what is professional writing
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1©Karen L. Thompson �Department of English � University of Idaho
What is Professional Writing?
At the University of Idaho
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English Major
Literature Emphasis
Professional Writing Emphasis
Creative Writing Emphasis
Teaching Emphasis
Students who major in English choose from four program emphases. Professional Writing is one of these.
At the University of Idaho
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English Minors
Literature Minor
Professional Writing Minor
Creative Writing Minor
TESLMinor
We also offer four minors in English and Professional Writing is one of these.
Broad Definition ofProfessional Writing
• Any form of written or oral communication—other than that produced or circulated as art. It is often referred to as workplace writing.
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Examples of Professional Writing
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Professional Writing as a Career Choice
• copy writers develop marketing and advertising content,• public relations communicators manage brand image and
business communications,• editors review/revise the work of others and plan publication
content,• technical writers collaborate with other professionals to
create/revise client projects and translate technical information to lay audiences,
• multimedia specialists create web authored content in a variety of media and across a range of platforms.
• the median salary for these jobs as of 2014 was between $60K and $70K (payscale.com).
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Professional Writing Courses at UI at the 200 and 300 levels
English 202 Intro to Professional Writing
English 313Business Writing
English 316Environmental
Writing
English 317Technical Writing
English 318Science Writing
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The primary learning objective:
• Learn and gain applied practice in how to enter and successfully communicate in professional environments.
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About English 202:Introduction to Professional Writing
• This course will introduce you to the theory and practice of professional writing and its functions in workplace settings.
• It is designed to be taken alone or as part of the curriculum for the Professional Writing Emphasis.
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About English 313: Business Writing
• Emerged from the communication needs of commerce, so it has a focus on interpersonal and intercultural communication from both within and without a business or organization.
• Students who take this course tend to be business, finance, and accounting majors but it is open to and taken by many other majors.
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About English 316: Environmental Writing
• Emerged from the need to express our relationship to our environment and to understand how language shapes this relationship in terms of ourselves and others (public policy).
NOTE: because environmental writing has this dual focus, it also includes art texts.
• Students who take this course tend to be majoring in environmental science, natural resources, and wildlife management but it is open to and taken by many other majors.
English 316 is offered through our Semester in the Wild Program
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About English 317: Technical Writing
• Emerged from the communication needs of inventing and using technology, so it has a user-centered design focus with an emphasis on developing a highly readable style that includes translating dense technical information to audiences with lower-levels of technical expertise.
• Students who take this course tend to be engineering, science, and technology majors but it is open to and taken by many other majors.
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About English 318: Science Writing
• Emerged from the need to communicate the results of scientific research, so it has a focus of disseminating those results to both expert and lay audiences.
• Students who take this course may be majoring in biology, chemistry, food science, plant science, animal science, and geological science but it is open to and taken by many other majors.
• NOTE: this course is cross-listed with JAMM318 and we offer it in alternating semesters with them.
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These categories are not mutually exclusive.
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Technical Writing
Science Writing
EnvironmentalWriting
Business Writing
• When a business writer analyzes data and presents it in a report, it is similar to scientific writing.
• When a science writer submits a request to purchase software, it is business writing.
• When a technical writer gives a presentation to a group of potential investors, it’s business writing.
• When an environmental scientist studies how audiences perceive messages about climate change, it is a form of technical writing (usability).
• Etc. etc. etc.
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Multimedia
Audio
Video
Interactive
Professional writing is created in all media forms and delivered in a variety of platforms.
Our professional writing courses will provide you with guided practice in producing these forms.
Upon successful completion of a course, you will have sample work that can be posted to an online portfolio to show potential employers.
Writing is a Problem-Solving Activity
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The project deliverables in this course (and on the job) are important, but if you learn how to produce them as tasks, you will not learn how to write well because the solution to a problem in professional writing is never the only available one.
Writers must constantly interpret writing situations and weigh possible responses to effectively meet these situations. That means the situations and products are dynamic, not static.
Understanding how writing is a problem-‐solving activity will help you develop writing skills that transfer to new situations.
Our Courses are Aimed at Helping You Develop Transferable Problem-Solving Skills
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If you saw the movie Taken, you know that the character played by Liam Neeson used transferable skills to get the bad guys and rescue his daughter.
We won’t be doing anything as exciting as that, but we will be working to help you further develop transferable problem-solving composition skills.
Therefore, throughout the course you will• Study concepts that are transferable to many
different writing situations and apply these concepts to complete each project’s deliverable (i.e. end-product).
• Think of these transferable concepts as sets of writing skills you are placing in a toolkit that you can draw upon after you leave the course to make effective choices in any writing situation. And the best friend in your skill-set tool box is rhetoric.
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What is rhetoric?
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The classical definition of rhetoric is the use of language to persuade.
Persuasion can be positive or negative, but in common usage, rhetoric has increasingly been defined negatively.
And, there’s a reason for that.
Plato and Aristotle from School of Athens by Raphael Sanzio (1509)
Negative definition of rhetoric.
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Because the art of persuasion can be used for --- let’s just say—not necessarily noble ends, the word rhetoric has a pejorative (negative) meaning.
This negative meaning is often associated with political rhetoric, where language is used to defeat another candidate throughdistortions, misinformation, or outright lies.
Modern definitions of rhetoric.
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A more modern definition of rhetoric acknowledges that it informs whatever we do with language.
It is how we use language to elicit any number of responses from diverse audiences and for a wide variety of purposes.
There’s just one more thing you need to know before starting the first project.
I don’t really want to read that report from you.
Don’t take this wrong but no one in the workplace wants to read what you write.
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• Solve problems,• Gain a better understanding of something,• Make effective decisions,• Plan work they and others will do, and• Create a paper trail for • and legal purposes.
Workplace readers will NEED to read what you write to:
This helps me.What a great writer!
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