What is Professional Writing?

Far too many times have I sat across from someone and mentioned studying Professional Writing at the graduate level only to be met with, “What can you do with that? Write books? What kind of fiction do you write?” Initially, I perceived this lack of information as ignorance on their part. Over time I learned to simply substitute the word ‘professional’ with ‘technical’ and it generally avoided a lot of questions.

Of course Technical Writing is only a small subset of Professional Writing. To a degree, I’m doing myself a disservice by using that term. It limits the realm of my abilities to technical manuals and how-to’s. However, it describes Professional Writing perfectly as it is simply a technical approach to writing. To be a professional writer is to understand rhetoric. It is to be able to write in a way that persuades your audience or helps them to understand clearly the purpose of any piece.

The beauty (and the beast) of Professional Writing is that it translates well to almost any field. It’s a common problem that not every subject matter expert (SME) knows how to communicate their ideas to the public, thereby losing important information or rendering it unattainable to the average person. That’s where the professional writer steps in.

At the same time, the flexibility of the professional writing field often makes it difficult to narrow down a single direction or grow a specific field of expertise. Starting out, new professional writers can get pulled in many directions, but the trick is to stay on course. It’s great to be a cross-over act here and there, but it’s important to develop one area of expertise.

Personally, I’ve found it helps to spend time researching online the areas I’m interested in and keeping a list of milestones I need to achieve in order to be the go-to-gal for that field. It takes time and it takes effort, but the professional writer never stops learning. I’m proud to be embarking on that journey, and I hope to share some of those milestones here.