 | The Writing of Business Researched Writing Projects |
| The Writing of Business Researched Writing Projects |
The Writing of Business was written to support people who at some point during the course are developing a substantial researched writing project. Given that broad general objective, the sample syllabus and the following assignments are written to allow significant room for students and their professors to negotiate projects that meet their particular circumstances, needs, and resources.
In our own classes at St. Cloud State University, we encourage and generally assume a collaboratively researched and written project, most often grounded in an issue that affects the immediate campus community. Early in the course, we devote a substantial part of one or two class meetings to identifying and discussing concerns that people in the class find significant. Out of these discussions, groups of people with common concerns tend to cluster and gel into working committees. Some groups choose issues that relate to other institutions or to the community or even the state in general. For example, a group with a member who's an employee at a local hospital might study a staffing or logistical issue at the hospital. A group with a common concern about a governor's proposal to increase tuition for college students might investigate legislative and administrative policies relative to college tuition and the practical implications of these policies.
A less common practice is for an individual student to take on a project individually. This kind of format most often occurs when a student has a strong professional interest in an issue that is grounded in a technical specialty where the student has particular expertise--for example, a technical report developed out of the senior project of an accounting major.
Following initial discussions of issues and interests and their implications for possible projects, the next step in our syllabus generally is the development of a written proposal. Here the group (or individual if a student has a strong sense of a calling for a unique, solo project and a strong rationale for the individual project) lays out a plan for the project. The sample proposal assignment, which we introduce on the next page, lays out a framework both for this document and for a process of developing the document.
A Sample Proposal Assignment--Elaborated
The lengthy project description that follows incorporates a series of writing assignments that move toward a final substantial researched document. The initial writing typically comprises memos in which people explore and speculate about project ideas and possibilities. Often these memos document and supplement class discussions and, in turn, cycle back into subsequent discussions. Fairly early in the process, the work moves to a more formal, systematic stage via a proposal. And throughout the process, people use writing to document their progress and needs as they move toward the final document. If the project takes the form of a group effort, then meeting agendas and minutes are an important element of this management and documentation of the project.
Phase One: Find a Problem/Need/Opportunity
Working either individually or in groups, start with an inventory of your own life circumstances at this moment. Scan the field of your own major or majors. What interesting issues come to mind as you think about the textbooks and the classroom discourse of your major courses? What trends and concerns in your discipline interest you and strike you as worth investing some time and effort in understanding? Look at your own work site, either your permanent work, your temporary summer work, or your work or volunteer or internship site during school. What threats and opportunities and other issues face you or your organization in this environment?
This initial inventory may turn up a rich array of possibilities for your project. In fact, the odds are good that it will. But if this initial inventory seems to come up dry, consider expanding your scope of problem/issue searching. Talk with your friends, family, colleagues, employers, and instructors about your search for interesting problems.
Read Chapter 13 and review Chapter 2 in connection with this inventory. Use GRACE, especially goals and readers questions, as a scope for finding and analyzing interesting problems. You're looking for an idea or set of ideas that are interesting enough to keep you energized and working hard on this project, challenging enough to make the project substantial, and limited enough to enable you to reach some kind of closure or milepost in the time you have available for the rest of the term.
Even the most contemporary and sophisticated of our problem-solving practices are indebted to the models John Dewey developed at the beginning of the 20th Century. Dewey identified the beginning of the problem-solving process as problem identification, and he found that this discovery or identification often began with an ill-defined, vaguely felt need or "itch." Problem definition is a process of analyzing that often vague sense and articulating the conditions that cause it. Often these conditions can be expressed in terms of a gap between where we are, either personally or organizationally speaking, and where we would like to be. As we articulate both sets of conditions--the is and the ought to be--we are not only defining our problem, but we are beginning to define criteria for a satisfactory solution to the problem. This process continues as we take inventory of our strengths and resources (time, money, people, technology, intelligence) as well as our limitations--and discover both opportunities and constraints that affect our evaluation and choice of solutions.
People like William J. J. Gordon (see his book Synectics, for example) advise us not to think too much about our limitations and constraints in the very early stages of this process, because we may abandon too quickly a preferred solution. For example, we might give up a promising idea because it looks too expensive or too time consuming--only to realize later that we had available time- or money-saving measures that would have made it feasible after all. As we creatively explore and evaluate the problem and all the possible solutions, we are developing, at least tacitly, criteria for judging the best solutions. Usually the solution we finally choose entails some compromise or "satisficing." We choose the best solution or set of solutions available given the costs and trade-offs and resources at hand. And nearly always we are writing our way through this whole process, especially if we are a part of a team. The writing is a way--sometimes the only effective way--of making complex aspects of the problem and the solutions visible to ourselves and to others. It is also a vital way of making our problem-solving process visible to ourselves and our collaborators and of being accountable to each other for our processes.
In moving toward a systematic examination and analysis of the issues (and toward a proposal and other text beyond the proposal), try the following.
In a nutshell, your goal for the proposal should be to convince me that you're on to a good project and that you're organized to make good progress--and that you're actually making good progress already. A second goal is to convince yourself of the same thing by the very act of writing the proposal. In other words, the work you do on the proposal will be work that will also move you ahead on the project itself, and you'll be able to see this. Keep this latter goal in mind if you find yourself feeling a little grumpy and resistant about having to do a second, different writing project in this proposal. It's really not a different project; rather, it's a step toward the successful completion of the big project.
Arguments (Significance, Benefits, Costs/Risks, Resources)
How will you benefit from the project, whether it achieves these explicit goals or not? For example, what will you learn? Will you have had an experience that you can put on your resume? Will you, in the course of working on the project, discover new contacts, friends, sponsors, or mentors who can advise or support you in your future endeavors? Could doing this project open up opportunities for other more substantial projects in your professional life?
Risks are probably harder to account for and talk about. In fact, there are even risks in talking about risks explicitly and directly; it may be much more effective in most cases to talk about the factors and strategies in your plan that will help lead to success.
Measured in any kind of financial terms, risks again should be minuscule in this project. The more substantial risks are likely to be academic and, potentially political. One obvious risk in taking on the project is not completing it successfully. This is probably the risk that you and I are primarily concerned about. So when you talk about your resources (see the next argument, Resources), you need to do so in a way that assures both you and me that you have a plan that lays out a sound and plausible sequence of events leading toward successful completion of the project.
What about political risks? What about the possibility that this project could blow up, that it could produce some kind of backlash or reaction that's bad--that's even the opposite of what you hope to accomplish? If you've analyzed the project with GRACE, you may well have already accounted for this issue, especially as you've talked about Readers, Arguments, and the Expression of your own character and stance. But it's an important enough question that it's worth considering at least for a moment on its own.
If you are proposing a group project, then an important part of your resources argument will be a description of how you'll allocate the responsibilities and activities among yourselves. For some ideas on how to talk about this, see the later discussion on Managing the Project Collaboratively.
Consistent with the usual convention for in-house proposals, let's use a memo format for this proposal. There are some samples in The Writing of Business Chapter 12 that should give you a good idea about format and also give you a sense for the appropriate length: probably two to three pages single spaced. Unlike many requesters of proposals, I don't have any particular template in mind for the organization, though you may want to use the conventional format or sequence of problem-solution-rationale, with the rationale being a discussion of your costs and resources (including your personnel) and an explanation of your plans, processes, and timeline (with mileposts) for achieving your proposed solution. This usually is roughly the sequence of the arguments in a proposal. With proposals as with resumes and employment letters, breaking conventions of grammar, spelling, and usage can seriously damage your chances of a favorable reading, so you want to make sure your proposal is mechanically clean and correct.
As appendices, you should also have two additional elements: a modified resume and a consultant/advisor's letter. You can use your job-search resume as the basis for this resume, but you need to modify it to fit this situation. Remember the arguments you're making here and the reader (me) to whom you're making them. These arguments (see above) are different from the arguments of your employment resume, and my goals (again, see above) are different from the person who's considering whether to invite you to an interview. In general, this resume will probably be shorter than your employment resumes, and it will be focused on your qualifications for taking on this project--your informed interest, your related experience, your background study including not only coursework you've done in the past but additional research you've done in preparing the proposal, relevance of the project to your future plans, etc.
The consultant/advisor's letter is addressed to me and signed by your consultant/advisor (con/ad), but you write the letter in consultation with your con/ad. This letter assures me that you (and I too, for that matter) are networked to at least one expert (presumably a faculty member in your major discipline; if it's not a faculty member, we may need to negotiate this) who can serve as a general resource and keep you (and me) from making a major blunder in developing (and evaluating) this project. Without scaring off your con/ad with a lot of legalistic, contractual-sounding language and without positing demands on the advisor that would create an inconvenience or hardship, this letter needs to tell what your con/ad will do (and perhaps has already done) for you. One specific element I would like to have in the letter is that the advisor would be available to me for a brief (15 minutes maximum) conference, either eye-to-eye or by telephone, if I decide I need to bounce a couple of ideas or questions off an expert in the process of evaluating the project. As you negotiate the letter with a prospective consultant/advisor, remember and emphasize that the commitment of time here should be minimal. After all, you're asking for expert advice for free!
Expression of your own character--your interest in the problems and issues you've identified and your commitment to making progress toward a solution and, in this case, completing a successful, well-done project--is vital in a proposal. Your most important goal here is to help me find the grounds for having confidence in your ability to complete this project successfully. This doesn't mean for a moment that you should gloss over potential problems and difficulties you see or suspect. On the contrary, a thoughtful and forthright identification and analysis of potential problems and barriers and doubts will increase my confidence in your ability to grasp this complex situation realistically. It may well be that we'll want to renegotiate aspects of the project based on my reading of your proposal. As I'm reading the proposal, I'll be watching carefully for concerns that we should talk about.
Phase Three: Research and Develop Your Project Document
Based on your work with your con/ad, your proposal, and your discussion with me, proceed to implement your project plan. It's possible that the readers of your final document will be experts who are steeped in a highly specialized vocabulary and conceptual framework and it would be inappropriate, even condescending, if you wrote that document for lay people. However, you'll have to convince me that this is the appropriate audience and the appropriate character of the discourse. And you will need to communicate in layperson's discourse in your proposal to me, your periodic memos to me reporting your progress, and your oral progress report to your class colleagues.
Last and Next-to-Last Weeks: Oral presentations. Give a 15-25 minute oral presentation to the class, bearing in mind the suggestions covering presentational speaking in the appendix Each person in the class will fill out a feedback/evaluation sheet that you have developed. We'll follow your presentation with discussion, led by you, focusing on ways to make the final version of the written document most effective.
Assumptions about the Audience when you make your oral class presentation: It's helpful to think of ourselves--all of us in the class--as a kind of problem-solving, policy-generating think tank analogous to the Hoover Institute at Stanford or the Salk Institute at La Jolla. We are all of us, communally, interested in the best possible success of the project of each person or committee that has formed to address a problem. So we all want the product of each to be as good as possible. Therefore, we're trying to support each other in the effort to make the final draft of the document as good/effective/persuasive as possible. Our role during the presentations, then, is to listen thoughtfully and attentively, asking ourselves at each turn whether the problem/opportunity definitions, proposed solutions, arguments and evidence for those solutions, and the expressions of character we're hearing will be effective or might create problems. And we should listen for what we're not hearing that would be effective and that each presenter should consider adding. Your presentation to the class should show that you have analyzed the problem well, have set reasonable goals for your project, have considered the needs of all those who will be affected if your arguments prevail, and have design a thoughtful and well-argued solution in a way that optimizes your own credibility.
Last class: In a single folder clearly marked with your name (all the names of your committee if it's a group project), submit your final document and all your work toward it: initial brainstorming and problem definition, committee logs and agendas, and two copies of your document.
If your project is a joint venture with some colleagues, then use the following guidelines for (1) organizing and structuring yourselves and (2) enhancing communication and accountability among yourselves.
At this moment, keeping minutes may sound like a redundant chore that I'm asking you to do for me. You need to think of the minutes as a project management tool for you--which they are. The primary audience for the minutes is yourselves. Every member of the group should get a copy of each set of minutes as soon as possible. As The Writing of Business points out, there are vast numbers of ways for communication to break down in groups. People don't hear agendas the same way, they don't understand assignments the same way, or they forget assignments and deadlines, or they duplicate assignments, or. . . . you name it. The possibilities are endless. Keeping regular minutes isn't a panacea, but we haven't seen many groups who kept good minutes and who ran into significant communication or project-management problems. For an overview of what needs to be in a good set of minutes and for a typical pattern of organization, see Chapter 3.
Shared Responsibility, Shared Rewards
If your project is collaborative, the project grade will be based on the quality of the written project and also on the quality of the documentation of the work on the project--minutes, agendas, progress report to the class, etc. Because these are a group process and product, all the members of a group will share the same group grade for them, just as happens in the professional world. However, as also usually happens in the professional world, you will have an opportunity to comment individually to me on the quality of the process after the project is completed and to acknowledge the work of anyone whose contributions to the project's success have been particularly notable. And you may want to recommend a particular member (or members) of your group for extra credit based on an exceptional effort or contribution.
Blowup: Thinking About The Unthinkable
You, as a group, are responsible for managing the work of your group. The division of labor suggested above (chair, recorder, goal/problem analyst, and reader analyst) has proven to be a pretty satisfactory structure for helping people be accountable to each other, especially when the group goals and individual assignments and results are documented through the minutes and agendas. But sometimes things still don't work. Sometimes, for whatever reasons, people just don't get the job done, and they let their group down. If somebody is freeloading, there needs to be an escape mechanism whereby the group can do damage control by cutting dead weight free. The following guidelines are designed with two purposes in mind: first, to limit the power of one person to affect the grade of the group, and, second, to limit the power of the group to affect the grade of one person.
You can be fired by your group under the following conditions:
If your group fires you, the following consequences obtain: you have to produce a final project on your own, with the understanding that there will be a 10-point penalty to the grade, since you'll be missing part of the point of the project.
For questions and suggestions, please e-mail us at kilbornj@stcloudstate.edu or rinkster@stcloudstate.edu.
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