I am not trying to be on-theme with Halloween when I write this blog post for you all, I promise, jobs and the future do not always have to be scary. It is much easier to approach professional writing careers much like any other business endeavor: using a network. WRD alumni have worked in a variety of fields and at a variety of companies and institutions, I have narrowed down a few examples of places WRD grads can gain employment,along with the kinds of skills that are expected so you can consider what you may need for future classes.
Alums Hannah Colwill (2018) and Deanna Gonzalez Barshop (2015) work at Relativity as Technical Writers. Relativity is “A market-leading, global tech company that equips legal and compliance professionals with a powerful platform to organize data, discover the truth, and act on it.”
Technical writers at Relativity “oversee team collaboration with Development, QA, Product Management, and other groups to plan, research, write, and revise printed and online documentation, including general overviews, tutorials, installation/configuration instructions, training class materials, and API documentation.”
You will have to collaborate with other writers and departments, and make a variety of works that can be read by various audiences within the company. It is also important to conform to the accepted technical writing, as well as have a keen eye for errors, and being able to integrate data and graphics into documents will be a necessary skill.
The key takeaways of working for Relativity include needing technical writing knowledge, the ability to work on a team, an emphasis on formal writing, and the ability to use multi-media templates for your work. Taking classes that specify in technical writing like WRD 521 will be almost required of the position, and classes like WRD 508 Discourse and Style, or WRD 506 Multicultural Rhetorics, will give the necessary exposure to all different types of writing.
CARE Content is another company where a WRD Alum has landed a job. Natalie Schawel (2018) is a Content Specialist for CARE Content, a “digital experience agency for health systems, medical associations, payers, and healthcare support service providers.”
Much like Natalie’s position, their Web Content Specialist requires “generating content ideas for clients and for the CareContent website. Creating content for client blogs and social media (i.e., interviewing client sources, researching, writing, editing, and proofreading the content).” Timliness and social media interaction is also important, as well as tracking the anaylitics of said social media. Finally, you would be required to write, edit, post, and assist in other social media tasks for the CARE blog.
There is an emphasis on multi-media writing, where a class like WRD 525 Writing for the Web of WRD 533 Writing Across Media would be very beneficial. Classes like WRD 523 Editing will also be a great use, as proofread, mechanically correct work is of upmost importance for CARE. Finally, WRD 532 Digital Storytelling would be able to sharpen the skills required to tell and present the personal, client driven stories CARE desires for its website.
Finally, there are numerous WRD Alum who continued their career at DePaul to teach as either Adjunct Professors in WRD or with FYW. Many other Alum have pursued teaching at other colleges, high schools, and TESOL programs across the country, so this overview will apply to teaching Writing as a blanket subject. DePaul, as an example:
“seek[s] candidates with a clear commitment to excellent teaching and antiracist pedagogy; proficiency with digital and multimodal writing instruction; experience teaching writing successfully to students of varied cultural and linguistic backgrounds; and sensitivity to the educational goals of a diverse student population.”
Luckily, the breakdown of responsibilities is much more straightforward as students witness all the work our professors put in, and many of us are teachers ourselves while pursuing this MA. Some of the most critical courses to take would include WRD 540 Teaching Writing, WRD 551 Teaching Apprenticeship Practicum, and any of the required classes for the Teaching Concentration, as they will all be of use.
In the coming weeks, there will be another post delving further into what it means to be a writer in the professional world, courtesy of alumni interviews.