Business and Professional Communication Quarterly

The increasing availability of recording technologies makes it easier to include usability testing projects in business communication courses. Usability testing is a method of discovering whether people can navigate, read, and understand a print or electronic communication well enough to achieve a particular purpose in a reasonable time frame. Usability projects increase students’ knowledge and motivation by forcing them to experience the audience’s frustrations with poorly written and designed communications. By following the suggestions and examples provided, faculty can develop effective usability project materials and capitalize on new technologies for data collection and sharing.

Given the expanding globalized workforce, business educators continue to seek new ways to prepare students for intercultural encounters. Although immersion in other cultures is the optimal strategy, this method is not always feasible. As such, educators seek other mechanisms to simulate intercultural experiences. This study examines emotional intelligence as a predictor of intercultural communication apprehension among university students (N = 425). Results indicate that three of the emotional intelligence subscales predict intercultural communication apprehension: emotionality, sociability, and self-control. These results support the premise that emotional intelligence manages and/or reduces intercultural communication apprehension and therefore should be integrated in business curriculum.

The best practices presented in textbooks and professional publications provide separate guidelines for paper-based and electronic or “scannable” résumés. This article recommends changing these practices so that writers can prepare one résumé for both paper and electronic delivery. These recommendations focus on three areas. Résumés should be formatted based on eye-tracking research about on-screen reading. Specific guidelines should help writers decide when to include an objective or summary. Keywords should be prioritized over active verbs. Last, résumés still must be formatted for paper but designing for on-screen reading is now equally or more important, and best practices need to reflect this change.

Infographics exist on nearly any topic you can imagine, proliferating in the digital age with social media. As this genre continues to explode in the business scene, business and professional communication instructors can no longer ignore showing their students infographics. After first defining the genre and outlining how it situates itself within business and professional communication, this article offers two approaches to increase awareness and exposure of infographics for students. The first focuses on an analysis assignment using infographics; the second focuses on a production assignment.

Although relatively little attention has been given to the voice assessment of student work, at least when compared with more traditional forms of text-based review, the attention it has received strongly points to a promising form of review that has been hampered by the limits of an emerging technology. A fresh review of voice assessment in light of recent technological developments strongly suggests that this form of review is now ready for broad adoption. Favorable student reception of voice assessment and its potential for raising instructor awareness around the review process itself argue further for considering it afresh.

Employers frequently complain about the state of their employees’ writing skills. Much of the current research on this subject explores workplace writing skills from the employer’s perspective. However, this article examines workplace writing from the employees’ perspective. Specifically, it analyzes MBA students’ responses to a course assignment in which they assessed their writing strengths and weaknesses and reflected on opportunities and threats to demonstrating good writing skills in the workplace. Results indicate employers must show that they value good writing and that writing skills must become the employee’s habit. Implications for business communication pedagogy are discussed.