Business and Professional Writing

This class will teach you how to analyze and compose deliverables typical of a contemporary professional organization or workplace. Importantly, it will do that without sacrificing attention to the ways market-based values affect how we practice inclusion, sustainability, and social justice in our writing.

Through individual and collaborative projects, you will develop tactics for crafting ethical messages that respond to the needs of multiple audiences. You’ll also gain experience with navigating material, stylistic, and social complexities associated with various media, genres, and situations. Genres you’ll learn in this class include letters, memoranda, presentations, proposals, social media plans, and other forms of displaying information visually.

Many 3304 instructors build their classes around the Kitty O. Locker Undergraduate Professional Writing Contest. The contest project invites students to produce materials for a local nonprofit organization.

Mindful of the ways market logics condition writing practices, cultures, and genres, students will practice strategies and tactics for—

• attuning and responding ethically to business and/or professional rhetorical situations;
• mobilizing communicative genres common to contemporary business and/or professional situations;
• creating inclusive, sustainable, and socially just professional environments.