Professional Writing & Rhetoric Major
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About the Major
Every business, nonprofit organization and government agency needs individuals who can write and connect with potential clients and the public. This program helps to prepare students for any and all writing contexts by engaging them in the rhetorically grounded, critically reflective study of writing in civic, workplace and social contexts, helping them find the right message for the right audience.
Jobs in Professional Writing & Rhetoric
- Technical writer
- Copy editor
- Content strategist
- Project manager
- Digital marketing manager
Past Elon Professional Writing & Rhetoric Internships
- Tessler Literary Agency
- Scholastic
- Skybound Entertainment
- Human Services Council
- National Immigration Forum
Related Majors
Research, audience-analysis skills gained in the classroom helped propel grad’s freelance writing business
Angela Myers launched her writing career even before graduating from Elon University in 2021, consulting with businesses on social media campaigns and writing on a freelance basis. Since then, she has built up a clientele that includes Forbes Health, AARP and Physician’s Weekly.
While Myers knew going into Elon that she wanted a career in writing, she didn’t want to be a journalist in the traditional sense, nor did she think creative writing was the right focus. The university’s professional writing and rhetoric major seemed to be a better fit — and it was, she said.
“I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t go in necessarily knowing what opportunities there were in writing,” she said. “Elon’s professional writing and rhetoric program did a really good job of looking at the different roles you could do in writing. It focused a lot on opportunities to be a writer in different settings.”
There were classes on science writing and travel writing, classes on how to approach new technologies and create user guides for clients, and classes where students worked on projects that had them interacting with community partners like nonprofits or local companies to help with their writing needs. “It just gave me a pretty broad experience of what it was like to write in more corporate or nonprofit settings,” she said.
In addition to the coursework, Elon offered opportunities to get hands-on experience in writing, managing and research, which have been major contributors to the success of her agency, Angela Myers Creative, she said.
I think what I really liked was that the program was focused not just on creating text but also reflecting on the decisions you make when creating text.
In particular, a three-year research project she worked on as an Honors Fellow and Lumen Prize recipient honed the skills she uses today.
“One of the most integral things that really helped me was the research project I did,” said Myers, who researched sexual violence prevention materials on college campuses in the U.S. and New Zealand and the effectiveness of their communication and design strategies. “It gave me a good look at the skills I use on almost a weekly basis now, that you don’t necessarily think of as part of the writing process. For example, I was conducting interviews, which I do now in my career, and it also taught me how to manage a giant project.”
The research skills have also helped when she gets an assignment from a client about an unfamiliar topic. Her assignments on health and health technologies cover a wide range of conditions, treatments and technologies. She needs to understand each topic well enough to make her articles, blog posts and white papers accessible to every reader — not just those who are schooled in the issue. And she needs to be able to tailor her writing when it is meant for one specific audience.
Those are all skills she learned at Elon, she said.
“There was a lot of audience analysis and thinking through how to talk to different audiences about specific issues,” she said of her coursework. “My clients, for example, may be speaking to physicians about different technologies they can use to improve their private practices, and that’s going to be a very different audience than when you’re writing for a general audience on how to improve your health or set better health goals. Being able to analyze who my audience is and how I should speak to them and what they need to know was definitely a skill that I was taught through the professional writing and rhetoric program.
“I think what I really liked was that the program was focused not just on creating text but also reflecting on the decisions you make when creating text,” she added. “That really helped me become more reflective of my own writing abilities and put me into a mindset of constant growth.”
While at Elon, Myers also worked at the university’s Writing Center as a consultant — and, during her senior year, was a lead consultant, co-managing a team of more than 40 — which not only gave her the chance to help students, staff, faculty and community members with their writing but also allowed her to gain experience working with writers across disciplines. There, she also developed a training program on how to work with multilingual learners. It was a passion project of hers that was encouraged by the writing center director.
“What I love about Elon is there are so many professors who are willing to help you when it comes to research and just taking on your own independent projects,” she said. “There were a lot of opportunities to take advantage of what you were passionate about and find professors who were willing to work with you on bringing projects together around your passions.”
Her professors and mentors were also essential in helping her connect with Elon alumni — which not only helped her when she was exploring what kind of career she wanted to pursue but has also been useful in building up her current clientele.
“Elon has a great network of alumni working in communications and content and writing, so that was really great having informational interviews with past alumni to hear what they did for a living and to see if that sounded interesting to me,” she said. And once she started her freelance business, the network served another useful purpose. “One of my first opportunities was through an Elon alum; it wasn’t necessarily her who hired me, but she knew someone, and I’m still working with that agency to this day.”
Myers encourages those interested in the professional writing and rhetoric major to take advantage of the program’s flexibility, the opportunity it provides to customize coursework according to a student’s interests — and its faculty.
“The professional writing faculty are really passionate about helping students realize what they want to do and helping them create projects around that or find internships that relate to that,” she said. “They are really good at connecting students with opportunities and different ways to grow and expand beyond the classroom.”
Did You Know?
- The professional writing and rhetoric major is not designed to prepare students for any specific career track. Instead, it is built around a set of core courses and then individualized by each student according to their career goals. Students are thus well prepared for a variety of career tracks — for example, editing and publishing or digital content creation — based on their courses, internships, research and outside electives.
- Students learn how to analyze, reflect on, assess and effectively act within complex contexts and rhetorical situations. They learn to approach a wide variety of communication practices — including visuals, multimedia, generative AI, collaboration and research — from the perspective of writing and rhetoric.
- Students are regularly engaged in hands-on work that challenges them to learn, implement and reflect on their lessons. Courses include active, creative problem-solving assignments and projects ranging from simulated case studies to real-world client and service-learning partner projects. Students are also required to have at least one internship.