By Teresa Davis
November 13, 2015
Have you ever wished you could add web design or desktop publishing to your résumé, but haven’t had time to take a class for it? Do you need additional experience working as part of a functional team? Would you like to give something back to the community using your professional writing skills? Have you ever discussed the Oxford comma with your friends, or wished your friends knew what the heck an Oxford comma was?
If any of this sounds like you, the Professional Writing Club at UAB could be a great fit.
The PWC is a very young club on campus, only begun in 2013, and just recently recognized as an official UAB student organization. That hasn’t stopped the club from attracting a group of members who are passionate about their craft, though. Members are involved in a variety of areas within professional writing, such as magazine writing, advertising design, technical writing, and social media writing.
Skills developed in these areas translate well to the different projects the PWC is involved in, and members all have different strengths to offer.
Projects
One of the best things about the PWC is the opportunity to offer services to real clients, and as a result, offer real-life experience to students. The most recent project the club worked on was creating a set of tutorial videos for the University Writing Center.
The Writing Center offers free tutoring to students of all levels across the entire campus, and offers online sessions for distance education students.
The PWC made videos to show how to navigate the Writing Center’s appointment system, including how to create an account, how to set and cancel appointments, and how to work with the online and e-tutoring system.
According to Dr. Jaclyn Wells, director of the University Writing Center, these have already been heavily utilized.
The PWC members who worked on this project learned how to plan tutorials, how to use screen recording software, and how to edit and publish videos.
In another past project, the PWC worked with a local middle school to design and publish a small collection of student creative writing. The club worked in several teams to create color schemes, fonts, and page layouts, then the teams came together to publish the completed project.
This provided an opportunity to effectively use desktop publishing software, as well as offering a service to the community.
Workshops
One of the things that makes professional writing different from other English department writing is being more specific to the business world.
Not that essays and critical writing aren’t important (because they are), but clear, concise, professional communication is applicable in any job.
For this reason, the club can be helpful for students in all majors and benefit any type of career.
For the Fall 2015 Learning Series, the PWC hosted a series of workshops designed to build skills specifically geared towards professionals of all majors entering the job market. In the first part of the series, Dr. Jeffrey Bacha, the Faculty Advisor for the PWC, offered a lecture on writing an effective résumé that will get applicants noticed.
For the second part in the series, members of the PWC were on hand to work directly with other students to revise and refine their résumés. These workshops took place on November 10th and November 17th. Further information about these workshops and other events can be found on the PWC’s OrgSync website, or through the club’s social media accounts.
Club Benefits
While the skills used in these projects are all taught in professional writing classes, not all students have taken those classes, which is one of the benefits of the club. Members are able to learn from one another’s skills and have an opportunity to practice outside the classroom.
For this reason, club members are not required to be professional writing students, they only need to want to learn the skills.
In addition to learning new skills and sharing their skills with others, the PWC is made up of a group that has become both friends and a strong network.
2015-2016 club president Shelby Morris says, “The PWC is somewhere I can meet people who are interested in the same things as me. It’s frustrating when taking a class and finding out there’s no one in there who is the same concentration. It’s always encouraging being able to talk to someone about the same design struggle or coding issue.”
Current, and certainly, future club members will have a group of peers with whom they can discuss classes, projects, careers, job prospects, and hobbies, as well as share a plate of cookies.
