Professional Writing As Compared To Other Majors
Professional writing, particularly as an undergraduate major, is most often confused with English and/or Journalism due to their similar skill groupings and classes.
Professional writers tend to have more specific and varied audiences with a focus more specific than facts alone. Professional writing involves advanced writing skills with an emphasis on writing in digital environments (e.g., web authoring, multimedia writing), evaluating rhetorical techniques to tailor writing to specific audiences, and requires proficiency in writing in a professional atmosphere such as the workplace for a company or professional organizations.
English courses often include classes in professional writing and professional composition, emphasizing a clear and technical approach to writing. However, the majors begin to differ in that English has a larger focus on the reading and analysis of literature. Traditionally as well, writing within an English major revolves around the creation of essays and critiques, besides creative writing such as poetry and fiction.
Journalism, while retaining the concision that is characteristic of most professional writing documents, tends to produce short and fact-based articles rather than the more in-depth reports within professional writing.
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Famous quotes containing the words professional writing, professional, writing and/or compared:
“Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention. The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Virtue and vice suppose the freedom to choose between good and evil; but what can be the morals of a woman who is not even in possession of herself, who has nothing of her own, and who all her life has been trained to extricate herself from the arbitrary by ruse, from constraint by using her charms?... As long as she is subject to man’s yoke or to prejudice, as long as she receives no professional education, as long as she is deprived of her civil rights, there can be no moral law for her!”
—Flora Tristan (1803–1844)
“For your writing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of such vanity.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“We cannot do without it, and yet we disgrace and vilify the same. It may be compared to a cage, the birds without despair to get in, and those within despair to get out.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)