Last week I was helping a friend write a report for her job. After about 10 minutes, she had a question for me – an important one. “You keep talking about showcasing myself,” she said. “What does that mean, and does it really matter in something I’m writing for work?”

Good questions!

“Showcasing” means crafting your writing so that readers are impressed (or intrigued or convinced, depending on your purpose) by what you’ve written. To put it more simply, it means selling yourself and your ideas.

“Showcasing” is essential to writing, but it’s often overlooked in traditional writing courses. When you’re writing in school about a topic that’s been assigned to you, your instructor is probably looking for unity, coherence, effective word choices, sophisticated sentences, and so on. There seems to be little need to “showcase” yourself and your ideas. (Actually there is, and I’ll get to that in a minute.)

Once you enter the working world your writing takes on deeper and broader purposes.  You’re promoting an idea or a project – or yourself. Often you’re trying to create an identity or brand for yourself:  “This is who I am. Look what I can do!” (And that strategy can be useful in school as well. It doesn’t hurt to make your instructor think you’re smart, or witty, or insightful – and a good writer can incorporate all those qualities into an essay or research paper.)

I can pinpoint the first time I began to think about a writing task as a showcase. I was teaching in the prison system and had some ideas about how officers could do their jobs better. They received little training in communication skills and problem solving, and the deficiencies showed  in their chaotic interactions with inmates.

But as a female English instructor I had little clout in the male-dominated world of corrections. So I didn’t even bother talking to the administrators about my observations. Instead I wrote an article for the statewide corrections newsletter. And I wrote it not from my point of view – “You guys need help!” but from theirs: Good problem-solving and communication skills would reduce officer stress and make them safer.

A few weeks after the article was published, I received a phone call from the state office of corrections. Soon I was traveling to prisons all over the state to conduct staff training in communications and problem solving.

On one of those trips I talked to an instructor who said she’d been trying for years to persuade administrators to offer the kind of instruction I was doing. “How come they listened to you and not me?” she asked.

“I wrote an article,” I said. “And I did a selling job.”

It worked for me. Will it work for you? Yes!

                    Showcase Yourself!