1) Icebreaker 2) What is Professional Writing?3) Starting to consider the client

project: a good video

Icebreaker:What was the first piece of music you bought with your own money?Mine was:

You read a brief statement on PW written by one of my favorite researchers in the field, Stuart Selber.

Here’s my much-more-brief definition:

Professional writing is writing that is designed and intended to do work.

There’s a lot more to it than just that, of course. There is subtlety and nuance. There’s rhetoric and multimodality. There’s so much to it.

But PW isn’t about style as much as it is about substance. Think of Frank Lloyd Wright, the famed architect: Form follows function.

So What does a Professional Writer do?

[okay, maybe don’t call us all that?]

Copywriter

Documentation

Editing[particularly copy editing]

Content generation

Print Design[layout and content]

Web Design[some coding]

[you should know some HTML][and CSS]

Social Media

Public Relations

Identity and Branding

Of course there are all the varieties of technical writing as well, and you could teach with a PW degree. You know, like I do.

It’s also a great foundational degree for graduate and professional school.

It’s important to realize the flexibility that PW offers, but at the same time, that means that you have to think carefully about where you’re going next.

While this class isn’t meant, as such, to be a career placement moment or anything of the sort, as a capstone, before we dive headfirst into our project, I do want you to think about how you might want to shape your profile to go into whatever comes next for you. That will help you to think about how you approach our task.

I want you to spend the rest of class writing. This is free writing, for you. I will ask you to look at it later, to save it. In that writing, I want you to write about what you’d like to do when you graduate. Be specific. Jot down questions you might have.

For next class: Find a video on YouTube that is between 30 seconds and 2 minutes long that you think is effective at representing an idea or organization. Bring the link to class on Monday.