Course Description
This collaborative hands-on course explores the kind of short-form writing that dominates today’s rapidly evolving professional communications space — the digital space where lines between content and form increasingly blur and where always-on media feeds deliver a mix of advertising, marketing, public relations, human resources, personal brand-building and journalistic reporting and research. It’s a space that presents new writing challenges every day: professional emails, office memos, newsletters, website copy, funding proposals, executive summaries, op-eds, tweets, blurbs, blogs. Much of this material is badly done. Most of it is mediocre. The best of it, though, sings out and demands our attention, demonstrating mastery in the kind of critical thinking and dedicated practice that delivers copy sharply focused and sure in matching voice and material with form and audience. This course is part professional-communications criticism class and part writing workshop. It’s about learning how to identify good writing; it’s about understanding the process that produces good writing; and it’s about practicing that process yourself.
Students can choose between a 3-credit and 5 credit option:
• Section A will be 3 Credits and meet the Professional Writing Requirement. It meets 6-8:20.
• Section B will be 5 Credits and also meet the Professional Writing Requirement. It will meet for a longer period from 6-9:50 and include additional short form assignments over the course of the quarter.
Meets Professional Writing Requirement.
University of Washington
Department of Communication