My Stance on Professional Writing

If I’m being completely honest I’d have to say that the phrase “professional writing” has always frightened me. I’ve always had the preconceived notion that I’d be a bad professional writer because I’m still in school and I haven’t officially joined the professional world. I feel more comfortable with the phrase “professional writing” and what it truly encompasses after reading the first chapter of Anne Surma’s Public and Professional Writing: Ethics, Imagination and Rhetoric.

I appreciate Surma’s intention to debunk society’s beliefs about what professional writing entails. She argues that professional writing should not be looked at as the direct opposite of creative writing. Surma uses rhetorical questions to pose her belief that as human beings we cannot simply split ourselves into these two distinct roles of professional writer or creative writer, “Can creative writing not be professional? Is professional writing not creative?” (19). I have to admit that although I knew professional writing could be creative, I never fully understood how that could be true until I read the rest of this chapter.

Part of the creative aspect behind professional writing lies in how it is taught to future professionals. With this in mind, Surma makes an interesting point about where the subject of professional writing shows itself in academia. The way professional writing degrees are marketed to students will eventually correlate to how those students will market their professional writing degrees to their employers. Despite professional writing’s correlation to the business and technical worlds, Surma suggests that professional writing belongs to the humanities, “By locating professional writing as a subject within the arts/humanities, we can more readily signal our intention to focus on its cultural breadth…The function of professional writing should not be reduced to the function of ‘servicing’ any single discipline” (20). Humanities degrees are known for encompassing a wide range of different studies within their programs, pushing students to think outside of their original realm of thoughts and beliefs.

Even though professional writing may be perceived as more exacting, direct, or explanatory than creative writing, this doesn’t make the skills of critical thinking or analyzing texts unnecessary to the professional writer. Surma argues that professional writing ought to be concerned with the position of oneself as a reader and writer as well as one’s position within one’s community, whether that community be local, professional, or global (21). One must be able to adapt to various positions throughout the process of professional writing; being able to imagine oneself as both writer and reader of a given text is a creative skill that must be maintained and practiced by professional writers. This focus on Humanities related skills and imaginative thinking is why I now understand why my own professional writing degree belongs to the English department at Bloomsburg University. Additionally, now that I recognize the roles of critical thinking and analysis within professional writing, I am becoming more comfortable with my capacity to grow as a professional writer given my daily practice of these skills within my other concentration (Literature).

The terms audience and purpose should be familiar to anyone who has taken a few beginning writing courses at the college level. Professional writers are asked to take the concepts of audience and purpose even deeper when they begin using their imagination and ethical reasoning within their writing. Surma demonstrates a direct correlation between imagination, audience, ethics, and purpose, “the activity of imagining [is] pivotal [and] encourage[s] writers to consider and value the place of readers as legitimate sites of particular actions or reactions in response to texts; actions and reactions that may differ from those desired by the writer” (30). I would think that successful professional writers must always identify their audience and purpose before writing. However, even if they understand who their proposed audience may be and what their message is, there is no guarantee that readers will respond to the work as intended. It is unethical to assume that readers must interpret the writer’s purpose exactly as intended. Additionally, it is completely ethical for readers to write responses to the original work. Whether those responses are in agreement or disagree with the original piece will depend on the professional writers ability to imagine, and plan for, the audience’s reaction before publication.

Having written more than a few papers and articles in my time, I understand the fear of being misunderstood by readers. However, I think what Surma is discussing here isn’t the misunderstanding of author’s purpose, but rather, she is amplifying the reader’s right to be unpredictable in their reaction to a text. As a professional writer, even if you’re an expert when it comes to concise and clear language, you must be able to come to terms with having your writing criticized and interpreted in ways you perhaps never thought possible. I would argue that a true test of a professional writer’s skill is how well they are able to adapt to the way readers interpret their work’s purpose. This chapter of Public and Professional Writing: Ethics, Imagination and Rhetoric has helped me define “profession writing” more clearly, but it has also brought to my attention a more challenging skill set that I didn’t previously foresee when I decided to begin developing my professional writing abilities. Going forward I will keep these professional writing challenges in mind and continue to work on understanding the complexity of the title Professional Writer.

Thanks for reading,

Anna J.

Works Cited

Surma, Anne. Public and Professional Writing: Ethics, Imagination and Rhetoric. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.