Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/54806
a topic when you're teaching it to someone else! To contrast our different perspectives on the subject of business commu- nication, we titled our presentation "The Business of English and the English of Business." Nine Instructional Strategies Through all of these efforts, I have developed strong opin- ions about two ways business faculty can help students improve their writing—through instruction and through feedback. I can recommend nine instructional strategies: 1. Explicitly emphasize writing in the syllabus. While business faculty might expect students to have learned writing skills in earlier courses, students often fail to master composition skills unless such a requirement is made explicit. At the beginning of the semester, I make it clear to students that excellent writing is expected in the course. 2. Allocate time in class. It's essential to spend class time on writing, even if this means instructors must reduce the time they can spend on discipline-specific material. I devote a maximum of 1.25 hours to the topic if I'm teaching a typical 45-hour semesterlong class. That's enough time to organize a writing activity, but it still leaves plenty of time to talk about business. The errors are easy to come by. I've observed that, in a class 3. Develop a pedagogy for working with large classes. The Millennial generation learns visually, which means that context-free blocks of text are often insufficient for teaching them any concept. When I'm teaching big lec- ture classes, I deliver a lecture composed almost entirely of pictures, where each picture illustrates one type of syntax or semantic error. I use a digital camera to capture these examples of poor composition—usually informal writing on public signs. I've collected more than 35 examples, ranging from errors in syntax to errors in semantics. I also explain why contem- porary writing technologies, such as embedded grammar correction programs, don't help authors fix these errors. The photo lecture approach has numerous strengths: It's memorable, it's humorous, and it makes an impact. Its weak- ness is that the lecture format is inherently passive. 4. Develop a pedagogy for smaller classes. In more intimate classrooms, I hand out a collection of errors written by students in previous classes. Students break into teams to identify each of the errors; they report back on the few they don't understand. with more than 100 students, an assignment of a two-page essay due by the end of the second week will exhibit nearly all the major types of surface errors in composition. I simply organize the errors by category: problems with mechanics, punctuation, grammar, word choice, and sentence style. I also include a section on challenges faced by ELL students. I don't provide corrected versions; I let the student teams identify and fix problems. The strength of this approach is that ad hoc teamwork is engaging. The activity changes the pace and structure of the course and encourages individuals to learn from their peers. A weakness is that students occasionally may miss critical errors that are likely to recur on future writing assignments. 5. Move beyond the basics. Once my students have a grasp of prose and composition issues, I can work on skills such as logic, argumentation, specific wording for hypothe- sis-based analysis, and the style guide conventions suggested by the American Psychological Association. I also can cover the language typically used to discuss the theories and frame- works taught in an undergraduate business curriculum. BizEd MARCH/APRIL 2011 45 These two signs were posted by different franchise outlets of a large retail chain of oil and lube stores. One features multiple grammar, language, and punctuation errors, while the other is error- free. This contrast shows students how variations in composition, prose, and language use can manifest in actual practice.