreed to take it on. At that time, I still had a fairly good grasp of my high school math. I’d been rather good at math (except for polynomials) and had taken it every year although it wasn’t required for my senior year. The computer people at Cliffs would create the software–all I had to do was write the questions with four or five possible answers that sounded plausible, with one of them, of course, being the correct answer.
It was actually a fun break from working with words all the time. The only part I was weak at was the polynomial section. I had almost flunked polynomials in high school algebra because I could never understand them. To this day I don’t understand them. So I asked my brother John for help. John was a math whiz, and he got me through it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t offer to share my byline with him, mainly because I don’t think I got a byline. I haven’t seen bylines on too many multiple-choice exams.
In fact, I never saw the finished product. I turned in my work, and the editor was satisfied (it has been so long, and I only worked with this fellow that one time, so I don’t remember his name), and Cliffs paid me, so I assume that my work was used for the software. And although the company was sold a few years later, the software may still be helping students prepare for their GED’s today just as my Notes on My Antonia is still out there.
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