Written Communication Toolkit

The need for written communication skills

Students need to write effectively to communicate with their peers, lecturers, professional colleagues and employers. They are not always experienced writers when they enter university and they don't always receive formal teaching in written communication while doing their undergraduate degrees.

This Toolkit is intended to provide some useful suggestions, strategies and checklists to help your students improve their writing skills.

Good communication skills are at the top of the list of what potential employers look for in graduates. The vast majority of business transactions involve written communication of some kind. Employers of graduates often express concern that students graduate with inadequate basic written communication skills. It is generally expected that university graduates have good literacy skills that can transfer into various work contexts, but research shows that this is not always the case.

Definition

Written communication is the ability to use the conventions of disciplinary discourse to communicate effectively in writing with a range of audiences, in a variety of modes (e.g., persuasion, argument, exposition), as context requires, using a number of different means (e.g., graphical, statistical, audio-visual and technological).