Nestled in the Himalayan Mountains, Bhutan, a Buddhist country, is one of the most isolated nations in the world. After spending a month there, the authors all agreed it deserved its title of "The Last Shangri-La." Their team of professional development specialists spent the summer of 2010 providing professional development in the basic…

The concept of "college readiness" is increasingly important in discussions about students' preparation for postsecondary education. This Framework describes the rhetorical and twenty-first-century skills as well as habits of mind and experiences that are critical for college success. Based in current research in writing and writing pedagogy, the…

Fostering data-driven decision-making is not an easy task, nor is getting busy people's attention in this age of information overload. How we write about and disseminate our findings can help. Writing to the audience, timing, formatting, choice of medium, and connecting results to institutional goals and current, even controversial, issues are…

An interim president has to perform a particularly difficult balancing act. He or she shoulders the burdens from--or legacy of--the previous president and must also provide a foundation of stability for the new president. Throughout the process, effective communication--both internally and externally--is critical to ensuring a smooth transition.…

Most business communication classes teach students to use a writing process to compose effective documents. Students practice the process by applying it to various types of writing with various purposes-reports, presentations, bad news letters, persuasive memos, etc. However, unless students practice that process in other contexts outside of the…

The essay is the most intimate of reading experiences, in which the reader is invited to eavesdrop as the writer works through a thought or excavates a memory. The writer can be explicit, in the first person, or just implicit, as the person behind the words, but he or she is absolutely, powerfully present. It's as if, for those few thousand words,…

In this article, the authors focus on the decision-making process that goes into professional writing and ways to emphasize ethical decision-making in writing classrooms. Professional writing has at its core an emphasis on action and audience. Certainly teachers want their students to write effectively--to serve their clients, organizations, and…

Teaching philosophy statements clarify why we do what we do in the classroom, and the process of drafting a philosophy offers an opportunity for developmental reflection. Personal teaching philosophies can be grounded in the shared foundation of historical educational philosophies. The authors offer here for facilitators a reflective card-sort…

That our writing can be misunderstood by our readers is a conceptual difficulty for developing writers. This paper outlines a perspective-taking process that assists elementary students in composing referentially detailed descriptions. Through a procedural sequence that includes drafting, feedback, readers' perspective task, revision and drafting…

This article presents the rationale for and implementation of the family message journal as a writing tool. The family message journal provides multiple opportunities for students to develop as writers while strengthening the school-home connection. This article provides examples of rhetorical moves that indicate young writers are aware of their…

As public relations professions advance toward new media platforms, one traditional tool--the backgrounder/position paper (more technically termed white paper) remains a compelling vehicle to impart enduring professional competencies. Moreover, the skills requisite to produce a white paper can be deployed in a variety of new and traditional media…

Many educators know that studying and composing literature and poetry helps English learners develop their own voice and sense of audience, and to express important social ideas in the process. Poetry, in particular, offers special challenges, but one type of poem that is manageable for the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom is "haiku,"…

Implementing process pedagogy in an L2 writing classroom has its own limits for students with low English proficiency. Although L1 writers commonly benefit from writing multiple drafts, most of the low English level Korean college students in my English composition class did not benefit from the revisions. This article introduces an innovative…

CDC's Marketing and Communication Strategy Branch (MCSB) in the National Center for Health Marketings Division of Health Communication and Marketing divides audiences into segments with similar needs, preferences, and characteristics and provides CDC programs with audience-specific information, marketing expertise, and communication planning. To…

Although students must understand the rhetorical medium that they use to present their proposals to their fellow classmates, they must also understand how audiences shape the rhetorical medium and shape how they create texts. Surveying audience members can help students figure out the best strategies to present their proposals and, in doing so,…