Communicating Across Careers: Writing Transfer and the Experiences that Shape a Professional Life (Routledge, September 2026) offers vital new insights about how professionals develop as writers across roles, industries, identities, and experiences. The project developed out of the author’s own experience of career change and her prior scholarship around writing transfer, or the ways that individuals learn within and adapt to new writing contexts. Using career change as a valuable, representative professional moment, the chapters in this book illuminate how central writing is to all of our working lives, but also how very connected who we are as people is to who we are as writers.

The book draws from long-form, narrative-inquiry-based interviews with 45 professionals as varied as a Marine-turned-pastor, a television producer-turned-school librarian, and a record label manager-turned-realtor. In addition to diversity in industry, economic history, gender, race, and ability, readers will hear from professionals ranging in age, including a relatively new graduate in her mid-twenties and a recently retired professional in his late seventies. The narratives of these professionals, then, represent not only writing as it develops over a career, but also over the past fifty years in American industry.

These rich stories show shifting identities, surprising challenges, and intriguing victories in writing development, ultimately revealing how complex factors ranging from the personal to the academic to the social tangle to shape a professional life. They also provide insights into the distinct experiences of writing transfer across professions, named here as Dynamic Workplace Writing Transfer. Finally, Communicating Across Careers establishes career change as a particularly valuable moment of study, as it’s nearly inevitable for all professionals, whether through traditional career shifts, as these participants experience, or through the inescapable technological developments that change industries and communication over a lifetime of work.

Communicating Across Careers offers pedagogical insights for all who teach and study writing broadly and those who teach technical and professional writing specifically, but also for Writing in the Disciplines (WID) and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) programs interested in how to better prepare students for writing the professional world.