This article offers readers 13 "My Favorite Assignments" that were presented at the Association for Business Communication's 83rd annual conference held in Miami, Florida, in 2018. The teaching innovations offered include assignments that present quick, fun icebreaker exercises; visual communication and diversity; rhetoric; email; and…

The "Toolbox" column features content adapted from ReadWriteThink.org lesson plans and provides practical tools for classroom teachers. This issue's column features a lesson plan adapted from "Graphing Plot and Character in a Novel" by Lisa Storm Fink and "Bio-graph: Graphing Life Events" by Susan Spangler. Students retell biographic events…

A basic premise of social approaches to studying communication is that theories of interpersonal communication and personal relationships are reflexively defined, socially constructed, and historically situated. In contrast to the tradition of psychological models of relational processes and message transmission, social approaches encourage…

The assignment described in this paper is an attempt to provide speech communication students with some training and experience in interviewing. Following discussion of the objective and rationale for conducting an interview and reporting information from an interview, guidelines are offered to help students with selecting subjects or content…

Describes the very first interviewing and writing assignment that introductory students do in a high school journalism class. (SR)

Presents a student assignment which involves interviewing a family member and then drawing images and writing a description of their advice. Includes completed assignments from two students. (SR)

For an instructor who feels the need to teach interviewing skills in the basic course, it is sometimes difficult to fit interviewing into a course that already covers many types of public speaking. An activity is presented that allows instructors to teach interviewing skills in either a one or one-half week time frame (two 50-minute class periods…

The teaching of highly valued scientific writing skills in the first year of university is challenging. This report describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel written assignment, "The Personal Response" and accompanying Peer Review, in the course, Human Biology (BIOL1015) at The University of Queensland. These assignments were…

A satisfying assignment for college freshman composition classes is to send students out to interview working writers in the college community. (HOD)

Describes a media history assignment in which students interview older adults about changes they have observed in communication media. (PD)

Describes a feedback method for teaching interviewing skills that requires dual evaluation of a student's performance by both the student interviewer and the interviewee. Illustrates benefits of this method with an analysis of 139 paired assessments of students' information-gathering skills in a "career interview" assignment. (PD)

Presents teaching tips for (1) generating titles as a prewriting activity; (2) having students write a biography of a classmate; (3) asking students to determine scenarios for their business communication documents; (4) using interviewing as a method of primary research; and (5) sequencing writing assignments to help students clarify their…

Describes a project assignment for a business communication course that is the central organizing principle for the course and addresses researching, interviewing, writing and reporting topics, and the inevitable question of why this course is required. (SR)

Describes an assignment in which students interview businesses to learn about the kinds of writing done in that business and then assess the rhetorical context of such writing. (SR)

Describes a cross-disciplinary research paper assignment in which students engage in original research and interview an expert before researching in the library. (SR)