A Different Kind of Writing

As a student, you’re familiar with academic writing – essays, research papers, literature summaries and analysis – all of which you’ve spent years learning about. But professional/technical writing is a bit different.  While the two kinds of writing share a lot of similarities, there are some significant differences that play important roles in both the process and the end product.

Sounds fancy, doesn’t it?

Many of you have already written professional/technical style documents without knowing it. If you have ever emailed a professor or a boss, put together a lab report, or crafted a resume and cover letter, then you’ve written a professional or technical kind of document, even if you wrote it in an academic setting.

Let’s start with a bit of a definition…

What Do The Experts Say?

The international professional organization for technical communication (yes, there is one), The Society for Technical Communication or STC (the name alone highlights the differences between this and a creative organization) defines technical writing/communication as:

• • being “about technical or specialized topics”
  • using “technology, such as web pages, help files, or social media sites”
  • providing “instructions about how to do something”

That’s not an exhaustive list, but it’s a good start. You’ll be working on various writing projects this semester that fall into all three of those categories, in line with the expectations of the experts in the field. To give you a little more of an idea of what sorts of writing fits into the STC’s definition and happens to be something you’ll write this semester, here’s a quick list of some of the more common kinds of professional/technical documents:

• • Emails
  • Memos
  • Instructions
  • Proposals
  • Presentations
  • Reports
  • Resumes
  • Cover Letters

What Do I Need To Focus On?

All these years of writing in an academic style have conditioned you to focus on things like a thesis, organization, paragraph development, and mechanics (like grammar and spelling.) The kinds of writing that you’ll be doing in this course will still focus on some of those same things, but you’ll be asked to really consider some other elements of your writing as well. Those elements include, but aren’t limited to:

• • Centering the Audience
  • Cultural Considerations
  • Formatting, Language, and Grammar
  • Professional Purpose

We’ll discuss each of those things as we move through the course.