Skip to main content

My Take On Professional Writing


To me, professional writing is a set of reading, writing, analytical, and 21st century skills paired with an attitude of adaptability that make a person adept at communicating in the work place and producing content. For me, professional writing is a set of added skills to my future teaching career. It is also versatility to my degree so that I can switch into another field if I don't want to teach my entire career. It is an undergraduate degree with a variety of graduate degrees available for the stacking. Professional writing brings opportunity to me by providing flexibility in my academic and professional career.

After taking 306 and starting off this semester in 515, I have added the ideas of advocacy and user experience to what professional writing means to me. Professional writers can advocate for the business they work for, their clientele, or both. Professional writers have the ability to communicate and should use that ability to speak on behalf of those who need their voice heard. Continuing in the theme of advocacy leads to the understanding and bringing about of user design. Professional writers should have the skill of taking on the perspective of the user and creating their works and designs to benefit the users’ experience with their work. This is also a form of advocacy.

My current academic plan involves two majors in the English department–professional writing and English education. I am also getting a minor in American studies because I am required to have a minor outside of the English department. The American studies minor has requirements that overlap with many of the other courses that I am taking. I need to meet with my advisor and check to make sure I can graduate at a reasonable time, but that is the plan. My plan for life after graduation is only figured out for the next 8 years, provided that I can stick to the plan. As we all know, plans are up in the air in 2020 and beyond…at least for now.

In the next few years, I plan to teach. I have a teaching scholarship that requires me to teach in Indiana for 5 years. I plan to teach English somewhere in the Indianapolis area. My dream is to teach junior English, which has many elements of American history. I think that the professional writing background will help me teach advocacy to students learning about literature's place in American history and culture. I will be able to help them interact with the content and find their voice in society rather than conditioning them to be passive learners of content. I also think that my background will help me prepare students with skills and writing assignments that are more likely to benefit them in the working world. At some point, whether before or after those 5 years, I plan to go to grad school. I can't remember when I started thinking about it, but I really want to go! I've toyed with the idea of going to law school, but if not, then I will get my master’s degree. I am not yet sure what to get a graduate degree in.

My interests and obsessions right now keep me busy, and I hope that I find ways to interact with them more! I want to continue being a nerd about music, recycling, searching for motives in society and business, leadership, Purdue Cooperatives, youths, Taylor Swift, scent psychology, sharks, books, writing, and acting. Those are the miniature obsessions that fill my days. No matter where my future takes me, whether it be one of the more concrete plans that I discussed earlier in the blog post or one of the obscure subjects I just mentioned, Purdue professional writing is setting me up for success. It’s more than writing; it’s a skill set.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Proposed Plan for Socially Distanced User Study of Wix.com

Plan for User Study: www.Wix.com I. Introduction Although a usability test is unlikely in this socially-distanced and pandemic-filled world, if I were to do one, this post describes how I would see myself doing it as well as a basic overview of my plan of study, had this been an option. II. Identifying Users 1. The users of this site align most with the age group of 20-35. This demographic uses Wix primarily for educational purpose and small business website platforms. 2. Users in this case will work through website creation, as that is the main function of the site. III. Target Identification of Problems Below are the main heuristics and an associated question to further explore the content of the site as I plan a User Study. A. Engagement Are the screen and workplace too crowded, and are they layered to maximize engagement? Is the site   nested too deeply with helpful tools to be useful? B. Error Tolerance Does the Help Desk analysis show enough specific problem de...
Post a Comment
Read more

Design Surrounds Us

Despite surrounding us in every object that we own, encounter, and interact with, design is oftentimes an invisible sort of force. Good design generally directs the user without being overtly noticeable, which means that it is often easier for us to pick out elements of bad design—that is, we most often notice design when we’re frustrated or confused by it. However, when we feel these emotions, it is important to understand which aspect of a design has caused them. Sometimes the failure in design is not caused by the most obvious component; indeed, the design of a specific frustrating component may have been the best design available if there are external and unmalleable constraints that it had to work within. Noting which level a design fails at, then, will make addressing design concerns much more exact and relevant, as critiquing a specific frustration without addressing the wider problematic system brings about no progress. While perhaps not the most exciting topic, a strong exampl...
Post a Comment
Read more

Think “Experience Architecture”

At the beginning of this class, we were assigned readings and videos about airports in order to conceptualize the main theme of the course, experience architecture. Experience architecture is the design of spaces (architecture) for users (experience), such as an airport. In de Botton's work, "A Week at the Airport," de Botton addresses a doubt about experience architecture that sheds light on the scope in which the concept applies. "Standing before costly objects of technological beauty, we may be tempted to reject the possibility of awe, for fear that we could grow stupid through admiration...[and] yet to refuse to be awed at all might in the end be merely another kind of foolishness. In a world full of a chaos and irregularity, the terminal seemed a worthy and intriguing refuge of elegance and logic." (de Botton, 2009, p. 3-4). Simply put, experience architecture is design that is meant for the experience of the user. De Botton communicates this through an exp...
Post a Comment
Read more