Make a Pamphlet by using lecture video

Principles of Professional Writing

Professional writing aims to be clear, concise, and invisible.

Clear: No matter the field, professionals write to convey information to specific audiences. If that information is not clear, the audience will become confused and, in some cases, annoyed. To convey information clearly, a writer must first consider her audience, for each audience will require a different starting context; for instance, when explaining a concept from your major to your parents, you will include different information than if explaining that same concept to another student within your major. Your parents may require you to define some technical terms, whereas the student in your major can be trusted to already know them. But clarity is also a primary concern at the sentence level. In this module, we’ll be learning several strategies for ensuring our sentences remains clear.

Concise: Subordinates exist in any organization to maximize the efficiency of their supervisors. Meanwhile, supervisors are most efficient when they communicate their needs to their subordinates with a minimum of directions. For these reasons, concision is a primary concern of all workplace writing. Concise writing conveys complex ideas in simple, easy-to-understand language, thereby ensuring the efficient transference of knowledge. Moreover, concision is considered in professional contexts to be a measure of intellectual ability; the writer who conveys a complex subject in 500 words appears smarter than the writer who conveys the same subject in 1000 words.

Invisible: The aim of some writing, poetry for instance, is in part to draw attention to the language itself. However, in professional situations, the single aim of all writing is to function as a window onto the content the writer seeks to explain. Imagine for a moment that writing is a window through which the reader peers; we want the reader to see what is outside, not the dirty glass before him. To this end, 1) we avoid fancy language when simple will do, 2) we incorporate the jargon of our field when the audience can be trusted to know that jargon, and if the audience cannot, we include parenthetical definitions, and 3) we do not think of our workplace writing as a vehicle for self-expression.