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Course Projects

Students complete two major modules.

The Language of Work: Style, Rhetoric, and Visual Design in Professional Communication

The first course module, The Language of Work: Style, Rhetoric, and Visual Design in Professional Communication, builds the communicative foundations that determine whether professional writing earns trust, commands attention, and gets read — the baseline competencies every subsequent module depends on. Across twelve weeks and eleven deliverables, students write a short instruction manual that teaches coworkers in a small business core design principles and the discourse conventions of professional communication (see, particularly, Professional Writing – How to Write for the Professional World). They create a 15-slide presentation on The Elements of Style — recorded as a single, continuous video — addressing how writers achieve clarity, brevity, coherence, flow, inclusivity, simplicity, and unity. After learning the discourse conventions and rhetorical moves of workplace writing, they sharpen their visual design competencies by creating an infographic that distinguishes academic from professional writing. The final capstone challenges students to apply what they’ve learned to produce an executive summary and a visual summary that translates academic research into a professional writing style.

Career Competencies in the AI Frontier

Module 2 builds directly on the communicative foundations developed in Module 1 and turns them toward a harder question: how is AI reshaping the workplace tasks those skills are meant to perform? Students explore which entry-level roles are most exposed to automation, which human competencies are gaining value as a result, and what it will take to build genuine career agency before graduation.

Students begin by conducting a literature review and producing two visualizations that map the shifting landscape of career readiness — the first capturing the pre-AI consensus on essential competencies, the second charting the emerging “frontier model” of skills researchers believe graduates will need to remain competitive. Drawing on original research — conducted through SME interviews, surveys or canvassing, or textual analysis — students synthesize labor-market research, competency frameworks, AI-exposure studies, and their own findings into a professional Recommendation Report and 90-second Video Pitch addressed to peers navigating the same inflection point. The Creative Challenge is where everything from Module 1 converges: the stylistic principles of professional and technical communication, the rhetorical moves of workplace genres, the elements of style — clarity, brevity, coherence, flow, inclusivity, simplicity, and unity — and the visual design principles of contrast, alignment, repetition, proximity, hierarchy, emphasis, and rhythm. Students close the module with a Reflection on what their research revealed and a Metacognitive Report documenting how they used GenAI tools across the project.

For more details on these assignments, see Professional Writing — Summary of Course Projects – ENC 2251.

Metacognitive Report

If students use GenAI to complete any deliverable, they must submit a Metacognitive Report alongside your assignment. For the exercises, the report can be as concise as 250 words. For the Creative Challenge, the report should be more substantive because it should summarize how you used GenAI across the exercises leading up to it as well as during the Creative Challenge itself, reflect on the key decisions you made independently to preserve your own voice and judgment, and explain how your use of GenAI evolved across the module.

Course Goals – Student Learning Outcomes

By the end of ENC 2251: Professional Writing, students will be able to:

1. Identify and apply the key differences between professional and academic writing — including shifts in purpose, audience, structure, and style — in workplace-oriented documents.
2. Create and integrate visual representations of information, applying core design principles — proximity, alignment, repetition, contrast, hierarchy, emphasis, and rhythm — to enhance clarity, usability, and audience engagement.
3. Analyze professional documents by evaluating how effectively they exemplify or violate the stylistic principles of clarity, brevity, coherence, flow, inclusivity, simplicity, and unity.
4. Critically evaluate research on communication, professional competencies, and AI’s impact on workplace practices, synthesizing evidence to explain implications for early-career professionals.
5. Explain how generative AI is transforming workplace communication and career readiness, identifying tasks most exposed to automation and the human competencies that grow in importance as a result.
6. Evaluate peer work using course criteria, providing specific, evidence-based justifications that sharpen rhetorical judgment and inform revision.
7. Deliver clear, concise, visually supported recorded presentations that convey complex information to professional audiences.
8. Produce an evidence-based Recommendation Report that synthesizes labor-market research, competency frameworks, AI-exposure studies, and original research into actionable guidance for peers navigating career entry in an AI-infused workplace.

Course Description

This course is an introduction to professional writing — also known as workplace writing or business writing. Students master the foundational competencies of effective communication: the elements of style (clarity, brevity, coherence, flow, inclusivity, simplicity, and unity), the visual design principles that make documents clear and credible (contrast, alignment, repetition, proximity, hierarchy, emphasis, and rhythm), and the rhetorical moves of professional genres including instruction manuals, presentations, infographics, executive summaries, and recommendation reports. Throughout, students work through a three-stage professional writing process — substantive draft, peer evaluation, and final revision — that mirrors how skilled communicators compose, compare, and refine their work in real workplace settings.

The course also confronts a question with direct stakes for every student in the room: the question isn’t whether AI will reshape your career field — it’s whether you’ll be positioned to benefit. In the second module, students trace the fault lines where AI is reshaping entry-level work, identify the high-ground competencies no algorithm can convincingly replicate, and conduct original research — through SME interviews, surveys, or textual analysis — to hear from practitioners firsthand. That research converges in a Recommendation Report and Video Pitch: a field-specific, evidence-based argument for peers facing the same inflection point, collectively building shared intelligence about which competencies will matter and how to develop them before graduation.

Why Does this Course Matter?

A professional writing course prepares students for the evolving demands of the workplace, where communication and adaptability increasingly define employability. Employers consistently identify strong communication as one of the most important competencies for new graduates. According to NACE’s Job Outlook 2025, 88.3 percent of employers rated written communication as “very” or “extremely” important, and close to 90 percent emphasized problem-solving as a core expectation. Professionals who can write with clarity, structure information effectively, and adapt messages for diverse audiences are more likely to succeed and advance in contemporary workplaces.

At the same time, work is being redefined by generative AI. According to Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index report, 75 percent of knowledge workers globally now use generative AI at work, and many adopted these tools independently rather than waiting for organizational rollout. This pattern signals that employers not only value communication and critical thinking, but increasingly expect professionals to engage with intelligent tools, prompt and refine outputs, and shape the narrative around data and automation. In a March 2026 New York Times column, Ezra Klein reports that those on the frontier of AI adoption believe “the winners and losers will be determined, in part, by speed of adoption” — and that the advantages of working alongside AI tools compound over time for those who start now.

Findings from Tomlinson, Jaffe, Wang, Counts, and Suri (2025) illustrate how this shift affects occupations. Their analysis of 200,000 Copilot conversations shows that the tasks AI most often completes — information gathering, writing, and explaining information — map onto the core activities of a wide range of white-collar roles. Occupations with the highest AI applicability scores include sales; computer and mathematical jobs; office and administrative support; business and financial operations; arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media; community and social service; and educational instruction and library work. These findings are reinforced by Massenkoff and McCrory’s (2026) analysis of 200,000 real-world Claude interactions for Anthropic, which found that sales, customer service, legal support, and administrative work face the highest rates of AI task completion — and by the Anthropic Economic Index (2026), which documents the accelerating pace at which AI is moving from augmenting human work to performing it autonomously. Because these roles depend on tasks that AI can already perform successfully, the authors note that automation could lower wages or lead to job loss, depending on how organizations reorganize work after productivity increases.

Indeed, a recent survey by Gotham Ghostwriters and WOBS LLC (2025) of 1,190 professional writers indicates that generative AI is diminishing employment opportunities for many writers, especially those who do not use AI tools in their work. Nearly half of freelancers report reduced demand for their services, and four in ten report income losses attributed to AI. The survey also shows that 43 percent of writing professionals personally know someone who has lost a job because of AI-driven automation. Nonusers express the strongest concerns: 89 percent fear that corporate leaders will replace writers with AI, and three out of four expect overall writing opportunities to decline in the next five years. Writers who use AI more frequently report greater productivity and, in some cases, higher incomes, which suggests that the ability to work effectively with generative tools is becoming a differentiator within the profession.

These findings may reinforce the belief that learning to write well matters less in an age when machines draft text instantly. But the data point in a different direction. As generative systems take over routine writing tasks, the value of human judgment, rhetorical reasoning, and audience awareness rises. Writers who understand how to guide AI tools, evaluate their outputs, and maintain accuracy gain an advantage in a market where employers expect workers to use these systems responsibly. In this sense, learning to write with clarity and purpose — and learning how to direct AI in support of that work — has become a practical literacy. It shapes employability, supports career mobility, and helps professionals produce writing that meets workplace expectations even as the tools of writing continue to change.

At a time when generative AI tools can produce competent prose in seconds, it may seem as though the role of human writing is diminished. Yet scholars such as Ong (2002) and Bolter (2001) remind us that writing is not merely a medium for delivering information. Humans use writing to externalize thought, test assumptions, and revise understanding. This act of putting ideas into language encourages us to clarify our reasoning, confront ambiguity, and reflect on what we believe. Writing enables abstraction and complex problem-solving, and it strengthens our ability to evaluate competing claims. When people write for personal, academic, or professional purposes, they practice habits of attention and inquiry that shape how they perceive the world and how they make decisions. In this way, writing contributes to human development by cultivating the cognitive, ethical, and imaginative capacities that no machine can supply on our behalf.

Appendix

FAQs

In order to critically assess information claims or to create knowledge claims that particular research communities deep autoitative, you need to understand the following research terms/concepts.

What is Professional Writing?

Professional Writing—a term used synonymously with business writing or workplace writing or technical writing—may also refer to

1. communication that accomplishes job-related tasks
2. a style of writing that emphasizes information visualizations, visual language, design thinking, scanability, information design and architecture, deductive organization and reasoning, as well as clarity in communications and the practice of   brevity, coherence, flow, inclusivity, simplicity, and unity
3. an academic discipline, a community of practice (aka discourse community), concerned with the study of writing, document design, the usability of documents and products, and project management in workplace contexts. It is
4. an undergraduate writing course at the University of South Florida, ENC 2251.

Who Are Professional and Technical Communicators?

Professional and technical writers are subject matter experts in writing, design, usability, information architecture, documentation, project management, and digital writing — including, e.g., remediating texts in multiple media, printed posters to Tweets.

They are practitioners, theorists, and researchers who investigate, create, and deliver clear, accessible content for diverse audiences across industries such as technology, healthcare, finance, and government. As researchers, professional and technical writers may investigate user behaviors, analyze document effectiveness, conduct literature reviews, or explore new communication technologies. They often collaborate with subject matter experts outside of their field, serving as writing coaches, editors, and project managers who engage in research to enhance communication strategies and outcomes.

Professional writers may do the equivalent work of technical writers — and vice versa — but traditionally there are a few distinctions between these roles:

• Professional Writers are typically skilled writers, public speakers, and researchers. They often hold undergraduate or graduate degrees in fields such as rhetoric, composition, communication, design, and product management, though some acquire these competencies through on-the-job experience. These professionals may serve as writers or spokespersons on teams, bringing their communication expertise to various subject areas. Their work can be job-related or extend to public spaces, including social media platforms like Reddit, blogs, newspaper and magazine articles, and books.
• Technical Writers share many of the skills and credentials of Professional Communicators but tend to focus on complex, technical subjects in fields like technology, engineering, and science. While they may have similar academic backgrounds to professional writers, their work is typically more specialized. Unlike Professional Communicators who often address broad public audiences, Technical Writers primarily create content for specific, often specialized audiences in workplace settings. Their outputs include instructional materials, user manuals, product documentation, and technical reports, with an emphasis on clarity, accuracy, and usability of information.