This paper presents some results of a ten year research and teaching project for educating educators for professional writing, either in the educational system or in the working environment. Specifically, it presents a curriculum of basic competences that all educators should have, independently of the didactic destination. These competences can be summarized in five points: the conscience of the variation between speaking and writing textual strategies; the ability to identify information within a context, and in using it for textual purposes; the conscience of the parameters that characterize a textual genre, and the capacity of managing them reformulating a text for different purposes; the skills for managing the different aspects of a communicative situation; and, finally, argumentation, with and without documentation. The study privileges textual rather than surface linguistic competences; so, even if elaborated for an Italian speaking environment, it is applicable in any occidental language and culture.
professional writing; education; textual competence