Business communication textbooks offer impression management (IM) strategies to help students learn how to soften bad news. But corporations sometimes use these strategies in ethically questionable ways. This article analyzes IM strategies in a landmark case of ethically dubious corporate financial reporting. Findings suggest that the company, Ivax, manipulated three standard IM strategies by overamplifying its power to fix a financial crisis, substantially downplaying bad news, and concealing damaging information. Ivax also used a fourth, less familiar strategy: It buried contradictory information in legal disclaimers. Instructors need to help students become ethical writers who avoid questionable IM strategies like these.

Despite students’ growing interest in entrepreneurship education (EE), the small body of research exploring rhetorical strategies for proposing new business ventures has focused only on the argument strategies that startup entrepreneurs use when delivering oral pitches to investors. This study, by contrast, explores the topoi, or lines of argument, that small business entrepreneurs use in written business plans created for bank lenders. Small business entrepreneurs use nine topoi in order to accomplish two rhetorical goals: justifying their ventures, via the creation of stability-focused value propositions, and establishing their entrepreneurial credibility. Ultimately, I argue that small business entrepreneurs use these topoi to frame their ventures as low-risk and stable, which contrasts with startup entrepreneurs’ arguments that their ventures are innovative and disruptive. In addition to learning strategies for highlighting innovation and disruption, EE students would likely benefit from learning rhetorical strategies for minimizing risk and emphasizing stability.

Studies of the grant proposal tend to conflate academic research grant proposals with other kinds of nonprofit grant proposal genres, even though research and nonprofit grant proposals have different audiences and goals. To address this gap, this study draws on the Aristotelian concept of topoi (or typical arguments) and uses corpus analysis, interview, and coding methods to answer the question, what topoi distinguish the academic research and nonprofit grant proposal genres? Findings suggest key differences in the topoi that research and nonprofit proposals use to advocate for problems and outcomes, set goals, and establish credibility.

In this chapter, we present a method for comparing tagging systems and patterns of disciplinary variation in corpora of student writing. We begin by highlighting the affordances of rhetorically and linguistically informed tagging systems by highlighting similarities and differences in each system’s analysis of the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). Results confirm that both taggers produce statistically robust results in distinguishing disciplines across three dimensions and also highlight commonalities and differences that reflect the taggers’ respective theoretical orientations. Then, we present the results of a DocuScope-driven comparison of the British Academic Written English (BAWE) and MICUSP corpora and summarize topical and rhetorical patterns of disciplinary writing that seem fairly stable across national contexts. This chapter’s findings should prove useful to scholars interested in comparative methodologies of corpus analysis and rhetorical measures of disciplinary variation as well as those who work in or research writing in the disciplines.