As part of the Association for Business Communication Student Case Competition, this article features a case study written by ABC member Rachel Dolechek. The case was blind reviewed and selected by the ABC Student Competition Committee. ABC membership utilized the case in their classrooms throughout 2024 and submitted top student examples for the…

Rubrics for writing courses have become increasingly popular yet there have been few studies published from the GCC. This study investigated the effectiveness of rubrics in business writing classes at a Kuwait university. The participants were 104 students who were given a survey that evaluated their opinions of the rubrics. In addition, several…

Purpose: PhD graduates are increasingly taking non-academic roles outside and inside universities. While effective communication is a frequently mentioned concern among employers, little is known about what actual communication PhD graduates do as part of their work. The purpose of this study is to examine the nature of work-related communication…

Objective: In this study, I investigate the efficacy of Microsoft (MS) Teams Class Notebook e-portfolios as a reflective tool in business writing courses. I address gaps in the literature regarding e-portfolio use in business writing courses in face-to-face classes, focusing on student perceptions, the impact of e-portfolios on writing skills, the…

Drawing on interviews with faculty and administrators across the curriculum, this article argues for a new approach to WAC/WID that I call writing in the professions (WIP). A WIP curriculum emphasizes writing with/for audiences outside the university and in genres that are intended for use beyond the classroom, rather than in simulated genres…

Language planning and teaching practices have recently shifted towards designing syllabi and curricula based on learners needs. Therefore, this study aims to determine the language needs of engineers, which will serve as the foundation for developing a course plan that aims to develop the speaking and writing skills of future engineers. This paper…

Teaching workplace communication is vitally important as we expect public servants to have the skills to draft, review, and revise written communication materials. Less explicitly demanded, and more often implicitly expected, we assume public servants know how to respond to individuals with empathy while also meeting technical obligations, such as…

Students attracted to quantitative disciplines of study can be reluctant to devote much attention to the critical task of communicating, and previous research (Hostager, 2018) has identified statistically significant differences in learning approaches by major among undergraduate business students. This paper presents results of learning assurance…

This article analyzes the writing competence of Norwegian students and apprentices in three professions: Healthcare, industrial mechanics and electricians. The research forms part of a large-scale assessment project in vocational education and training (VET). A subset of 108 written test-answers were subjected to an explorative analysis focusing…

We analyze the self-rated writing skills of graduating business majors and perceptions on how much these skills changed during college. Subjective skill measures may be good proxies of objective skills, and affect outcomes such as career goals, job applications, and graduate school enrollment. The sample includes 436,370 students from 619…

In expanding our minor in Professional and Public Writing (PPW), we drew on scholarship exploring tensions inherent in the field's efforts to understand and present itself as a cohesive, yet capacious, discipline. Missing from the scholarship are the voices of students. To fill this gap, we conducted focus group interviews with PPW students at…

167 final writing projects from bachelor level Leadership courses were analyzed to find a correlation of success rates between pre-completed business and professional communication courses. The test statistic was close to an outlier on a one-tail test with a probability of 5.318948%, which meant the outcome of this study was quite close to null…

Conceptual understanding is important for professionals because a broad and deep synthesis of knowledge enables flexible and original thinking in complex problem solving. However, little is known about the appearance of conceptual understanding at the student level. This article therefore investigates the appearance of conceptual understanding in…

This article describes a course design that offers an innovative approach to using client-based projects (CBPs) in technical and professional writing. It shows how teachers can incorporate CBPs in hybrid or fully virtual instruction, adapt it for a quarter or semester, and tailor it to meet students' needs. While there are standard writing…

The research purpose was to identify (1) the problems encountered by academic and administrative staff in emails received from students, (2) positive and negative qualities of the authentic emails of higher education students, (3) functional explanations of the academic email, (4) the problems encountered by students in emails received from…