The Writing of Business Writing the Class: Syllabi, Calendars, Assignments, and Other Management Documents

One of the special pleasures in teaching The Writing of Business and the courses for which it's an appropriate text is the extraordinary opportunity to marry pedagogy and content. In writing this book, we have embraced wholeheartedly the currently popular metaphor of the business/professional organization as a learning organization. If the workplace is a lot like school, then it follows that school is a lot like the workplace. And most of the genres and goals of writing in business--creating shared visions and missions, defining and negotiating conflicting needs and goals, empowering people to act responsibly with autonomy and integrity, building teams, managing projects, clarifying assignments, accounting for work accomplished, evaluating individual and collective performance, and the like--are readily adaptable as genres and goals of writing in a class.

For example, the syllabus offers an opportunity for you to lay the foundation for a shared vision for the class and create a framework for defining and negotiating individual students' respective goals for the class. The calendar, obviously, serves as an agenda. Weekly memos from students, which we recommend (preferably ungraded, though assigned points for completion), serve exactly the same function in the class that they serve in the workplace: They give people an opportunity to report their progress and their concerns and questions to their supervisor, and they give the supervisor an opportunity to clarify and adjust assignments and schedules. And these memos merge readily into other functional genres: written documents accounting for excused absences, committee minutes reporting on group projects, memo proposals for classroom projects, and progress reports.

Using writing in this businesslike way in the class serves two important purposes. First, it helps professionalize the class: Classroom procedures aren't haphazard and slipshod; they're done according to written understandings, and they're documented in professional written texts. Second, it reinforces one of our crucial arguments: The fact that writing is central to the management of the class itself helps demonstrate that the writing of business is the doing of business.

So when we talk about the documents of the classroom--syllabus, calendar, assignment sheets, and the like, we tend to correlate them with the genres of the writing of business. And we do this not only here in the instructor's manual but in our classes as well. You'll see this correlation in action in the following sample class documents and our discussion of them.

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