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CHAPTER SIXTEEN: TEACHING EFFECTIVE WRITING
The following observations are based on experience and a survey of how major
universities and businesses teach writing to managers (Hattersley, privately distributed,
l993).
More and more businesses find themselves teaching writing to employees who are
college graduates and MBAs. Most cite two reasons:
1. They can’t communicate their thinking in writing. Top managers frequently
2. They just write badly. Typical complaints include: inflated language, verbosity,
passive verbs, convoluted sentences, jargon, and excess modifiers. Typical
comment: “They’re trying to sound impressive.”
Ezra Pound once said that he’d spent ten years learning, and ten more having to unlearn
what he’d learned. Many college and graduate students have never learned to write well;
many others have to unlearn what they’ve been taught before they can. Throughout the
text, we’ve tried to include opportunities for a representative range of business writing
Let’s start with a few principles widely endorsed by teachers of business writing and
widely practiced by the growing number of firms hired to teach writing to working
managers:
1. Writing is mostly rewriting.
2. Ideally, writing should be taught in small groups of five to eight, so that every
student both gives and receives feedback at every session.
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Clearly, these principles call into question the standard model in which students turn in a
paper and sometime later get it back with a few comments and a grade. This works well
in a situation where students are being evaluated on their command of a particular topic:
analyzing Oedipus Rex, for example, or describing the events leading up to the French
revolution. It works less well when the actual topic being taught is writing.
Here are some exercises designed to teach writing that can be incorporated into the ideal
Management Communication course:
1. Diagnosis. Students submit a writing sample very early, perhaps even before the
2. Agenda-setting. From these assignments, the instructor prepares exercises on
the most characteristic types of bad writing, drawn from the students’ own work,
such as run-on sentences, passive constructions, faulty parallelism, inflated or
3. Cross-editing. This can take several forms:
A. Students turn in a paper and two copies. Each student edits two colleagues’
papers by writing marginal comments and a short evaluation. The instructor
4. Group writing assignments. This is really how much writing is done in
business; teams collaborate to produce a departmental report, consulting
recommendation, or sales pitch. While such assignments may generate some
resentment, since the perceived “best writer” in the group will be drafted to do
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These techniques for teaching writing, in combination with the more traditional graded
All feedback on writing is time-intensive, and most of the methods described above
require a class of traditional size to be broken down into smaller groups. Each poses
problems of logistics, scheduling, space, and instructor availability. Some of these
problems can be addressed by holding small-group sessions outside the normal class
Most Management Communication instructors face special problems teaching writing to
students for whom English is a second language. Ideally, resources should be provided
for them before, or early in, the course. These can include one-on-one instruction, a pre-
Eventually, of course, students will want to know where they stand, and this means some
writing assignments graded by the instructor. One pattern to consider: assign low weight
to assignments that come early and/or issue from collective editing exercises, higher
weight to assignments students do later and on their own. At least one graded exercise
should probably fall fairly early, since some students won’t face the fact that they have a
problem until confronted with a bad grade.
One final note. Management Communication teachers have a tendency to assign students
to write about communication. This is natural, and sometimes useful; asking students to