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Professional Writing

College Magazine ranks Purdue’s English Department #1 in the United States, and it’s easy to see why. Our degree programs offer individualized attention and access to excellent teachers and experts who shape how people think about literature, linguistics, and writing.

While pursuing a BA in Professional Writing, students explore strands in technical writing or writing and publishing. The Professional Writing student is a multimedia-writing specialist. The major is perfect for those who enjoy organizing and presenting information in multiple formats. Professional Writing cultivates writing for the digital workplace; specializes in multimedia writing, visual rhetoric, usability, and emergent technologies, as well as print and digital publishing; and emphasizes collaboration, community service, and open-source development and documentation. It also requires a minor outside the English department to cultivate further expertise in a related area of interest.

Learn more about Professional Writing at Purdue, including courses such as ENGL 419, 420, 421, and 422.

Preparation

All Purdue University College of Liberal Arts majors prepare students with skills contributing to professional and managerial success: communicating and listening well, understanding and appreciating of diverse points of view, creative thinking and problem solving, collaborating with others, synthesizing complex ideas and expressing them clearly, and a Boilermaker work ethic.

Within the field of English, students develop skills that are applicable to many different careers. These may include, but are not limited to:

  • Exceptional writing for multiple audiences, and in multiple styles (stories, poems, reviews, reports, memos, essays, and critical analyses)
  • Deep reading (how to read patiently, with empathy and insight; how to recognize patterns in texts; and how to express your observations about them effectively)
  • Creative and literary thinking (metaphorical and other non-literal reasoning; historical and global awareness; connecting the dots and telling stories with data)
  • Analytical and research skills (how to take texts and ideas apart for a greater understanding of the whole; how to find, compile, and synthesize important information)
  • Cutting-edge presentation skills (how to produce, read, and understand images and digital texts; how to present your ideas in the most effective manner)