1.1: What Is Professional Writing?
How does professional writing differ from other kinds of writing? How we define this writing style helps us focus on expectations. Before we explore professional writing specifically, we need to understand how it fits in the world of communication.
Read this text, which explains what it means for business communication to be effective. Communication is an activity, skill, and art. It influences your thinking about yourself and others, how you learn, and helps you accurately represent yourself and your employer.
Professional writing refers to anything written for a business or organizational purpose in an occupational context. It includes blogs, contracts, emails, reports, presentations, press releases, and social media posts. This writing style is part of our daily lives and critical to our success in the business world.
Read this article on how to recognize good professional writing. Good business writing follows the rules, is easy to read, affects the reader, meets the reader's expectations, is clear and concise, and is efficient and effective.Your professional voice is how you sound to your audience. Your voice refers to how to orient your writing, where you are coming from, and what you bring to the table. Developing your voice refers to how you build your writing skills to reflect yourself as a person.
Watch this video on the difference between "good" and "great" business writers. The speaker says great writers do the following:
- Create a repeatable and thoughtful structure,
- Communicate with precise words with elegant phrasing,
- Prefer to get to the point but will sacrifice brevity for clarity,
- Use correct grammar,
- Adopt an upbeat, conversational, and warm tone, and
- Welcome the opinions and criticisms of others so they can make improvements.
Read this text on technical writing, another aspect of professional writing that focuses on detail and instruction. As we will explore in Unit 2, the ability to size up the knowledge and skills of your audience is critical to good technical writing.
The ability to explain complex technical, medical, and scientific concepts to the average layperson is a unique and valuable skill in nearly every profession. If you write in a manner full of jargon or too complex, you will lose an audience that does not understand your terms. However, if you write as if speaking to a group of middle school students, you may frustrate or insult a group of scientists.