Rebekka Andersen
Fun fact: Rebekka is a classical pianist, and she has a goal of one day playing for senior centers in the evenings!
Rebekka Andersen is an Associate Professor within the University Writing Program. She graduated with her PhD in Professional Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2009, and has since taught courses at UC Davis that prepare students for careers as professional writers or professionals who write. Over the years, Rebekka has supported students completing the Professional Writing Minor and has contributed to the development of an undergraduate major in professional writing.
Rebekka’s research focuses on technical communication and the implications of digital content transformations for education and research in technical communication, as well as on strategies for building stronger connections between academia and industry. She regularly presents her research at industry and academic conferences, and serves on the Advisory Council for the Center for Information-Development Management; the Technical Communication Advisory Board for the Department of Writing Studies, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities; and the Steering Committee for the ACM SIGDOC Committee on Structured Authoring and Content Management. She also serves on editorial and reviewer boards for several journals in the field of professional and technical communication.
Rebekka’s co-authored book, Technical Communication and the Discipline of Content: Considerations for Research, Training, and Career Readiness, was published by Routledge Press in 2025. She hopes the book and its companion GitHub repository inspire new research focused on the content discipline and new approaches to preparing students for careers as content professionals. She has also published research on cultural dynamics in technology diffusion processes, the value of academic research in technical communication, editorial roles and processes, and visual literacies.
How has professional or disciplinary writing made a difference in your life? How do you think it could benefit others’s lives?
Well, I would say in the day-to-day for my work, professional writing is embedded in everything I do. So if I’m teaching, it's the way I develop my syllabus, the way I set up my Canvas site, right? I’m always applying principles of document design and accessibility best practices and also writing with clarity and concision. I try to practice what I preach, which I think is important because being an effective communicator has served me really well over many, many years. Whether I’m applying for a job, teaching, or writing a proposal or report, professional writing has helped me in important ways and I want to share that with students.
I also have a lot of conversations with hiring managers and consultants who are actually in positions in which they can and do hire entry-level communicators into the field, including in the world of editing. I spend a lot of time in conversation with those folks in technical communication, and I bring what I learn back to not only my research and what I publish but also to the classroom. I love the field of professional writing, kind of at large. I love how it's applied, I love how you can effect change through communications, and I enjoy bringing that kind of love and passion to the classroom. I hope to inspire students to move in that direction for their own careers.
What benefits do you think the Professional Writing Minor offers to undergraduate students?
The minor introduces students to professional genres that they're likely going to be writing in. Reports are a big one for STEM majors. They're often reporting results of data-driven research. How do you write that up? How do you write it up for different kinds of audiences? For your lay audience versus your public audience versus your research-based academic audience? Learning those genres is really valuable.
And it’s not just genres but also communication processes, plain language, editing, the basics of a sentence. How do you have control over the way in which you structure a sentence? There's power in that. Giving students that rhetorical toolkit is helpful for more than just STEM majors. There's tons of opportunities for those who are in the sciences and studying technical disciplines who can also communicate well. Those are our subject matter experts. In engineering firms, in research labs, in professional environments, the go-to people in those contexts have strong editing and communication skills. They're often the people training others. There's more opportunity to get promoted and to move into higher level positions if you have that professional writing skill set. So that’s a tremendous benefit to those students. Developing a language for those kinds of high-stakes communications is incredibly empowering, and people recognize that.
What is a class you would recommend to anyone wanting to gain experience with professional writing?
I always recommend the editing class, UWP 112A. It’s a different kind of class, and I recommend taking it after taking an advanced writing class. So you get a foundation, and then you move into the particulars of structure, content, and style.
I also recommend the business writing class, UWP 104A. I think that’s a great class that introduces students to the fundamentals of professional writing and gets them learning about professional genres and how to analyze a rhetorical situation. It also introduces students to primary research, getting beyond secondary research that we tend to focus on our freshman and sophomore years. How do you design a survey? How do you conduct an interview? How do you write up the results?
What’s one piece of advice you’d give to undergraduates looking to complete the minor?
Don't hesitate to reach out to faculty who teach the courses in the minor, and please take advantage of the person in the faculty advisor role. Their job is to support you, help you through picking classes, help you think through the internship piece and when it makes sense to do an internship, when you should start planning. Just take advantage of the people who are already positioned there to support you and help you.
Don't be the student who is graduating in the spring, and week one of spring quarter be like, “Oh, shoot, I need a four-unit internship.” Don’t do that. Take advantage of your resources early. Know that we’re excited to talk to students and here to support you.