Professional writing is writing for reward or as a profession; as a product or object, professional writing is any form of written communication produced in a workplace environment or context that enables employees to, for example, communicate effectively among themselves, help leadership make informed decisions, advise clients, comply with federal, state, or local regulatory bodies, bid for contracts, etc. Professional writing is widely understood to be mediated by the social, rhetorical, and material contexts within which it is produced. For example, in a business office, a memorandum (abbrev. memo) can be used to provide a solution to a problem, make a suggestion, or convey information. Other forms of professional writing commonly generated in the workplace include email, letters, reports, and instructions. In seeking to inform, persuade, instruct, stimulate debate, or encourage action from recipients, skilled professional writers make adjustments to different degrees of shared context, e.g., from a relatively accessible style useful for unsolicited contact letter to prospective clients to a technical report that relies on a highly specialized in-house vocabulary.
A professional writer may be freelance, meaning they work on a self-employed basis, or fully employed in an occupation where their primary responsibility is the production of specialized documentation, such as journalism, marketing, advertising, public relations, or the military. Yet even workers who don't necessarily think of themselves as professional writing practitioners regularly produce professional documentation regularly in the course of their work as lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, engineers, and social workers. Moreover, as Anne Beaufort observes, writing skills have become increasingly important to so-called "blue collar" occupations since "technologies have driven more record keeping and decision making to those who are directly involved in manufacturing, information-processing, and care-giving activities."
