Why this book?

1. It’s evocative. This resource works from the baseline that your work as a student, volunteer, or professional is always situated within a capitalist system of labor. With the knowledge that modern capitalism is not a natural, or even consistent system, this resource invites you to consider how our economic structure renders the future uncertain, generates inequality, and promises the untenable prospect that upward mobility is fairly earned in return for loyalty and productivity.
2. It’s free. Previous students who have taken this class reported that, for one reason or another, they did not use the expensive textbook that typically gets assigned in this class. We knew we needed to make a change, therefore. In response, we’ve crafted this cost-free resource to help guide you this semester as you learn more about business and professional writing.
3. It’s responsive. The other affordance of this resource is that, because it’s hosted in an online space, it can be updated in response to ongoing workplace evolutions. Our research suggests that organizations and workplaces undergo constant changes to their workflows, technologies, and document designs. We’ve designed this resource to remain attuned and responsive to those changes.
4. It’s critical. This resource is designed intentionally to teach you the genres common to contemporary business and professional writing, but it invites you not just to replicate those genres, but also to critique them. In other words, we are less interested in turning you into a capitalist cog in the wheel who will eventually turn a profit for an organization or workplace. Rather, we hope to provide you with a set of tactics and strategies for participating rhetorically and responsibly in a world that tends to value profit over people. Ultimately, we’re hopeful that by preparing future writers in this way, you’ll help to create more livable workspaces and worlds for the students-turned-professionals who come after you.
5. It’s data-based. A lot of business and professional writing teaching tends to be lore-based. That is, students learn to write in a particular way because “that’s how it’s always been done.” But this resource is designed based on data we collected from a study of how previous students did or did not learn in this class, how instructors typically teach a course like this, and how actual professional writers in the world do their work. We conducted interviews with instructors who have taught this course over the last five years, analyzed student work produced in this class over the past five years, and surveyed and interviewed professional writers who work in both for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Our findings inform this resource’s recommendations.

Three Guiding Questions

You will notice that each chapter in this resource asks the same three fundamental questions. These questions make up the backbone of what we understand to be a rhetorically savvy and responsible professional writer in a world where officialized words and genres are weaponized in dangerous ways. Each question asks you to respond rhetorically to the violence caused by market logics. To improve future workplace writing practices and environments, each chapter asks you to consider the following questions.

1. In what ways can you mobilize and/or manipulate the standard written genre conventions in this situation so that it’s clear that you value people over profit?
2. For each of the stakeholders involved in this situation, what are the consequences of your writing?
3. What barriers, institutions, and/or structures might make it difficult for you to write ethically, truthfully, and sustainably with each of the collaborators (people, places, and things) involved in this situation?

Tactics and Strategies

Rather than simply giving you a bunch of examples of memos, proposals, and stylishly designed resumes (all of which could easily be found doing a quick Google search or checking out the genre samples at the back matter), this resource will offer you a more sophisticated approach to practicing business and professional writing. You’ll be asked to cultivate a set of tactics for doing this kind of writing work in the world.

One expert in professional writing, Miles Kimball, argues that tactical communication involves appropriating writing in a way that increases “freedom of agency and…involvement in shared cultural narratives” (p. 68). Developing a set of professional writing tactics, therefore, equips and empowers you to participate in creating positive change in the world.

Tactics are local responses (versus generalizable rules) to unique rhetorical situations. While traditional written business writing textbooks tend to list guidelines and rules for professional writing, this resource asks you to poke at, prod, and push back against such dogma.

By way of example: Professor Teston (one of the authors of this resource) used to live in Moscow, Idaho, which is a rural and much less densely populated city than Columbus, Ohio. Professor Teston also enjoys riding her bike outside. Upon moving to Columbus, Ohio, she was surprised to learn that state law requires her to come to a complete, or “hard stop” at all stop signs while riding her bike. In Idaho, state law allows cyclists to come to what is called a “rolling stop.”

Rolling stops allow cyclists to treat all stop signs as yield signs rather than required hard stops. The rolling stop makes sense in an environment in which there are fewer cars. Coming to a complete stop at a stop sign where there isn’t much oncoming traffic forces the cyclist to lose their momentum; some argue that forcing cyclists to act like cars “criminalizes normal cycling behavior.” In this resource, you’ll practice detecting when it’s most appropriate to come to a (metaphorical) rolling stop versus a hard stop. That is, you’ll practice learning how to assess the consequences of communication decisions, some of which may feel like they’re being made at the last moment, or just as you’re about to approach an intersection.

Learning how to negotiate the complexity of making in-the-moment decisions based on unique, local conditions requires rhetorical skill. And it’s also what makes for being a good writer.  Therefore, we’ve designed this resource so that you have an opportunity to reflect on and be critical of the standards and strategies that you’ll encounter outside of classroom writing spaces; it also asks that you hone tactics for attuning to local conditions along the way. This might mean we come to a hard stop in one situation but use a rolling stop in another situation. Be patient with yourself and others.