Non-Teaching Careers You Can Pursue With An English Degree
So you’re looking into getting an English degree but don’t want to teach? Well, there are many careers available to people who hold a degree in English. This list is to show you the ones that are directly related to the skills you get during your desired school’s English program.
Editor
One of the most obvious careers you can get with an English degree, other than an English teacher, is to be an editor. Editors need to have an excellent grasp of the English language to correct the writing of others.
However, the amount of editing differences from genre to genre. If you are editing a piece for a newspaper or non-literary magazine, then you should make sure the grammar is almost perfect and the language is used correctly.
If you are editing a piece of non-fiction, then there are some rules you can allow to be broken or bent while editing. For poetry, some poems don’t have any punctuation. During those ones, you’re looking for language use and style. If punctuation is used and is correct, then you should follow standard grammar rules.
Fiction has a little less wiggle room than poetry does since punctuation and grammar help the reader understand the story. However, if an author’s writing style is to not use the Oxford comma, or to use it excessively, then you should keep it and/or consult the author on the use of it and if they wanted to use it in that amount.
Technical Writer
This career isn’t one you might think of at first, but it is definitely a possibility if you have experience in other kinds of fields. Many technical writers are looking for people who have medical knowledge, machinery knowledge, etc so that they can look over manuals for correct usage of words and grammar.
It’s not all proofreading either. As a technical writer, you will also be in charge of writing these kinds of manuals too. So if you’re deciding on taking an English major on, or even a minor, then this might be a career path for you if you have knowledge in more than one field.
Almost every job out there needs someone to write the manual for things, since every job has a system and rules that its employees need to follow. So this job will always be in demand.
Lawyer
When people think about careers associated with an English degree, they don’t think about being a lawyer. However, lawyers have to be very creative and forward-thinking in the courtroom. This is perfect for someone who has an English degree.
You had to write many papers. In some cases, you had to get creative with how you approached a topic. By having a degree in English, you will have that boost over the competition and find ways to win your cases that others might not have.
Creativity will especially help when you go into law school and have to write many different papers. Sometimes they might be for the same topic but from a different angle.
You can also use your creativity in coming up with the counterarguments your opponent might have and figuring out how to use those in your client’s favor.
Journalist
Another popular career path for people who have an English degree is journalism. There are some differences between having an English degree and a Journalism degree, but oftentimes employers will let both backgrounds apply for the same job.
One of the main differences between the degrees is that English focuses on the history of the English language while focusing on specific periods or authors. A degree in Journalism focuses on copyediting, writing for newspapers or magazines, and writing stories for the mass media.
Having a degree in English can allow you to have a special input on certain topics that you have a specialty in and inform the audience you are writing for. This is especially true when new things are being discovered about certain authors and topics of the past. Your input will tip the scales one way or another for many readers.
English degree holders will generally have a better grasp of the English language and how to manipulate it to say just the right words for their audience. After all, it’s what they focused on doing for at least four years in college.
Lexicographer
Unless you’re already in this career or are looking into it, you might not know what type of profession it is. A lexicographer is someone who studies words and compiles them into a dictionary.
Dictionaries get updated quite often as the English language continues to evolve, so naturally, there needs to a job for someone to compile all the new and old words. There are dictionaries for just the meaning of words, and there are dictionaries to explain the grammar of using those words in sentences.
If you love to research and compile lists while observing a language evolving right before your eyes, then you might want to check out this career.
Media Researcher
This career path is growing now more than ever as social media continues to grow every year. You can use your skills as an English degree holder to show trends and creative ways to grow as a company.
If you’ve ever had to write a paper or look at an article online, you will see that they choose specific images and words to grab your attention and keep you drawn in. Without even realizing it, you’ve used a method you’ve seen before to hook your reader to stay on your paper or article rather than someone else’s.
You can use this method to help your own company grow their presence in social media, or keep them from setting a bad image for themselves.
Media researchers are responsible for looking at trends in the media and predicting how it will go, or to get their company to hop on board the current trend to stay relevant. This is especially important for a company since once the market doesn’t find them relevant anymore, they tend to disappear from people’s minds.
