Abstract
When I was in school, I was told to always make an outline before beginning to write anything. My teachers would require a very detailed outline, complete with Roman numerals for major sections and lettered headings for each paragraph, including the topic sentence at the beginning. I was never able to make an outline useful, and so I succeeded in school by writing the outline after I finished the paper. I was then praised for having followed my outline perfectly. I was thrilled to have found the secret of getting around advice that did not work. In graduate school, I learned that Peter Elbow, in his enormously influential bookWriting Without Teachers(1973), advocated for scrapping outlines altogether and to just start writing.
Later on, when I was faced with longer projects, I realized the value of considering the structure of a piece—for example, a dissertation or a book—and learned to arrange my evidence and arguments, though I did not always follow the order in which I listed them. Planning, in whatever form, I learned was indeed important, even if I could never produce a formal outline. That conclusion was confirmed by the pioneering work ofFlower and Hayes (1981a,1981b), who used a laboratory setting to study how professional writers wrote. They reported how writing could begin in a multitude of ways.
We know from several decades of research on the writing process that every writer is different, and what works for one will not for another. I once asked a colleague why he insisted on prescribing outlines for his students when he did not use them himself. He said because he was a “creative writer” who had publications in leading venues. This response begs the question of why we insist that students do what professionals do not, but that is another question for research. What we do know is that outlining itself, though often recommended, had rarely been studied in any depth, as Walvoord et al. noted some 20 years ago (1995) in one of the first studies of how students actually use outlines. The absence of such research, with a few exceptions, has continued since then.
Our lead article in this issue explores the issue of outlining and what motivates students to use this technique. As the author notes, many textbooks in business and professional communication focus on the results of outlining but do not address how writers perceive this process. Using qualitative content analysis and qualitative coding of survey responses, the author reports that students perceive outlining as more useful if their outlining process includes both organization and content exploration and less useful if it excludes organization or content exploration. This kind of model can be employed for further studies of the tools that writers choose.
The second article in this issue also analyzes student perceptions, in this case using written reflections on their experiences in writing to multiple audiences in response to a workplace problem. Teaching audience analysis has long been considered quite challenging by instructors in business and professional communication. The authors conclude that reflections provide an effective teaching method for instructors to understand students’ consideration of audience. Student perceptions are also the focus of our third article, which addresses mobile phone etiquette during professional meetings. The authors report that student and professional perceptions aligned frequently, although gender, age, and year in school were also important factors.
In this issue we also have a feature topic, on the ever-popular innovation of flipped classrooms. One study presents student voices, whereas the other addresses student perceptions and engagement. The first study shows positive student evaluations of the pedagogies employed. The second study finds that the flipped condition produced better outcomes for oral and written assignments, even if perceptions of engagement were the same across both platforms.
We close with the second installment of “My Favorite Assignment,” with 13 selections from the 2018 Association for Business Communication (ABC) annual conference in Miami, Florida. ABC is meeting in October in Detroit, and I hope to see many of our readers and editorial review board members there.