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Alex Ragen boggles:
>>Being as I am a straw chewing hayseed from the backwoods, I innocently
thought that the word "professional" distinguishes those who get paid for
what they do from those who don't. So ... if a degree in "Professional
Writing" doesn't prepare a person for making a living at writing, what does
it prepare a
person for?
Alex, my undergrad degree in professional writing did a fair job of
preparing me for writing for a living, and, as I mentioned, the co-op
program
did quite a lot of that too, for my classmates.
A *graduate* degree, however, is a different beast. It tends deals with
theory,
not practice. We did not so much study how to write professionally as
study other folks' professional writing, in an analytical way. It's
interesting,
and illuminating, and it won't help a lick when you sit down to write a
manual. In much the same way, taking a degree in literature or literary
theory
won't help you write the great Canadian novel.
I tend to be a pretty hardcore supporter of the liberal arts, and I do
believe in the
distinction between vocational courses (HTML coding, project planning) and
theoretical courses (let's apply Bakhtin to this bit of advertising).
So I tend to agree with Theodora Mazza, who wondered where in hell there
was an MA in professional writing that told Katherine King they couldn't
teach her anything. What on earth did they have to offer in the first
place?
The active voice? Sorry, that's undergrad or college stuff (in an ideal
world,
highschool stuff); don't bring it into my graduate class.
A further two cents.
Pete Kloppenburg - pkloppen -at- certicom -dot- com
Technical Writer
Certicom Corp
Mississauga, Ontario,
Canada http://www.certicom.com
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