Prose Hacking

About the name

I was originally going to call the LLC I set up for my freelance-writing business “Prose Engineering.” My wife has an electrical-engineering degree, and I’ve used that phrase to describe to her the craft of constructing a headline or a lede. (Also, my dad was a chemical engineer.) Unfortunately, you can’t use “engineer” or a variation in your company’s name if you are not, in fact, a licensed engineer. So I had to find a synonym—which you could call a bit of prose engineering in its own right—and so settled on “Prose Hacking.” The fact that the matching dot-com domain was open helped too.

About the person

I’m Rob Pegoraro. To sum up my bio in a paragraph: 

Rob Pegoraro tries to make sense of computers, consumer electronics, telecom services, the Internet, software and other things that beep or blink through reporting, reviewing and analysis—from 1999 to 2011 as the Washington Post’s tech columnist, now for a variety of online and print outlets.

In a sentence:

Rob Pegoraro writes about interesting problems and possibilities in consumer technology.

You can read more about me at my blog, get a more detailed version of my resume on LinkedIn and see what’s on my mind at any given moment on Twitter.

About the work

My three regular clients at the moment are Discovery News (I blog about technology for this Discovery Communications site), the Consumer Electronics Association (I do one longer column a week on its blog, plus a monthly Web chat and podcast) and USA Today (I do a Q&A column for its Web site). I’ve also written separate stories for other clients, from Reader’s Digest to ReadWriteWeb, and am open to doing more. I also do radio, TV and public-speaking gigs reasonably often.