Even though you have successfully completed UN 1015, your path as a college writer has only begun. During UN 1015, you learned valuable research and writing skills such as genre and audience awareness, tone, style, and formatting, to name a few. Those skills can help you become successful students in your future classes. For example, when you enroll in other communication-intensive courses like Editing, Introduction to Journalism, Science Writing, Grant Writing, and Technical and Professional Communication. The goal of these courses will be both to provide continued practice in writing for new audiences, purposes, and genres and to give you choices about writing and speaking in an area of your interest. You will have to tap into the skills you learned in UN 1015 to help you succeed. This can lead you to become a successful writer in your future profession.
However, communication-intensive courses are only some of the courses that will help you put the skills you develop in UN 1015 into practice. There is a common misconception that outside of college, STEM careers do not require much writing. However, there are still many types of communication you will need to be able to complete successfully. Beginning with a strong foundation that you learn here will only set you up for success.
Writing is how we make meaning. In the article “Why Teach Writing?” Sharon Crowley and George Redman explain that if you have an idea but can’t explain it, the idea is not complete yet. When you write out and explain ideas, you are figuring out what you know and understand. Writing throughout your college career will help you gauge what you are taking away from your classes.
In UN 1015, you will have written for a variety of purposes and audiences, as well as developed knowledge for how to assess a writing task and make choices about language that meet the needs of that task. However, UN 1015 is not just a course to complete on your journey toward a college degree; it gives you a set of flexible tools to take with you to sites of writing outside the classroom walls. Some kinds of writing or speaking you might encounter outside of college include:
The skills that are learned in UN 1015 can help to build audience awareness when it comes to writing beyond UN 1015.
If you find yourself struggling to start an assignment for a class, writing a proposal for a client, or developing your slide deck for that big presentation, the invention skills you learn in UN105 can help you get started with those projects. As we discussed in Chapter 4, there are a few methods that you can apply, such as brainstorming. When it comes to brainstorming, you can do it on your own or with others to collaborate on ideas. For effective brainstorming that can lead to freewriting, write down every idea that comes to mind, and do not judge what you or others have written down. The ideas do not have to be profound or even directly connect to the topic; allow the ideas to flow and write them down as they come to you.
Another method we briefly mentioned is freewriting. Similar to brainstorming, you want to write down what comes to mind; however, instead of just writing down ideas, with freewriting, you want to try to come up with as many ideas as possible related to your topic.
Freewriting strategies you can try include:
Don’t limit yourself when it comes to brainstorming and starting your writing process. Brainstorming unleashes creativity, helps explore various angles, and generates ideas, enhancing the writing process by providing a pool of inspiration and possibilities to draw from.
Quick Tips
When you are writing a document that is unfamiliar to you or you are just stuck, ask yourself the questions below. These will help you figure out where to start with your document.
Much of the writing you do in college is on-demand and asks you to demonstrate what you know or what you’ve learned in your classes. Writing assignments also show that you can think in ways that are appropriate for your discipline, which means learning the rules of genre and style will be extremely helpful later. Lastly, these assignments will give you practice with different types of writing tasks and skills. Throughout your time at MTU, you will have the opportunity to complete many different types of writing tasks. Some examples include:
Although there are many overlaps in the type of content, each genre creates a different set of expectations. By learning about how to break down a genre, you can more easily approach these assignments in the future.
For example, a literature review is very commonly used in multiple genres, or it can be a paper on its own. You will read a body of work and then review it and explore how it impacts your work specifically. You can break down a literature review chronologically and look at how the field has changed over time, or you might break down the literature by common themes and explore how different topics are discussed. A literature review, however, can be used loosely by instructors so you will need to closely review the assignment descriptions below to understand what they want.
Activity: Review the two literature review assignment descriptions below and write a few sentences about how they are different, and how that changes the approach to them.
Assignment Description 1: To complete this paper, you must include a literature review—a descriptive summary of existing research on a topic of your choosing. The purpose of this assignment is to inform your readers of the significant knowledge and ideas existing in your field. You will compare, contrast, and connect findings through the works you have chosen to review, and demonstrate how you have established a knowledge foundation for the research question you have chosen. You must practice synthesizing the knowledge you are learning, so consider how that impacts your approach to writing your literature review. You should have at least 5 academic works cited in your literature review.
Assignment Description 2: Your final paper for this course will give you the opportunity to write about a topic in composition studies. You will review the existing literature in the field and focus on one of these three issues: grading and error, writing process, and writing across the curriculum. The key points of your paper will answer the following question: How do theory and praxis tie together for this particular issue? Each of these asks you to complete a literature review but in different ways. In the first example, this literature review will be part of a larger body of work. You might do this in design projects, research papers, or presentations. If you progress in your academic career, you will likely write them for your thesis or dissertation and other writing assignments in coursework.
Assignments can be genre-bending in college. This means you need to be careful to follow what the instructor is asking you to do. However, this will prepare for your future writing in your career. For example, although there are style guides like MLA, APA, and Chicago, some places create their own style guide and you will need to learn how to write in those styles. They also might ask you to write reports with specific sections or ideas that you must incorporate to reach your audience(s) most effectively.
You can also use the writing and researching skills you have learned from UN 1015 to search for employment upon graduation and internships throughout your academic career. For example, it is a good idea to start developing and keeping job-seeking materials up to date as you navigate your academic career. Make sure you keep a record of your accomplishments, course projects, awards, and recognitions that can all be applied to your resume and cover letter.
A resume is a user-centered persuasive document that highlights your education, work experience, and other relevant skills specific to the job you are applying for. However, some of you may find it hard to craft a resume due to your lack of “real world” job experience in the field that you are going into. However, that is a common misconception, and most of you will not realize the wealth of professional experience you have already gained in your undergraduate education. Even if you have not yet held a “real” job, your college courses and opportunities to become involved in your community are helping you to develop many skills that will apply beyond the classroom.
Although these may seem like form documents, it is important to review them for each job posting to ensure you are doing your best to reach the employer. For example, you can edit your resume to include certain keywords and then expand on projects and experiences that highlight your experience with those keywords in your cover letter.
A cover letter for a job application is distinct from a cover letter like the one you have written for your portfolio. In a job application, a cover letter is a short and concise document that accompanies your resume. Similar to your resume, it is also a user-centered persuasive document that gives you an opportunity to show why you are the best candidate for the position.
It gives a prospective employer or administrator a good first impression of you and emphasizes how your skills and experience are an asset.
TIP: Show your experiences and qualifications through examples instead of simply telling them you are the best qualified. Reflect on what you did during your college career--and connect those experiences to specific expectations for the position laid out in the job ad.
Writing a follow-up email to a prospective employer to whom you’ve applied is often perfectly acceptable. This shows the employer that you are highly interested in the position and eager to share your qualifications with them. In a short, concise email, you should inquire about the job listing and the timeline for when they may start contacting potential interviewees. You want to use professional language and be courteous.
As AI changes workplace processes, employers will be increasingly seeking skills such as:
Your courses will help you develop these skills in different ways—for example, when you write a long-form research paper, you are processing complex information, doing critical thinking, researching, and using your advanced literacy and writing skills. Developing these will make you a stronger employee as some fields move towards AI or machine generated processes.
Writing projects you will likely do in the workplace are:
Much of the writing you do in college is preparing you to do these tasks, even if it feels annoying or useless in the moment. As a student, you are entering a specific rhetorical ecology—your writing is influenced by your professor, classmates, and environment, or where you physically write. You will enter a new rhetorical ecology when you enter the workplace, where you are most likely completing team-based writing projects. This means you will get feedback from multiple people, which can include people on your team, your boss, and clients. You will also likely have specific formats, technology, and programs to write with, which impacts your writing process as well.
As you become a working professional, you will learn more about writing in your discipline–the specialized language and writing tasks that other professionals in your field use or do regularly. In other communication courses at MTU, you will learn about writing in other genres after UN 1015 and prepare for the workplace. For example, in your senior year, you will likely complete a senior design or capstone project that will require multiple types of communication tasks.
In Chapter 8, we discussed working in groups with your fellow classmates, and the steps covered in that chapter are good takeaways for how you might approach working with future co-workers.
Public genres occur when you are writing or communicating to a public audience, such as through news writing, opinion pieces, social media posts, or speeches. Publics occur situationally and their membership size can vary widely. There are four different types of publics that will impact how you approach your content: Immediate, Media, and Identity, and Complex (Gerhke & Foley, 2023).
When you begin to write for a public audience, you need to consider who makes up your audience. If you are giving a speech to an identity public that opposes or is ambivalent to your ideas, you—as the writer/speaker—need to figure out how to reach them. It is your responsibility to find shared values to reach audience members who are open to listening to you. If you are writing a government report that will be shared with the public, you will need to be conscientious of your responsibility to communicate ideas clearly and ethically.
As you compose for your public audience, remember that there will always be people who will never agree with you. In order to write more effectively, consider your rhetorical audience within the public you are writing or speaking to. The rhetorical audience, as defined by Lloyd Bitzer, “consists only of those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change” (“The Rhetorical Situation”). This means that your audience must be willing to listen to you and take your ideas into account, and they must be able to act in some way. If you are seeking to solve a problem, your rhetorical audience must include people who are willing and able to act to solve the problem. As a simplified example, consider a class where you are getting a low grade. Your professor must be both willing to hear your plea for extra credit, and willing to raise your grade.
Your skills from UN 1015 will translate well when it comes to writing and speaking to a public audience. For example, genre and audience awareness will help you determine who you are speaking to, how to best approach them, and what they will expect based on the constraints of the genre.
Writing and communication skills will serve you for the rest of your life. Through UN 1015, you have practiced rhetorical and genre awareness and strengthened your writing skills. Writing isn’t just something you will do in assignments—you will need to be able to communicate in the workplace and with friends and family in the future. Think of the skills from UN 1015 as tools for success in all areas of your life, because they can sharpen your thinking and make your ideas clearer.
UN 1015 also helps you take in information critically, which is important in today’s interconnected world where we are constantly inundated with news and information. Being able to find meaningful information and use it will benefit you in the future, as you continuously encounter information.
Chapter 9: Your Future as a College Writer