Writing for the Workplace

Course Approach

This is likely the course I have taught the most over fifteen years in higher ed; a version of this course was the first course I taught professionally, and has gone through significant changes over the years.

My major goal is that the course is not Biz 101. Rather, it should operate as a bridge between Humanities majors who want professionalize, and pre-professional degrees who want different perspectives on work. Regardless of major, you can walk out at the end of the class with a working resume, cover letter, LinkedIn profile, and some interview fodder for answering how you work on a team.

‘Working’ is an extremely human condition. Arendt separated work from labor (and action), but regardless of major or socioeconomic background the class is situated to explore the shared experiences of work–coworkers, hierarchy, meetings, deadlines. I’ve seen versions of this class taught where time management skills are taught, so i selected (upon coming to KU) Melissa Gregg’s Counterproductive as a ‘textbook’, focusing on some of these strategies but also the critique of them.

Signature Work

The main portfolio object from this class is simply what I refer to as application docs, a resume and cover letter that they can start sending to employers. Students also create an optimized LinkedIn, and we discuss networking, being found by recruiters, and interviewing.

The back half of the class students work on a format of an annual report, in which they work in pre-designed teams (most recent iteration is Aldi, DuoLingo, Palantir, Under Armor, and LEGO) to write collaborative reports. Students learn how to meet deadlines in a team-based setting while also mastering their own ‘department’ (Budget, Marketing, Operations, Competitive Analysis, and if there is a fifth person then a Leadership position). Students working on the Budget section often were Business or Marketing students and Humanities students avoided it, to which i reconfigured that section to be more in-line with my research on Investor Relations and had them write Investor Letters where they use quantification and forward-looking statements (will, plan to, have budgeted for, will make moves to, in the future can, etc.,).

The newest wrinkle I added in FA25 was a budget game based off of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s stock exchange game (link). The goal is to make Humanities students comfortable discussing finance and money, with the increasing narrativization of the economy (see: Cedric Durand’s Fictitious Capital)https://www.versobooks.com/products/320-fictitious-capital?srsltid=AU7gw4Xx9LlTv18S_2402vcucOHksnW1PHwGYJD_Cnu36NCS9N-cz4Cy. Students earn tokens for basic class activities and to which they then use to select from a ‘menu’ of solutions to fix their assigned company. This does two things–allows students streamlined thinking so that they can focus on writing in topics they may not be familiar with, and gamifies some of the invisible labor of teamwork.