Professional Writing, Graduate Certificate

In addition to University Requirements:

• Complete individual plan requirements.

Students may be able to use some courses to meet more than one requirement. Contact your advisor for details.

Purpose Statement

The Professional Writing Certificate program will help you to create excellent workplace documents such as project proposals, grant proposals, reports, and emails. It will also help you to implement best practices in creating user-facing documents such as product and service descriptions, help files, and instruction manuals. Your participation in our courses will increase your skills in audience awareness, document design, document project management, and editing. These skills are important for anyone who writes at work and can prepare you for a career or help you to advance in your current career as an administrative professional, grant proposal writer, technical writer, technical editor, or any other type of professional writer in many careers such as project management, program management, and non-profit, research, government, and corporate communications.

Student Learning Outcomes

Students completing the Certificate in Professional Writing will have mastered the following bodies of knowledge and related skills (specific courses for each outcome shown in parentheses):

Bodies of Knowledge Mastered

• The rhetorical demands inherent in business, industry, and government settings. Related skills:
  • Ability to analyze the context of any document and write that document to fit the demands of its specific context
• Understanding of the writing and editing skills necessary to create and write documents with the characteristics demanded in professional settings: clarity, conciseness, coherence, and correctness. Related skills:
  • Ability to edit the documents of self and others, to bring those documents to a professional and/or publishable level, in terms of such things as clear sentences; logical and effective organization; powerful supporting graphics; effective documentation; etc.
  • Ability to analyze problems in a business, industry, or government setting and design and conduct the research necessary to solve that problem and write an appropriate document detailing those results, such as a proposal, a set of procedures, etc.
• All of the above is measured and documented in one way (in addition to class performance): each student begins the creation of an electronic portfolio of his or her professional work.