Treffer: Teaching Graduate Business Students to Write Clearly about Technical Topics

Graduate programs in business emphasize technical analysis in finance, accounting, marketing, and other core courses. Important business decisions--what market to target, which products to offer, how to finance an acquisition, whether to lease or buy equipment--require mathematical and statistical problem solving. Management communication courses therefore need to help students write clearly about such technical subject matter. In this article, the authors emphasize six key guidelines on how business communication faculty teach students to write well about technical subjects. These are: (1) analyze which technical terms, concepts, and abbreviations are appropriate given a document's purpose, genre, context, and intended readers; (2) make the sequence of ideas logical and signal the relationships among the parts to readers; (3) alternate between claims and support; (4) reduce the density of ideas; (5) use parallel construction in sentences or phrases that compare data; and (6) use design elements to make the text physically easier to read and to signal hierarchical relationships. Together, these six guidelines, illustrated by technical documents from the students' own fields of study, provide a way for management communication courses to address one of the biggest challenges graduates face: writing clearly and convincingly about technical subject topics.

ERIC