Making the Rhetorical Sell

Abstract

Thanks in large part to a $30 million gift, Miami University, located in Oxford, Ohio, is in the midst of constructing a new state-of-the-art School of Business. This enormous new structure, which will measure 210,000 square feet, will house the Farmer School of Business's six academic departments, as well as a trading room that enables students to simulate stock-trading activity, Net classrooms, 500-and 150-seat auditoriums, a library, and electronic research facilities. As the plans for this massive structure suggest, traveling from the English department to the business school entails more than simply crossing the street; it means walking into an entirely different world. When we enter the business school as writing across the curriculum (WAC) administrators, we're not simply stepping into a different discipline, we're often stepping into different ideologies and values as well as different ways of thinking, talking, and writing. As in any WAC venture, two guiding principles are "know your audience" and "adapt to your environment." Admittedly, all WAC endeavors are by nature site specific; consequently, this article advocates rhetorical analysis that first uncovers and draws on the language and methods of a specific discourse community so that WAC administrators in a variety of institutional sites and cultures can then effect change.As WAC administrators in the School of Business, we are tasked with encouraging curricular change in a discipline intensely devoted to content and preparing students to succeed in established forms of capitalism. We are also assigned to work with an overwhelmingly male faculty that teaches 3/3 Pedagogy Published by Duke University Press

Writing Entrepreneurs

“…By exemplifying writing's significant role for entrepreneurs, our data might encourage students to pursue courses in professional communication that further develop the skills necessary for carrying out tasks of practicing entrepreneurs. These results might also help instructors and program administrators sell the importance of their writing courses across campus (see Shaver, Bowles, & Beemer, 2009) and to community consulting services such as SBDCs and regional business incubators. Besides valuing writing as part of their businesses, our participants (n ¼ 94) expressed a fair amount of confidence in their own abilities to write the documents necessary to build and maintain their ventures.…”