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52 BizEd JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2015 your turn Professors Without Borders BRINGING WRITING INTO BUSINESS BY JAMES VANOOSTING I'M PROUD TO POSSESS dual citizenship in liberal arts and busi- ness. My doctorate is in theater, but I paid for it by coaching business speakers. I've published four novels, but I've also pub- lished four business books. I've been a dean of arts and sciences, and now I'm writer-in-residence in a business school. I live in the boundary land between business and liberal arts, and I have never enjoyed an intellectual home more. I'm not alone here, of course. Liberal arts colleagues cross into business territory all the time. They're usually on tempo- rary work visas, because specific projects call for expertise in philosophy, art, literature, or language. Only one discipline that I can think of, however, offers a permanent passport, and that's writing. Professionals on both sides of the border need good writing all the time. Here are three principles of writing that I believe can be imported across the border from liberal arts to business: 1. THE BEST WRITING IS CONVERSATIONAL. Professors should emphasize to students the relationship between writing and speaking. Today most writing assign- ments are presented as calls for five- or ten-page papers. But manufacturing pages is not the same thing as composing words. Writing is not the production of print, but the reproduction of voice. One exists for the eye, the other for the ear. The typical rate of speech in the United States is 130 words per minute. A typical page of double-spaced print is 260 words. Therefore, one page of print equals two minutes of talk. Almost all the writing assignments that I give are one or two pages, because I want students to grasp the equation between speaking and writing. I tell them that if, in their profes- sional lives, they can't explain a topic in two minutes of uninterrupted talk—i.e., one page—they're unlikely to hold the at- tention of their audience. I also tell them they should learn to make a sophisticated argument, complete with documenta- tion, in no more than two pages. After all, on how many occasions will they be permitted to talk without interruption for more than four minutes? You can apply this lesson in the classroom in two ways. First, instruct students to write out loud. Ask them to listen to the words as they come out of their mouths, rather than watching words as they scroll onto a screen. Tell them to imagine that they are speaking to a specific listener, or writing for a specific reader—someone who is bright, well informed, capable of following a nu- anced argument, and, at the same time, skeptical. Second, as you assess papers, try reading them out loud. If you can't hear a recognizably human voice, rather than one that sounds like it was produced by