Kathryn Rentz

Language and Corporate Values: Teaching Ethics in Business Writing Courses.

Standard approaches to ethics in business writing courses do not adequately stress the inescapable power of language to perpetrate certain values. As prospective writers within professions and organizations, students need to learn about this power in order to use and respond to it responsibly.

Editorial: Negotiating the Field of Business Communication

This special issue came about as the result of a proposal I wrote to the editor, Lamar Reinsch, about two years ago. For me, the desire to know who I was as an academic professional had become sharp. Books about English as a discipline were proliferating (Elbow, 1990; Graff,1987; Scholes, 1985; one might also include North, 1987)-and all of them declined to include business or technical communication faculty in the

The Value of Narrative in Business Writing

As in the fields of composition and technical writing, the emphasis on hierarchical organization of texts in business writing has led to a devaluation of narrative, perhaps because the kind of knowledge that narrative creates has been insufficiently understood. By elucidating the special properties of narrative as a mode of discourse and as a cognitive instrument, this article argues for the potential power of narrative in many common business writing situations.

Getting an Invitation to the English Table—and Whether or Not to Accept It

In this article, we trace the journey our professional writing program took from marginal area to well-supported specialty in an English department—a journey we made without sacrificing our commitment to prepare students for professional-level employment. In so doing, we explore the grounds of intellectual compatibility between our field and English studies and describe the conditions most conducive to professional writings finding a respected place in English departments.

Designing a Successful Group-Report Experience

Lisa Gueldenzoph Snyder, PhD, is an associate professor in the School of Business and Economics at North Carolina AT email: lguelden@ncat.edu.

A Flare from the Margins: The Place of Professional Writing in English Departments

Last year, when we revised the requirements for the English major at the University of Cincinnati, we took seriously a significant finding from a survey of our graduates: that well over 90 percent of our majors do not go on to academic jobs in English. In response to this fact, we somewhat reduced the literature requirements to allow room for more writing electives, and, perhaps more symbolically significant, we created a new course, “Discourse Communities,” to serve along with three other courses —“The Study of Language,” “Literary Theory,” and “Advanced Composition”—as “toolbox courses,” any two of which each English major would be required to take. In this way, the analysis of different kinds of professional discourse — managerial, technical, medical, legal, journalistic, and so on — could become a core component in our English majors’ education. While those of us in professional writing regarded these changes as a welcome signal that what we teach does, in fact, belong in the English department, the terms of that belonging were not extensively discussed at the faculty meeting where these changes were approved. In proposing the inclusion of “Discourse Communities” in the major requirements, we relied on justifications already favored by our literature and composition colleagues—that is, that texts and the realities they create are socially constructed; that particular discourses can be seen as instances of larger, institutionalized areas of discourse constraining the lives we live; and that it is part of our job to alert our students to the power relations inscribed in texts of all sorts. To get the course approved at the meeting, we had to point out more than once that this was not a course in producing professional discourse, but instead one taking a critical (as in both analytic and criticizing) approach. I think I know what the outcome would have been had we taken it into our heads to propose an actual professional writing course as a “toolbox” course instead of one devoted to the critical gaze. Yet professional writing instruction is a significant component of many English departments across the country. Of the 525 or so English undergraduate programs represented in a 1991 Modern Language Association survey, 65.4 percent offered professional or technical writing (Huber 1996). More

Beyond the Generational Stereotypes: A Study of U.S. Generation Y Employees in Context.

This case study examined the extent to which expected Gen Y traits surfaced in a well-managed U.S. company. The results indicate that certain Gen Y traits typically regarded as undesirable in the workplace are especially persistent, even in an optimal organizational setting, but others are not. The findings also reveal both expected and unexpected attitudes on the part of the Gen X and Boomer employees and managers. Such studies can help us move beyond generational stereotyping to more accurate, context-sensitive advice about cross-generational communication.

Making a Difference with Business Communication: A Response to Daphne Jameson's ORA Address

I have to confess that, when I read the plan for Daphne’s paper, I thought it would be fitting to start my response with the words, “But seriously, folks . . . .” Can a portion of the blame for the current economic crisis really be laid at our doorstep? Recently, the two Mikes on “Mike & Mike in the Morning,” an ESPN-sponsored talk show, laughed about the Detroit Lions blaming their winless season on the economy. On the face of it, I think blaming the state of the economy on the way we teach business communication is about the same stretch. Much as we might want to think of ours as the super discipline in business, I think calling the poor financial decisions that myriad parties have made poor communication decisions is defining what we do much too broadly. But there is something special about business communication courses, isn’t there? Maybe the best way to make a case for their critical importance in a developing professional’s life is to reference a study prepared for the U.S. Department of Labor by the RAND Corporation, the well-known nonprofit research group. The study, The 21st Century at Work: Forces Shaping the Future Workforce and Workplace in the United States, discusses trends that are already having a huge impact on business communication practices and purposes. Here I’ll highlight three of them.

ABC Publication Award Winners for 2005

THIS COLUMN ANNOUNCES and celebrates the winners of the Association for Business Communication’s publication awards for 2005. As you read the commentaries on these award-winning works, you will notice an impressive range of topics and research methodologies. As Margaret Baker Graham, winner of the ABC’s Outstanding Researcher Award for 2005, remarked in her address at the association’s annual meeting in October, our multidisciplinary field has looked to many research traditions over the years—and not without squabbling over which tradition produces the most “real” knowledge. But the persistent desire to find things out has kept business communication researchers trying new methods, combining old ones in new ways, and discovering each method’s merits. We hope our descriptions of the best work in business communication in 2004 will send you to the works themselves to appreciate the intellectual curiosity and methodological resourcefulness they demonstrate. Enjoy and learn!

Book Reviews : Discourse and Organization. Edited by David Grant, Tom Keenoy, and Cliff Oswick. London: Sage, 1998. 248 pages

that the discipline of management studies has discounted the potential value of discourse studies, and their purpose is to remedy this neglect. While I think the book is somewhat uneven in quality, it successfully demonstrates that the study of organizational discourse yields rich, varied, and useful insights. As the thoughtful and well-researched introductory chapter by the editors announces, virtually every essay in the volume examines the relation