Unit 1: Know Your Purpose
To be an effective writer, it is essential to identify the purpose or goal of your communication – whether you are writing for your own personal reasons to entertain a friend or convince a local politician, or you have been given a job assignment to sell the services of your company to a wealthy business client. What message do you want to convey? If you are unclear or uncertain about what you wish to accomplish, your readers will find your writing confusing and difficult to comprehend. Your local politician may follow an unwanted course, or your wealthy business client may move on to a more articulate competitor.
In this unit, we examine several rhetorical models the Ancient Greeks adopted to help create a framework for what they wanted to achieve during their discussions. What is your purpose? Are you writing to persuade, inform, analyze, or express? In most cases, you should incorporate several elements of these rhetorical strategies to help you get your point across most effectively. But your purpose must be clear – so you can effectively explain or pitch it to your audience.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 3 hours.
Upon successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:
- identify common forms of professional writing;
- articulate characteristics of good professional writing;
- outline benefits and strategies for identifying the purpose of your professional writing; and
- describe the four purposes of professional writing: to persuade, inform, analyze, and express.
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.
1.2: What Is Your Purpose?
We typically write professional documents to motivate action. For example, we write memos to convince our colleagues to act; design a company website with text, images, and video to showcase why customers should buy our product; and prepare a resume and cover letter to convince an employer to hire us.
There are four general approaches to writing: to persuade, inform, analyze, and express. Notice the deep connections between these four writing strategies. For example, a writer may use expressive writing to move their reader emotionally to persuade them to support a cause. They may combine expository writing techniques with an analytical approach to provide a narrative account of a significant controversy – breaking the elements down to explain the known facts and unstated assumptions of the situation. We seldom use just one mode. Effective writing – in the digital realm and elsewhere – blends and balances them all.
Before we discuss the four writing approaches, read this text on how to develop a clear purpose in your writing. It will help you think about the methods you will use to achieve your goals.
Read this short text on how to approach writing by exploring your purpose.
Watch this video on how to realize your purpose. Pay attention to how the competing values model can help set the stage for your writing. The examples will help you understand your different purposes as a writer.
1.3: Writing to Persuade
The art of persuasion lies at the heart of rhetoric and is fundamental to communication. We use persuasive strategies to affect another person's attitude or behavior and begin learning how to persuade as children – when we ask our parents to buy us a toy or let us stay up past our bedtime. As adults, our professional and private lives put us in a position to persuade and be persuaded by others.
Here are some professional situations where a persuasive approach is useful.
- You want your reader to buy a product or service.
- You want your reader to believe an idea, proposal, or sales pitch.
- You want your reader to support a politician or political position.
- You want your reader to donate money or support a group or cause.
Read this article for a comprehensive look at how to approach persuasion as a writer. It identifies common aspects of persuasive writing and how to construct or develop a project.
Watch this video introducing persuasive writing in the context of a business plan. What are the components of a persuasive appeal?
Read this text to explore critical features in developing an argument to support your persuasive claims. It builds on the previous video on persuasive prose. Pay close attention to how rhetorical strategies work.
1.4: Writing to Inform
Explanatory or expository writing seeks to define or explain something – it may be a topic, process, event, or phenomenon. Writers use expository writing to explain what happened, how something works, or how to do something. For example, we use an expository approach when compiling a report on the current business environment or explaining a recent medical breakthrough.
Here are some professional situations when an expository writing approach is helpful.
- You want to establish the facts of the matter for the reader.
- You want to explain a concept, an issue, or an event.
- You want your reader to understand a process or follow a step-by-step procedure.
Read this text on using informative writing in the workplace. There are many applications of informative writing. What are you trying to do when you write to inform?
Watch this video on various approaches to informative writing. How can you use these different styles in the professional world?
1.5: Writing to Analyze
Analytic writing examines, probes, dissects, and picks things apart. This thinking examines issues, events, ideas, statements, and propositions in-depth and determines whether the content is explicit or assumed. Analytic writing systematically breaks things down into parts and examines the logical connections and cause-effect relationships.
Analytical writers use their reason, experience, history, social norms, and a sense of morals and ethics to examine questionable statements.
Medical experts, journalists, business analysts, political pundits, and book or film critics are high-profile examples of analytical thinkers and writers. However, most of us use these critical thinking strategies in our everyday lives as we question our assumptions and those of others.
Here are some situations when an analytic writing approach may be useful.
- You want your reader to reflect on a subject.
- You want your reader to critique their preconceptions and assumptions.
- You want to make a systematic, logical case for or against something.
Read this chapter for a detailed discussion of analytical writing. When do you use analytical writing in your current professional context?
Read this article on critical thinking, an approach that underpins analytical writing. The author offers a strategy for analyzing or critiquing a subject.
1.6: Writing to Express
The best expressive writing is concrete, colorful, and unique. Since no two people express themselves in the same way, this form of writing brings out an individual writer's perspective and personality.
This writing style is useful to more than just artistic writers. Effective expressive writing draws on readers' feelings, imagination, reason, and knowledge. At first glance, expressive writing seems directly opposed to more objective approaches. However, balancing expressive style with objective analysis is the hallmark of a skillful writer – regardless of field.
Here are some situations when an expressive approach can enhance our writing.
- You want to challenge, excite or stimulate the reader.
- You want to dramatize situations or ideas.
- You want to call on the reader's senses.
- You want to give the reader the sense that they are there.
We turn to expressive strategies to move another person – to imagine and remember sights and sensations or make them see and feel experiences beyond their own.
Read this outline on writing to express a story or experience.