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.
The Effect of Writing Frequency upon Essay-Type Writing Proficiency at the College Level
FACULTY OF American colleges continually raise questions about methods for improving the written expression of college students. At Michigan State College, considerable evidence in the form of corres pondence, term papers, book reports, and other essay type composit ion indicated that students had not acquired the proficiency in the writ ing skills expected of them. This study was initiated as one of several to provide further information on the problem. Required training in writing skills by Michigan State College studen ts consists of one three -hour course in communication skills for three quarters. Not more than one-third of that time is devoted to written expression ? or the equivalent of one quarter's work. It may be that this amount of training is not sufficient to produce the desired improv ement in all students deficient in writing abilities. That more writing experiences are at least a partial answer to this problem, is supported by the experience at Purdue University where the amount of writing in a composition class was doubled. (The normal amount was about equ al to the amount done by Michigan State College students during the three quarters of their course. ) Doubling the amount of writing done
Measuring the Effect of Instruction in Pre-Writing.
this article can and should be a part of each instructor's process of self-education. Although the study uses unscientific sampling procedures and perhaps involves the investigator too deeply for optimal objectivity, the basic strategy of predicting what will happen to the experimental subjects is actually a more sophisticated approach than the typical experiment conceived of as a horserace between experimental and control groups. Comparison of results of large numbers of such small and inexpensive studies can yield knowledge as reliable as that yielded by a single, expensive, impeccably designed experiment. Reviewed by W.J.H.