The Hurley Write Story
Hurley Write was founded by Pam Hurley in 1988, while she was working as an adjunct in the English Department at UNC-Wilmington. Pam’s real passion was teaching technical writing. In fact, Pam enjoyed teaching that class so much that she developed an advanced technical writing course in which students worked on a semester-long feasibility study. In this course, students were asked to find a project they felt was worth researching or a problem they wished to solve and, at the end of the semester, they presented their findings, via oral presentation, to their peers and decision-makers. Over the years Pam taught the course, students solved many problems they saw on campus, in their workplace, and in the community.
Pam realized that the skills that she was teaching her students were applicable for professionals in the real world. She also knew, based on extensive research, that employers often complained about the writing skills of their employees. Armed with that knowledge, she called a local contract research organization (CRO) and asked if she could teach a course for their staff; they agreed. The course was so successful that the CRO then hired her to teach all new employees the same writing skills. That contract lasted four years until the company dissolved its Learning and Development program.
Pam was developing her business while teaching in academia. She went on to pursue her doctorate in technical writing at the University of South Carolina; while initially she thought that she’d stay in academia, her success at the CRO showed her that many professionals needed just the kind of help she was offering. With that, she started Hurley Write, Inc.
While the company’s first clients were mainly in biotech, drug development, and life sciences, Hurley Write’s clients now include a wide variety of professionals across all disciplines: engineering, financial, IT, customer service, and marketing, including many Fortune 500 and multinational firms, but smaller companies as well.
Hurley Write designs and teaches writing courses for companies all over the world; the company’s instructors are highly credentialed and have backgrounds in technical writing, professional writing, and instructional technology. All have many years of teaching experience and all are imminently qualified to designs solutions that meet a company’s needs for a writing course.
Hurley Write’s success can, in large part, be attributed to the expertise, enthusiasm, and passion of the instructors (they’re not “talking heads”—they live and breathe the subject matter!), and the fact that the concepts taught, which are based on readability studies, provide participants with logical strategies to plan, write, and revise.