Dan Melzer
Fun Fact: Dan likes to play guitar and is currently on the verge of forming a band!
Dan Melzer is a professor in the University Writing Program, where he serves as the Professional Writing Minor advisor and internship coordinator. He graduated with a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from Florida State University, and his main focus as a researcher is on writing across curricula, which includes assignment design, student and instructor response to writing assignments, and the administration of writing programs. His latest book, Reconstructing Response to Student Writing: A National Study from across the Curriculum (2023), received an honorable mention from the Conference on College Composition and Communication. While he’s very proud of his work, he claims he’s not as proud as his mother.
How has professional writing made a difference in your life? How do you think it could benefit others’s lives?
The thing that I never really grasped when I was going to college is how important writing was going to be outside of school for me. I do a lot of political activism: I volunteer for a lot of different groups, and I'm often texting people, or writing articles or opinion pieces for newspapers, and a lot of the same basic rhetorical principles about audience, persuasion, supporting an argument, and finding your voice that I learned in college are what I also apply when I’m writing for my political activism, too, even if the audience and writing style are a little bit different. So that also has a strong impact on my life, because my activism is really important to me, and I can really see the impacts of what I’m writing resulting in change and persuasion, you know?
Today, I would say 80% of what I do with my day is writing. All kinds of writing, from emails, to reports, to articles and books, to observations of teachers, to recommendation letters—just writing, writing, writing. And it’s my voice as a writer, and my research as a writer, that has connected me to other people in my field.
What benefits do you think the Professional Writing Minor offers to undergraduate students?
One of the things I think is really useful about the Professional Writing Minor is that the kinds of things you’ll learn about writing, and the kind of growth that you'll have as a writer by completing the minor, are really transferable to all different kinds of contexts. Whether you're going to graduate school, or you want to be a journalist, or you want to write in the business world, or you're going on to law school—whatever your professional goals are, the things you’ll learn in the professional writing minor are going to transfer and be applicable to all different kinds of writing contexts. I think you’ll find that the things you would learn will really empower you and make you much more confident as a writer, no matter what the writing context that you’ll encounter after you graduate.
Another great thing about the Professional Writing Minor is that you’re going to have a balance of classes where you gain some general knowledge that is broad and that can apply in many different contexts, but then you have the choice to take classes that are more tailored to your specific needs and your specific goals. And you’re going to be able to participate in an internship that is also really tailored to your specific goals, and that’s going to give you some very concrete, real-world writing experience. So, the minor is a nice mix of broadness and breadth, and you’ll be able to tailor your needs by choosing classes that work for you and an internship that works for you.
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to undergraduates looking to complete the minor?
The main piece of advice I have is coming from my position as an internship coordinator, and that is to take the internship very seriously and devote some time to really finding one that meets your goals and is a good fit for you. Meet with me, or whoever the internship coordinator is when you start to look for an internship, to talk through it; whether you need some feedback, you need help finding an internship, or you just have some questions. Because, from what I’ve seen, the students who start thinking about it early, and talk to me about it, and start planning for it, usually have a lot more success.
Another piece of advice is that I think a lot of students, when they think about professional writing, think about the products that they’re gonna turn out; the specific types of writing, genres of writing, and specific products that they’re going to be writing in the classes. But the other aspect of the Professional Writing Minor that I think is really important to consider is the way it will impact your processes as a writer. Your habits, your revision processes, your confidence as a writer, and how those might impact how well you write. So to me, the secret benefit of the minor is the way it will transform you and help you grow your self-awareness as a writer, your processes, and your confidence. These kinds of things are aspects of writing that don’t necessarily have to do with editing, the quality of your writing, or the final product, but have more to do with your habits as a writer, your processes as a writer, and how you think of yourself as a writer.