Most students come to this class with workplace experience. You may have worked in an internship or job in your field. You may have experience working in a job here on campus. You may have worked in an after-school or summer job while you were in high school. You may have watched a family member or friend in the workplace. 

No matter what experience you have, you have seen workplace documents—everything from posters on the bulletin boards to contracts, and from letters to project proposals. You may have even written some documents yourself, like an email to your supervisor asking for a day off or a memo that provided your team with an update on your work. 

Your experience has surely taught you some tricks and strategies to survive as a writer in the workplace. You might think about these questions as you consider what you already know about writing on the job: 

• Where do you start?
• How do you do it? What techniques do you use?
• How do you keep everything organized?
• How do you remember how to incorporate details and evidence? 
• What can you do to make sure people read what you write?

For today’s Try-It, tell me about one of the tricks you have learned or developed. In your response, tell me the following: 

• your secret for writing in the workplace.
• how you learned your secret and/or how you figured out that it was effective.

I will share some of the workplace writing secrets that you submit with the class next week.

 

This question is adapted from Scott Warnock’s Teaching Writing Online: How & Why (2009), pp. 98–99.

Image credit: Software engineering paper based prototype by Samuel Mann on Flickr, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license.