About This Resource
Professional Writing and Communications for Business is an open educational resource (OER) created to help prepare emerging business professionals and students to develop the writing skills currently in demand. Instead of a textbook or writing manual, this work focuses on fundamental professional writing concepts rather than language-level instruction.
One significant lack of Professional Writing and Communications for Business, for example, is the lack of guidance regarding grammar, syntax, sentence structure, and other finer points. There are several reasons for this:
- I lack the expertise in those skills to speak to them adequately.
- Two outstanding resources, Professional Writing Today, by Sam Schecter, and Technical and Professional Writing Genres, by Michael Beilfuss, Staci Bettes, and Katrina Peterson cover a lot of ground. Several chapters from each have been incorporated into this OER for the convenience of my colleagues. See the Acknowledgments page for further information.
- Many professionals (and students) use tools like Grammarly as well as the built-in functions of their writing tools.
- Many of these tools, particularly Google Docs and Microsoft Word, have implemented AI assistants that can offer suggestions when prompted. I have added a chapter to help exploit these tools for these purposes.
The ambition of this resource is to be a “living document” that is regularly maintained and revised to reflect technological and professional changes as they emerge.
Several key principles motivate the guidance offered in this work. I’ve found these principles to be important in the classroom but even more so in the workplace.
- Writing is a technology. No one is born knowing how to write and is a tool that must be learned. It is also a tool that is rarely mastered. Even professional journalists, authors, and professors need editors to proofread, make suggestions, and share their points of view.
- Writing is hard and requires practice. Like any technology, it takes time to acquire basic skills in writing. It takes many more to reveal your writing “voice,” and only a few of us would ever be considered masters of the craft.
In its current version (Spring 2025), this resource is designed to work with Writing Foundations courses at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay (UWGB) or another college. The specific course this resource has been created for, Professional Writing for Business Majors, focuses on the writing skills sought by regional business leaders, UWGB colleagues, and the students participating in my courses.
