Journal of Business and Technical Communication

Genre use entails a rhetorical response to an exigence in the writer's context. In one category of genres, which the author calls temporal genres, linear time constitutes a major exigence to which writers must respond. Temporal genres, such as annual reports and status reports, call for writers to publish texts because a certain amount of time has passed, even if they are not yet ready to do so. The first annual report of the Privacy Office of the Department of Homeland Security reveals an ineffective ethos and discontinuities between the mission of the office and that of the department. But the second annual report reveals a more effective ethos and greater harmony between the missions. This study shows how the requirement to report can force writers to decide existential issues of identity and mission.

In situations of potential business change, the cooperation of various direct and indirect stakeholders (i.e., employees, customers, shareholders, neighbors) is crucial. The alternative policy courses may all be reasonable, and yet none of them may be clearly best for all stakeholders; support for an option must be cultivated through public rhetoric. Loci communes and Burkean transcendence are two potent rhetorical strategies that can help business leaders publicly weigh and civilly advocate a policy position relative to competing alternatives. This article develops and illustrates that argument by analyzing the public rhetoric involved in AirTran's attempt to build support for its hostile takeover of Midwest Airlines and Midwest's successful resistance to that attempt. Midwest's deft development of the transcendent term value helped it circumvent the initial deadlock between its preferred loci communes (i.e., the existent and quality) and AirTran's (i.e., the possible and quantity). The article advances a rationale and call for rhetorical scholarship to adopt more situated, social practice views of loci communes and transcendence.

Student compositions traditionally are written for the teacher. Yet instructors of professional communication genres have discovered that students' motivation may be enhanced when they write assignments for audiences of peers within the classroom or professionals outside the campus. Yet client-based projects require writing students who have never yet written for an external audience to make a leap beyond the classroom. To bridge the gap between writing for classroom peers and writing for professional clients, this article describes a third and intermediate choice of audience, namely, external peers in cross-classroom collaborations that occur via telecommunication. The author places this intermediate-audience strategy within the larger conversation about the impact of audience on student writing outcomes, applies the strategy to professional writing pedagogy, and reports the results of a small pilot study that provide some preliminary support for the strategy.

This article describes a pilot effort for an accreditation-driven writing assessment in a business college, detailing the pilot's logistics and methods. Supported by rubric software and a philosophy of “real readers, real documents,” the assessment was piloted in summer 2006 with five evaluators who were English instructors and four who worked or taught in business environments. The nine evaluators were each given 10 reports that were drawn from a sample of 50 reports completed in a writing-intensive course. They created 88 individual assessments using a 10-category rubric. While the overarching purpose of the pilot was to determine the effectiveness of the methods used, the results may also be of interest to those involved with the assessment of writing.