Do any majors fit this bill?

An English major, or a writing major, will give you most of what you are looking for.

A lot of people tend to believe that you need experience in the precise, exact thing that you want to do in order to learn skills for it. For example, the assumption is often that if you want to write good marketing copy, you should major in something that is going to have you practicing writing marketing copy over and over.

But college is not vocational school. Moreover, transferable skills are what you’re looking at. The foundations for good, logical, engaging, persuasive language can be found in a variety of majors that make you write a lot - English probably chief among them, philosophy another, history yet another.

The traits of good, persuasive, engaging writing are relatively similar whether you’re writing the Great American Novel or the Great American Marketing Campaign. If you study the way great writers hone and spin their craft, you’ll be well prepared to do the same in nonfiction.

Don’t be so quick to dump on fiction; you can learn a wealth of great narrative craft there. I am a very good writer and I use a lot of principles I learned from analyzing and writing fiction to write persuasively in business settings. (Additionally, a lot of business writing is truly awful.)

You can also take classes in more than just your major - so it is very possible for an English major to also take classes in marketing and philosophy.

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