A Reassessment of the Case Approach: Reinforcing Artifice in Business Writing Courses

1985 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 4-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn S. Butler
Keyword(s):  
Business Writing ◽  
Writing Courses

Teamwork Through Team Building: Face-to-Face to Online

2008 ◽  
Vol 71 (4) ◽  
pp. 472-487 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Staggers ◽  
Susan Garcia ◽  
Ed Nagelhout
Keyword(s):  
Team Building ◽  
Business Writing ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Kinesthetic Learning ◽  
Online Business ◽  
Online Environments ◽  
Building Activities

This article describes the ways the authors incorporated team-building activities into our online business writing courses by interrogating the ways that kinesthetic learning translates into the electronic realm. The authors review foundational theories of team building, including Cog's Ladder and Tuckman's Stages, and offer sample exercises they have converted. The authors show how the medium affects the exercises, how the choices made as teachers affect the exercises, and how they adjusted to meet the needs of their students. The authors argue that teamwork most successfully occurs after team building, and too often this team building is lacking in online environments.

Developing Digital Literacies in Second Life

2011 ◽  
pp. 169-193 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Remley
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Environments ◽  
Student Perceptions ◽  
Second Life ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Corporate Training ◽  
Digital Literacies ◽  
Business Writing ◽  
Training Environment ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
Digital Environments

The proliferation of virtual environments and their use in business and industry begs the question of where in higher education and corporate training various literacies associated with these digital environments, such as using the technology and critically examining its affordances and constraints in applications, can occur. The author argues that such literacy training can occur in business writing courses as well as in corporate training environments that engage students and trainees in situated learning experiences. This chapter describes an instructional approach that integrates Second Life in a business writing course, which could also be applied in corporate training; and it reports on survey research related to student perceptions of their learning experience with that pedagogy. The discussion also includes how the instruction can be implemented in a corporate training environment to give employees experience using and critiquing business applications in Second Life. Generally, students perceive that Second Life is appropriate to include in business writing pedagogy because it is relevant to their career development as more companies use it in their operations. Implications of this study include identifying activities to help train students with virtual environments that they may experience in workplaces after graduation and offering activities that can be used by corporate trainers to help those already in workplaces develop these situated digital literacies.

Perceptions of Memo Quality: A Case Study of Engineering Practitioners, Professors, and Students

2005 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole Amare ◽  
Charlotte Brammer
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Technical Writing ◽  
Rhetorical Strategies ◽  
Business Writing ◽  
Workplace Writing ◽  
Engineering Faculty ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
Similarities And Differences

One goal of college technical writing courses is to prepare students for real-world writing situations. Business writing textbooks function similarly, using guidelines, sample assignments, and model documents to help students develop rhetorical strategies to use in the workplace. Students attend class, or read and perform exercises in a textbook, with the faith that these skills will apply to workplace writing. In an attempt to better understand the similarities and differences between industry and academe's expectations of one genre of workplace writing, the memo, we compared the perceptions of memo quality by engineering faculty, students, and practitioners. All three groups responded to three sample memos taken from textbooks used by engineering professors in their undergraduate classrooms. The results indicate that students' and engineers' opinions of memo quality were more closely related to one another than to professors' comments, focusing on content, while professors were the most critical of style issues.

Documentation: A Functional Rationale

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-42
Author(s):  
J. W. Allen
Keyword(s):  
Business Writing ◽  
Secondary Research ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
Research Reporting ◽  
Auburn University ◽  
Definition Of

This article describes a practical rationale for the use of documentation in technical or business reports and articles based on a definition of documentation which emphasizes its role in providing support for theses. Stressing the “evidential” aspect of documentation, and the importance of “verifiability,” the article shows how the concept of documentation is relevant to both primary and secondary research reporting. Advantages which follow from this approach are pointed out. The approach described is one formulated for and currently being used in technical and business writing courses at Auburn University.

Computer Conversations and Writing Apprehension

2000 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Mabrito
Keyword(s):  
Communication Strategies ◽  
Writing Apprehension ◽  
Business Writing ◽  
Writing Courses ◽  
Online Communications ◽  
Online Business

As participants in a growing number of online business writing courses, students must communicate with each other and the instructor electronically. One group of students may face particular challenges in this environment: those with high degrees of writing apprehension. This study examined the online communications behavior of such students as they communicated with both familiar and unknown audiences via Internet newsgroups. Low-apprehensive writers tend to exhibit simi lar communication strategies in both types of newsgroups. But high-apprehensive writers contributed more, initiated more topics of discussion, and felt more com fortable participating in electronic discussions with unknown audiences than they did when communicating with familiar audiences.

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