How We Should Be Teaching Business Communication According to Findings of Writing Research
Although instructors of written business communication courses try to help students refine their writing, many instructors have had only limited-if any formal instruction in writing pedagogy. Familiarity with the pedagogy of writing will enable business communication instructors to help students improve their writing skills, especially students whose skills are substandard. When students’ writing skills are substandard, the writing process must also receive its fair share of attention. Regardless of how well students master the content and structure fundamentals of various types of business documents, the effectiveness of the material they write will be diminished when their writing skills are deficient.
Using Research in Preparing to Teach Writing.
Much has been said in recent years about the teaching of composition, about what the curriculum in composition should contain, and about ways to teach composition more effectively. We hear a great deal about the decline in literacy of our students, the sharp drop in SAT scores, and the observations that many students cannot write a clear English sentence at the senior high school level. Yet, many would say that such statements are grossly exaggerated, and that clearly there are reasons for the appearance of such a "decline." Regardless of whether the alleged literacy crisis exists or not, English teachers at all levels seem to have a new sense of interest and
Further Effects of Sentence-Combining Practice on Writing Ability.
Considerable interest in sentence-combining (SC) exercises has developed following Mellon's (1969) demonstration that practice with such exercises will increase the rate at which students' free writing becomes syntactically more fluent or mature. Mellon's exercises were essentially arhetorical, providing graded experience with a variety of English syntactic patterns without requiring students to provide their own ideas and/or vocabulary. The exercises followed a standard format; each was a set of kernel sentences plus directions for combining the kernels into a single complex statement to be written out by the student. The directions were informed by a basic transformational grammar which students had been taught directly. While Mellon and others (Ney, 1966; Raub, 1966) were introducing the SC procedures, research efforts in child language development were refining syntactic indices that have subsequently been employed as reliable measures of the effect of SC practice. In 1965, Hunt established the T-unit and clause length as sensitive and objective measures describing a normative continuum of children's growth in "syntactic maturity" by grade level. More recently, Hunt (1970) has described more economical procedures for sampling associated with descriptions of syntactic maturity levels. Admittedly, Mellon employed an array of syntactic indices of variable precision and claimed, as his results could not, that SC practice and not the formal instruction in transformational grammar account for the increases in