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…

To teach effective business communication, instructors must target students’ current weaknesses in writing. One method for doing so is by assigning writing exercises. When used heuristically, writing exercises encourage students to practice self-assessment, self-evaluation, active learning, and knowledge transfer, all while reinforcing the basics…

The 13 Favorite Assignments featured here were presented at the 2012 Association for Business Communication (ABC) Annual Convention, Honolulu, Hawaii. A variety of learning objectives are featured, including the following: enhancing resume's visual impact, interpersonal skills, social media, team building, web design, community service projects,…

At the 2008 Association for Business Communication (ABC) annual convention in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, many attendees stood at the back of a crowded room to hear over a dozen teachers describe "My Favorite Assignment." As is customary in these lively sessions, the chair, Dan Dieterich, orchestrated a fast, efficient presentation pace; each…

Managing student plagiarism can cause instructors to feel as if they are serving educational institutions in the role of investigator rather than educator. Since many educators continue to struggle with the issue of student plagiarism, the author interviewed some of her colleagues. In this article, she shares her and her colleagues' antiplagiarism…

The "My Favorite Assignment" Session at the 2009 Association for Business Communication (ABC) annual convention in Portsmouth, Virginia, featured over a dozen teachers sharing pedagogical innovations in a fast-paced, 4-minute format designed by Dan Dietrich. The wide variety of ideas and techniques presented makes these sessions popular…

This article describes a holistic, discourse-based method for assessing the critical thinking skills of undergraduate senior-level finance majors. Rejecting a psychometric assessment approach in which component features of critical thinking are disaggregated, this study is based on a holistic scoring of student memos. Students were asked to…

Making ethics relevant to students in a business communications course continues to be a challenge. Classroom practitioners have long noted the difficulties in surmounting the contradictions students sense in business ethics instruction. Furthermore, students often perceive ethics to be largely irrelevant to the skills necessary for success in…

Individual or group presentations are common assignments in business communication courses, and many students use PowerPoint slides as audiovisual support. Frequently, curriculum constraints don't allow instructors much time to teach effective design and delivery of presentation graphics in their courses; guidelines in the form of minilectures or…

There are multiple advantages to service-learning projects across the business curriculum, but in communication classes the author has found their biggest value to be authenticity. A "real-world" assignment requires the flexible, creative integration of communication skills in an environment where, "unlike exams and other typical university…

Reflection is, by definition, a critical part of any service-learning class; without it, the course merely has a commuity service commponent. Researchers in business communication service learning agree on the importance of reflection as the crucial element in joining field experience with academic subject matter. In this article, the author…