Professional Writing

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This graduate course explores professional writing in our digital age. Designed for potential researchers, teachers and even practitioners of professional writing, this course will help you master the theories, strategies and common practices of 21st-century workplace writing. We will hear directly from top corporate and non-profit leaders, while also reading, discussing and writing about the latest research in the field. Options for your final project will include an authentic assignment for a local non-profit as well as a potential conference paper on professional writing. Throughout this course, we’ll explore how the approaches you have mastered as graduate literature students apply to teaching, researching and practicing non-academic writing. Specific lines of inquiry will include the following: ● How have professional writing theories and strategies evolved to meet the needs of an increasingly globalized workplace in which Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn are more relevant than the interoffice memo? ● Can key literary theories about readers, including reader-response theory, help us understand the complex roles of audience in a world of approval processes, stakeholders and audience profiling? ● Can narrative theory help us understand, teach, and perform organizational storytelling in such genres as business case studies, legal briefs, and corporate social responsibility reports? ● Can a writing voice ever be corporate – even as companies such as Groupon and Kellogg spend millions to develop “authentic” and yet global brand voices? ● Are high-profile approaches to professional writing, including the Federal Plain Language Guidelines, supported by usability, cognitive science and other research into how people read in the 21st century?