W231 Professional Writing Skills

About IUPUI’s W231 Professional Writing Skills

W231 Professional Writing Skills is offered by the Writing Program at IUPUI’s School of Liberal Arts. The course focuses on a student/community client partnership. Students in W231 reach out and connect with clients around Indianapolis then provide hundreds of hours of exploration, research, and analysis at no charge to community partners. The experience-based course combines academic rigor and community service; the curriculum challenges students to analyze and innovate then pitch practical recommendations to address workplace problems.

 

W231 includes independent writing projects throughout the semester as well as a team project that spans 10 weeks. Independent writing projects include:

• Connecting with and interviewing local professionals

• Practicing a variety of different types of professional writing genres (emails, memos, letters, recommendation reports, etc)

The ten-week team project, which is the recommendation report on this website, condenses and summarizes over 100 hours of research on an in-house challenged provided by our community client.

 

Other community organizations who have worked with the W231 class for the team project includes:

• Indiana NBA Pacers

• Eskenazi Hospital

• Boys and Girls Club

• Creekside Counseling

• IUPUI CAPS

• Back on My Feet

• Ronald McDonald House

• Bru Burger

 

Notable Statistics and Achievements of W231

W231: Professional Writing Skills includes:

• 40+ sections each year (face-to-face, hybrid, and online)

• Over 1,070 students enrolled each year

Each team is made up of 4-5 students

• Partners with over 175 community clients every year

• Creates and distributes a local study that contains at least 50 respondents

• Invests about 200 volunteer hours for each client (100 hours on research and 100 hours on analysis and writing the report)

 

This year W231 students will partner with approximately 160 community partners and dedicate over 35,000 volunteer hours.​