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…

Social networking via texting, Facebook, Twitter, and similar media is enormously popular with students, though it often leads to communication challenges along gender lines. Research supports the fact that men and women have divergent expectations for social networking and use it differently. Students can benefit from classroom experiences that…

Social media offers an exciting new area for our discipline to produce research and pedagogy that is in high demand by students, industry constituents, and other disciplines. This article discusses why business communication scholars should focus on social media as an important stream of study and outlines an MBA course in social media strategy…

Although the resume and cover letter genre is widely discussed in both popular and scholarly publications, discussion thus far has failed to acknowledge that the process of creating a resume and cover letter has the potential for encouraging students' reflective and reflexive capacities. This article suggests that business communication educators…

Poetry recitation removes the distractions of creating and organizing original material so that business students can focus on presentation skills of delivery, confidence, and memory. Delivery includes articulation, emphasis, nonverbals, and presence. Confidence and memory development are complementary. Confidence comes from trusting the memory…

In academic culture, plagiarism is considered to be a form of cheating and therefore unethical. Understandably, instructors try to eliminate this kind of unethical behavior from their courses. But what if they designed their assignments and exams in such a way that students would find no reason to cheat? The authors think that it is possible, at…

Plagiarism, presenting someone's words or other creative products as one's own, is a mandatory discussion and writing assignment in many undergraduate business communication courses. Class discussions about this topic tend to be lively, ranging from questions about simply omitting identified sources to different standards of ethical behaviors…

At Emory University's Goizueta Business School, eportfolio serves as the foundation for a sequence of assignments in our core "Communication and Professional Development" course. Our philosophy underlying the use of eportfolio is influenced by narrative and sense-making theory. At the beginning of the semester, students record their…

The 12 Favorite Assignments featured in this article were presented at the 2011 Annual Convention of the Association for Business Communication (ABC), Montreal, Canada. A variety of learning objectives are featured: delivering bad news, handling difficult people, persuasion, reporting financial analysis, electronic media, face-to-face…

Plagiarism is a reality in most college classes where some students plagiarize unknowingly and others do so knowingly. This situation requires instructors to decide how to manage the situation. Some may take the easy way out by ignoring the problem, simply pretending that none of their students plagiarize. In contrast, other instructors embrace…

Assurance of learning continues to be a hot topic in higher education. Both accreditation agencies and employers are asking a key question: Are we graduating students who actually have the knowledge and skills that we promise? This case study focuses on business writing in an MBA program and presents a prescriptive, five-step program to improve…

In the workplace, the process of evaluating and discussing the performance of both employees and managers is referred to as feedback. The process generally involves a discussion of the individual's strengths or weaknesses, with suggestions on how to improve upon weaknesses. Feedback aligns workplace behavior with the overall goals of a team or an…

Plagiarism can be "plaguing" if it is not discussed, understood, and enforced by the professor right at the beginning of the course and throughout the semester. Students usually don't "have" to cheat or plagiarize; they do so mainly because "they can." Professors who turn a deaf ear or a blind eye to students who plagiarize create deleterious…

Plagiarism does exist at universities today. In some cases, students are naive with respect to understanding what plagiarism is and how to avoid it. In other cases, students blatantly disregard and disrespect the written work of others, claiming it as their own. Regardless, educators must be vigilant in their efforts to discourage and prevent…

Plagiarism can be controlled, not stopped. The more appropriate question to ask is: What can be done to encourage students to "cheat" correctly by doing the assignment the way it was intended? Cheating by college students continues to reach epidemic proportions on selected campuses, as witnessed by the recent episode at Central Florida University,…