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.
Are your communication skills good enough
The importance, effectiveness, and success of undergraduate communication courses in preparing students for workplace communication tasks were the main issues addressed in a survey administered to business students at Florida Institute of Technology (Florida Tech). Overall, both groups felt that such tasks were important and would like to be better prepared for them in their job assignments. While over half of the graduate students believed their communication courses were adequate, the seniors felt more emphasis needs to be on work-related assignments. Adding more work-related content and specialized courses could increase student motivation by making benefits of assignments tangible. Survey results provide insights to curriculum designers who want to adequately prepare tomorrow's communicators.
A sense of story
Arthur N. Applebee National Council of Teachers of English Urbana, Illinois L * S. Vygotsky (1971), writing on the functions of art, gives a very simple example of the way in which a "sense of story" can alter our perception of a narrative. Let us take as an example a fable attributed to Aesop: "It is said that monkeys give birth to two little ones. The mothers adore one and hate the other. They smother and pet and choke the loved ones in their hairy arms, so that only the hated ones live to grow up." For this realistic account to become a fable, we would have to narrate it thus: A monkey once gave birth to two little monkeys. She loved one and hated the other, and so on. (p. 115) Analyzing the differences in his own responses to these brief accounts, Vygotsky points out that in the first case, his mind "reverts quite naturally to reality, and to wondering whether or not the story is true." In the second case, however, he finds himself dealing "with a special, strictly conventional reality" (p. 115). and he isolates it from the intellectual techniques and modes of evaluation brought to bear on the first version. The shift, as Vygotsky points out, is dramatic. We ask totally different questions of the two pieces, evaluate them according to different standards, and integrate them into our general interpretation of the world in quite different ways. The question, of course, is why we do this. A good starting point is James Britton's (1970) distinction between language used in the role of the spectator (who, however moved by the experience, is not expected to directly intervene) and language used in the role of the participant (from whom an intervention of some sort is required). To oversimplify somewhat, Britton's analysis casts the traditional distinction between scientific and "literary" uses of language into a framework where the emphasis is on the relationship between the language-user and the language experience. In the participant role, which embraces a spectrum ranging from sports broadcasts and newspaper reports to Darwin's The Origin of Species and Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, we judge primarily on criteria of objective truth. (In a similar way, we