Everyone knows that education is important, we are confronted daily by discussion of it in the media and by politicians, but how much do we really know about education? "Education: The Basics" is a lively and engaging introduction to education as an academic subject, taking into account both theory and practice. Covering the schooling system, the…

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…

This study explores interactional metadiscourse resources in master's dissertations (introductions and conclusions) of Turkish students written in Turkish and English. Interactional resources were identified according to Hyland and Tse's (2004) framework by using WordSmith Tools (5.0). A statistically significant difference between two groups of…

This study analyzes the ability of advanced Russian learners of English as a foreign language (FL) to compose authentic essays in the target language (TL) reflecting morphosyntactic, discursive, and cross-cultural expectations. Thirty-four students at Russian universities were asked to utilize their TL, English, to write compositions focusing on…

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…

Adolescent writing proficiency is widely considered to be in a state of crisis nationally, and new instructional approaches are needed to raise writing proficiency among all adolescents, with special attention to those students who struggle most (Graham & Perin, 2007). The affordances of digital communication media, such as online discussion…

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.…

Research on the efficacy of mediated suicide awareness campaigns is limited. The impacts of a state-wide media campaign on call volumes to a national hotline were analyzed to determine if the advertisements have raised awareness of the hotline. We use a quasi-experimental design to compare call volumes from ZIP codes where and when the campaign is…

Branding is about delivering on desired outcomes. The importance of positioning program offerings on the basis of outcomes sought in the education market is illustrated in this study of choice of an MBA program by prospective students. MBA fair attendees were surveyed and multiple methods were employed to determine the importance of desired…

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,…

This article focuses on vocabulary and writing at university level from the perspectives of 14 English as an additional language students studying at a New Zealand university. The students individually carried out an integrated reading and writing task and then participated in an interview which focused on their language learning background and…

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…

This article explores the types of audience engagement strategies used by a Japanese secondary school student in an after school course preparing for a high-stakes impromptu academic writing task on a university entrance exam. The study uses appraisal theory--the branch of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) concerned with the patterning of…