Business and Professional Communication Quarterly

A study of writing in the United States Navy indicates the wide usefulness of the rhetorical concept of ethos. Although almost never formally taught, the concept is continually being rediscovered and applied within a wide variety of naval contexts, from naval personnel evaluations to ship- repair reports. But ethos is still too seldom consciously present or habitually applied in the naval profession. And, as the Tailhook episode has recently demonstrated, a lack of such understanding can sometimes have adverse effects on the credibility of the Navy as a whole.

This paper describes a project incorporating writing-to- learn activities into an introductory finance class. Such activities use writing informally as a vehicle to promote student learning. Examination of the students' brief papers showed that students became less likely to skip theory and go to canned formulas and that they took more responsibil ity for their work. For instructors, the project was beneficial because it enabled them to tailor class presentations more precisely to students' actual comprehension of course material.

Marketing educators have long recognized the need for strengthening their students' business communication skills. Recruiters routinely consider superior communica tions skills as essential hiring criteria when filling entry- level marketing positions. Additionally, marketing students consistently rate communication-intensive business courses as among those most helpful to them in preparing for their business careers. This paper discusses an undergraduate buyer-behavior course project targeted at improving stu dents' business communication skills through a team- teaching project. The paper highlights the value of integrating written, oral, and electronic communications pedagogy with buyer-behavior course instruction and then outlines the project from a "how-to-do-it" perspective.

This self-assessment is an experiential learning exercise designed for both corporate training and classroom. With Kolb's experiential learning model as a theoretical base, the self-assessment questionnaire in the exercise was developed on the basis of seven. dimensions of communication compe tence identified and confirmed by various empirical studies as predictors of intercultural business success. After com pleting this exercise, students should be able to (a) identify their communication behavior in intercultural interactions, (b) be aware of their communication competence level in intercultural interactions, and (c) increase their under standing of the relationship between communication behav ior and intercultural business management success.

The diversity of society today requires people to interact with others who have different cultural backgrounds. The simplest communication can be complicated by nonverbal factors. This study used a pretest-posttest design to deter mine the effect of an intervention treatment consisting of students viewing pictures of people and identifying attrib utes based solely on what they see. Then in groups the students discussed their varying interpretations. The findings were that the treatment made students more aware of nonverbal factors and how they are involved in interper sonal communication.

In order to reproduce the politically charged environment of most corporations, I turn my class into a company. Using previously designated study groups, I make one the presi dent, another the vice president, and a final one the man ager of operations. Then I give them a problem which they can handle only through memos. Outside of class, they communicate by fax machines. Inside of class, they read and discuss each other's memos. This assignment enables the instructor to drop out of the role of lecturer as students discover for themselves the complex interaction between a writer and an audience.

This paper shows instructors how playing the role of a boss can lead students to write, speak, and behave more profes sionally. The course accomplishes this transformation by changing the academic mindsets, conventions, and actions of both instructor and students. Instead of academic policies to govern a class, workplace conventions operate. In a reciprocal fashion, instructors assume that students' assignments represent the instructor's competence to upper management, and thus instructors "invest"themselves in student work beyond traditional academic obligations. The paper also critiques the "boss" approach as well as provides assignment topics, evaluation guidelines, and specific descriptions of some assignments.

Composition research provides a vast field of information from which business communication instructors can draw. Major changes in techniques for responding to student writing include teaching the process of writing and ways to teach grammar.