The Writing of Business An Introductory GRACE Note

By now you've probably noticed that the heuristic we repeatedly invoke in The Writing of Business--a series of questions about Goals, Readers, Arguments, Conventions, and Expression--is abbreviated with the acronym GRACE. For the most part (but not entirely!) we've resisted making the kind of pun we make in the title to this little introduction. But the amphibole has been constantly on our minds as we've written and thought about and taught from this book, and, in fact, our own affectionate name for the book itself is GRACE. After all, grace in professional writing and grace in teaching--real, substantial grace with its ethical and humane dimensions as well as its superficial, graceful attractiveness--is a quality that we all fervently hope for.

But what about this repetition of GRACE? Some of your students are likely to ask this question. And some may begin to resist the reading at some point, based on the mistaken perception that the GRACE discussions in each new chapter are simply repetitions of the GRACE discussions in the preceding chapters. Actually, we've experienced less student resistance to repeated uses of GRACE than we have with similar heuristics in other texts, partly because we anticipated the issue and have taken care to point out how different the answers are to the heuristic--and, indeed, how different even the questions can be--depending on the situation in which one evokes GRACE.

We think it's important to point out at the beginning that the GRACE acronym is not an algorithm, not a formulaic template with slots where you dump in data and an output orifice where you crank out the "correct" text. The five letters are simply reminders of five places (or, in classical rhetoric, topoi) where one can go to find useful, productive, appropriate questions that help one analyze and evaluate any situation that entails communicating with other people and to generate both written and spoken language for that situation. And the same kinds of questions also generate useful tests for the rhetorical and ethical appropriateness of language--both one's own and that of others--generated in a particular situation.

Well, then, you may be asking, if the questions suggested by GRACE seem to be sufficient for generating and testing ideas and language for all these occasions, why are there so many samples in the book--and still more in this instructor's manual? Don't the samples invite imitation irrespective of variations in specific situations, and don't they imply that there are just 49 letters for all occasions--or 101, or whatever the finite number is? Don't the samples imply a cookie-cutter approach to professional writing that's in opposition to the strategic, rhetorical approach embodied in GRACE?

Our answer is yes. They do. And, frankly, we like that tension. We think it's a tension that's present in almost every professional situation that invites any kind of discourse. In fact, we often make the tension explicit through GRACE-generated questions, especially questions relating to conventions. We often invite our students to ask explicitly whether a situation is enough like a situation they've encountered before that they can use an earlier letter as a template for a new letter. And, indeed, we discuss the effectiveness of form letters at length, pointing out their virtues. (They're efficient. They're egalitarian, treating all addressees equally, for example, in employee-hiring situations. Etc.) But we repeatedly offer this caveat: On some level, every writing situation is absolutely unique, and it's wise to ask whether that uniqueness creates demands that override the economy of effort or the homogeneity of treatment that are the virtues of using templates.

Furthermore, we point out (and we think it's useful for you also to point out) that the samples are samples, not models. There's not a single sample in the book that we think is perfect. And the very multiplicity of the samples suggests that there are lots more possibilities as well.

For questions and suggestions, please e-mail us at kilbornj@stcloudstate.edu or rinkster@stcloudstate.edu.