Topic: Business Schools and Writing

Question: What are employers’ criticisms of business school students’ writing?

Answer: Quote: “After employers said they found some students' writing too wordy, the school started having a writing instructor grade students' papers in some courses, in addition to the regular professor's grade.

“The school asked students to write a cover letter as part of a writing exam during orientation. Students who don't score highly enough get additional writing instruction.

“Before the improved focus on writing and communication, Northeastern M.B.A. students were too long-winded and timid during presentations and even when writing emails, says Ralph Miller, director of corporate information management at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Inc., a nonprofit insurance company. After the school ramped up its writing training, Mr. Miller, who was who was among the executives the school tapped for feedback, noticed improvement. The firm hired three Northeastern M.B.A. students in 2010. Typically it just takes one; it also increased the number of interns it brings in from the school.”

Comment: FYI. RayS. 

Title: “B-Schools Give Firms Say Amid Tough Jobs Market.” By DIANA MIDDLETON Wall Street Journal. January 6, 2011. Internet.

Topic: Professional Acrimony

Question: What is the effect of viciously criticizing a colleague’s point of view in writing or speaking?

Answer: Watch it. That vicious colleague might turn on you.

Quote: “Although Jane Tompkins’s ‘Fighting words: Unlearning to Write the Critical Essay’ was published two decades ago, recent evocations of the essay by professors of English addressing the harmfully competitive nature of the profession suggest that its ruminations on the violence that ‘takes place in the conference rooms at scholarly meetings and in the pages of professional journals’ remain current two decades later.

In particular, Tompkins’s dramatic account of a conference session where the audience thrilled to the speaker’s denigrating attack on another scholar’s work has been taken up as a prototypical instance of the combativeness that infuses not only literary or English studies, but the academy as a whole. Thus it appears as the opening epigraph in ‘The Rhetoric of Reproof,’ Leonard A. Podis and JoAnne M. Podis’s analysis of ‘the censorious rhetoric that pervades our professional conversations’; it is recognized as ‘an oral version of what regularly occurs in academic writing’ in Deborah Tannen’s ‘Agonism in Academic Discourse’; and it appears as a block quotation in Linda Hutcheon’s ‘Rhetoric and Competition’ following the comment, ‘Jane Tomkins recounts a conference scenario that many of us, sadly, will find familiar.’” P. 48.

Comment: I think of people who are educated as above this sort of wrangling. Unfortunately, they are not and, in their denigration of others, they are denigrating their profession. RayS.

Title: “Reconsiderations: Anonymity and Violence: Jane Tomkins’s ‘Fighting Words’ Twenty Years Later.” Gary Weissman. College English (September 2009), 48-66.

Topic: William Strunk Jr.

Question: We’ve all heard about Strunk and White’s book on style. And we all know about EB White. But who was William Strunk, Jr.?

Answer: “The details are sparse: born in Cincinnati, Ohio, Strunk received his PhD from Cornell University in 1896. He taught at Cornell for the next forty-six years, during which time he published, locally, two brief monographs—The Elements of Style in 1918, and, in 1922, a sixty-one page pedagogical reference book on English meter. He edited a few literary volumes including John Dryden’s Essays on the Drama, in the introduction to which Strunk somewhat gratuitously faulted Milton for the ‘inordinate length of his sentences.’ (Dryden, the clear winner of the comparative brevity test). He published a few papers from conferences in the proceedings. Aside from a smattering of literature classes, Strunk taught a heavy rotation of composition and journalism courses.” P. 23.

Comment: The author of the article from which this quote was taken, concludes that “Strunk , in other words, was deadwood.” FYI. RayS.

Title: “The Fighting Style: Reading the Unabomber’s Strunk and White.” C Prendergast. College English (September 2009), 10-28.

Topic: Examples of Latest in MLA Style Sheet

Examples:

Books: Butler, Paul. Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric. Logan: Utah State UP, 2008. Print.

Film: Fight Club. Dir. David Pincher. Twentieth Century Fox. 1999. Film.

Internet. Fromin, Karen Bronk. “Declaration of Karen Bronk Fleming, PhD.” Unabomber Trial. Sacbee, 6 June 2001. Web. 20 Apr. 2009.

Newspaper on the Web: Gelernter, David. “Back to Basics, Please.” The Opinion Journal. Wall Street Journal, 14 Oct. 2005. Web. 30 Dec. 2008.

Comment: For me, the most notable change is the identification of the medium near the end of the item: “Print”; “Film”; “Web.” Of course, it’s been a long time since I have used the MLA Style Sheet. RayS.

Title: “The Fighting Style: Reading the Unabomber’s Strunk and White.” C Prendergast. College English (September 2009), 10-28.

Topic: Finding a Wider Audience for Research on Writing

Question: How can we broaden our audience for research findings on writing?

Answer: Charles Bazerman, College Composition and Communication Chair in 2009:   “…challenged rhetoric and writing scholars to bring our research to wider public audiences and identified ‘a greater need for publicly persuasive evidence…  [for] our practices!: p. 336.

“…urged scholars to alter the ethos of the independent professional, connect our interests, and turn research to public focus.” P. 336.

“Multilayered dissemination strategies allow centers to produce work valued by academic disciplines while creating a space for faculty and students to reach publics beyond the university. The move toward alternate ways of publishing research suggests that today’s centers constantly work to establish new links with broader audiences. As a result, research centers are uniquely positioned and strongly motivated to push the discipline toward greater acceptance of these alternate publications in ways that individual voices cannot.” P. 353.

Comment: I assume that the goal is for research on writing to become part of nightly newscasts as is medical research. A worthy goal. RayS.

Title: “Research Centers as Change Agents:  Reshaping Work in Rhetoric and Writing.” Brian Grogan, et al. College Composition and Communication (December 2010), 336-363.