The Business Writing Center will evaluate your writing or your employees' writing and certify competence in the business writing best practices. The Center will provide a certificate of competence to those who demonstrate 100 percent mastery of the skills. The competency examination requires the candidate to write a memo, letter, e-mail, and short report based on a case study provided by the Business Writing Center. All four must be written within four hours of receiving the case study. If the candidate does not demonstrate all of the skills, he or she may take the competency examination again at a later date using an alternative case study. The fee for each competency examination (all four parts) is $125. Students taking BWC220 Explicit Business Writing and BWC225 Explicit Business Writing with Additional Training are not charged a fee for the final examination. The examination is included in the tuition.

Competencies Evaluated

Candidates must demonstrate 100 percent competence in all of the best practices. They are explained in the book, Explicit Business Writing: Best Practices for the Twenty-First Century, and taught in BWC220 Explicit Business Writing and BWC225 Explicit Business Writing with Additional Training. Usage (grammar, punctuation, spelling, and syntax) are not evaluated in the examination because usage requires an entirely separate, focused course of study, and most usage errors do not interfere with the reader's comprehension. The certification focuses on the best practices that result in explicit business writing. However, proofreading and creating a final draft with no typos or other careless errors are evaluated.