This special issue came about as the result of a proposal I wrote to the editor, Lamar Reinsch, about two years ago. For me, the desire to know who I was as an academic professional had become sharp. Books about English as a discipline were proliferating (Elbow, 1990; Graff,1987;Scholes, 1985; one

This commentary describes and critiques criteria that, according to results from an Association for Business Communication (ABC) member survey, are having an impact on quality judgments about our journals. ABC members rank the Journal of Business Communication and Business Communication Quarterly as top research and pedagogical journals in business/management communication, a finding corroborated by a larger study of academics in business and technical communication. However, the growing importance of citation counts and journal rankings currently disadvantages our journals, presenting us with professional obligations and personal dilemmas in relation to them. The authors' purpose is to raise awareness of the various determinants of perceptions of journal quality, to explore Special thanks to Marie Flatley and Bruce Reinig of San Diego State University for assisting us with survey administration and analysis.

As in the fields of composition and technical writing, the emphasis on hierarchical organization of texts in business writing has led to a devaluation of narrative, perhaps because the kind of knowledge that narrative creates has been insufficiently understood. By elucidating the special properties of narrative as a mode of discourse and as a cognitive instrument, this article argues for the potential power of narrative in many common business writing situations.

REPORT ASSIGNMENTS AND collaborative assignments can both be fraught with risk. Report projects, if not well planned, can be too simple (which causes lack of motivation) or too complex (which causes frustration) and/or can leave students wondering what they are supposed to have learned-all while creating a major grading burden for the instructor. Poorly planned group projects can cause similar difficulties, with the added danger of creating interpersonal stress in the student groups.Yet for many reasons, the report assignment is the perfect choice for the collaborative project. Because of its extra length and complexity, the report enables several students to contribute meaningful research, writing, and document design decisions to one product or a related set of products. If the project goes well, each student will learn important lessons both about report writing and about teamwork.To maximize the likelihood that the project will go well, the instructor must think through a wide range of variables and decide, based upon his or her learning objectives, what the features of the project will be. To assist with this process, we have generated a

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