Tales from the Writing Center: Business Communications Word Puzzles

Tales from the Writing Center is a Shitty First Drafts Feature that celebrates the thankless job of staffing a writing center or working as a writing tutor, coping with panicky, half-crazed students and trying to translate incoherent assignment prompts and instructor feedback. You may send your war stories and heartwarming anecdotes to sfdrafts@gmail.com and possibly see them included in this feature.

My university has a mammoth business school, a mammoth business school that is even more finicky about grammar than the English, Communications, and Journalism departments put together.  Every freshman business student is required to take a Business Communications class, where they learn how to write memos and executive summaries and such.  My first year staffing the writing center, the faculty head of that particular program came to a training session to tell us what to expect from these students and assignments.  During that session, we learned that writing for Business is different from writing for English class in the following ways:

• Writing in business is audience-oriented
• Writing in business is about solving problems
• Writing in business is clear
• When writing in business, we don’t use flowery language
• When writing in business, we use a lot of bullet points

Got that?  Also, we were told that in Business Communications, they do not tolerate grammar errors.  Also, if Business Communications students were to come into the Writing Center, we should totally just focus on grammar, because we weren’t qualified to comment on any other aspect of their assignments.

It gets better.  They told their students this as well, so often times, the business students who wandered into the Writing Center on their way to a networking lunch carried the same prejudices and obsessions that their professors did.  The typical Business Communications student walked in looking for help–not with drafting readable, engaging prose–but navigating the byzantine style rules they are supposed to follow.

For example, this freshman girl comes in for a consultation with me.  Her task for this class is to write an email to a prospective career mentor, describing her expectations for the mentorship and the duties of the mentor.  The email was supposed to be exactly one page long.  Additionally, she was only allowed to use any first person pronoun (I, me, my, or mine) a maximum of five times.  Also, passive voice was strictly verboten.  Now, let me start by saying that I understand the spirit of these rules.  Writing that contains a surplus of first person constructions tends to be overly centered on the writer, the writer’s expectations, and the writer’s needs.  Similarly, the passive voice tends to obscure agency, though the professor who came to train us informed us that passive voice is acceptable in business if you are trying to avoid responsibility for something:  “Mistakes Were Made.”  Yes, she actually said that.  Out loud.

Just for fun, in your spare time, try writing a one page message to someone you want to work with while avoiding using yourself as the subject or direct object of the sentence.  If you were able to do this and still produce prose that sounds natural, you deserve a giant freaking gold star, because we were not able to do this within the 45 minutes allotted for the consultation.  Just for fun, let’s give it a shot here.

Dear So and So,

Thank you for agreeing to be my [1] career mentor this year.  During our time together, I [2] will be following you during your work day once a month.  I [3] look forward to learning more about your field and your responsibilities in the position of X.  Before the mentorship begins, I [4] want to take a moment to describe what you can expect during this mentorship.  If you have further questions after reading this message, feel free to contact me [5] or my [6] faculty mentor.

So that was 6 in one paragraph, and this assignment was supposed to take up an entire page.  The thing is, I find the above paragraph to be a perfectly lucid introduction to a collaborative relationship.  While there are six first person pronouns (3 subjects, 1 direct object, 2 adjectives), each sentence in that paragraph speaks directly to the reader and attempts to address the reader’s concerns.  So, while it would have been entirely feasible to have gotten rid of, say 3 of those first person pronouns, it is actually extremely difficult to abstain from doing so over the course of three or four, especially while avoiding passive voice or irritating imperative constructions.  Furthermore, I’m just not sure that it’s necessary. If you want the piece to be audience-oriented, give your students some better guidelines regarding how one avoids making a piece of writing all about the speaker while still conveying appreciation and investment in the relationship.

Otherwise, the assignment becomes a damn word puzzle, not an actual writing assignment.

Using “I” Without Making it All About You

One of the cardinal rules of writing in high school is that you are not supposed to use the first person pronoun.  That rule generally gets relaxed once you get to college, and there is a reason for it.  Professional writers (and most of us who teach college writing are professional writers or at least trying to be) use “I” all the time.  Academic writers say, “in this chapter, I will argue,” “during my research, I discovered,” etc.  Those who write in less formally constricted environments, such as editorials, are even more promiscuous about the use of “I.”  But I’ve been hearing some colleagues talking lately about how they ban the word “I” in their student’s writing, and this sort of bothers me.

There is a reason why high school writers aren’t allowed to use it, and I get it.  But a great deal of my energy in getting students to produce felicitous (that’s a great word, isn’t it?) prose is spent trying to untangle the web of rather arbitrary-seeming rules and constraints handed down to them at earlier stages in their education, so it seems worthwhile to spend some blog time exploring why this is taught and how it maybe really doesn’t have the intended effect.

The reason students are told not to use “I” is because of the tendency of young writers to make the writing all about them.  No one ever told you that in 9^th grade English, did they?  But there it is.  Kids are kind of narcissistic, and it does, in fact, get in the way of efforts to help them produce good writing.  They tend to rush to positions on an issue and then defend it dogmatically based on nothing more than their god-given freedom of thought:

“MY ARGUMENT IS THIS BECAUSE IT’S MY ARGUMENT AND I’M ENTITLED TO MY OPINION AND YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO THINK IT’S A FREE COUNTRY AND YOU SHOULD BE GRADING MY IDEAS NOT MY GRAMMAR.”

Moving from expressive writing that is focused on exploring the self and toward writing that is focused on tailoring an argument to persuade a specific audience is one of the most profound steps student writers take.  It’s sort of like that Lacanian moment when, as a child, you begin to recognize that you are a self that inhabits a world of selves, that the space you take up in the universe is bounded and runs up against the boundaries of others.  The problem is that the injunction against using “I” in writing doesn’t really help.  The tendency to make one’s writing all about the writer rather than the reader is an impulse that remains alive and well in college and even among adult writers.  So, instead of simply banning the word “I,” we ought to be teaching how to use it.  I actually encourage students to practice using the following statements in their formal, argumentative writing, especially in early drafts:

“I contend…”

“I argue…”

“I advance the position…”

“I have concluded…”

For one thing, freeing up students to work with these kinds of constructions actually helps them write stronger, clearer theses by forcing them to distill their main point in such straightforward terms.  However, there are a couple of phrases that I do tell students to look out for:

“In my opinion…”

“I believe…”

These constructions are in some ways inherently self-directed, while the former set tend toward other-directedness.  By saying “I argue,” you imply that there is a person on the other end of that argument, an interlocutor, a potential respondent, someone you have to persuade or at the very least engage.  By saying “I advance the position,” you are implying that there might be other positions out there, some of which you may need to acknowledge or rebut.  However, when you say “I believe,” you are talking about thoughts that are typically very private.  The implied relationships is not between yourself and the reader but between yourself and the entity you believe in.

That isn’t to say, however, that “I believe” statements cannot work.  They can.  In a lot of confessional writing (think Augustine, Tolstoy, or C.S. Lewis), in which the author is talking about beliefs, you get this kind of language all the time.  But even those writers were attempting to persuade their readers.  By showing how the workings of curiosity, doubt, and faith have led them to adopt a particular belief system, they are trying to say something about how it might work for other people, but trust me, they are almost always thinking about the reader in the process.  People who try to get you to convert to their religion are talking about “belief,” but they are also thinking about the rhetorical strategies that might get you to go along with them.

So, instead of banning “I believe” or “In my opinion,” I tell students to watch for these phrases in their writing and examine why they are using them.  Are they using them as a defense mechanism because they aren’t sure how to justify or substantiate their conclusions and want to render themselves impervious to criticism by resorting to the “well, this is just what I believe, and I’m entitled to my beliefs” stance?  Are they trying to similarly insulate themselves from critique by highlighting the inherent subjectivity of what they are about to say?  If so, then they should see what the statement sounds like if they restate it using one of the first four constructions I listed before.  Does it now sound like something that can be argued and supported with evidence?

I contend (Iseewhatyoudidthere) that banning the use of “I” really only limits vocabulary without teaching students how to see themselves, their beliefs and opinions, as entities that have to interact with other entities in the world, people who have to persuade other people, beliefs and opinions that have to acknowledge and respond to other beliefs and opinions.  Students often think that their writing is part of a hermetically sealed conversation between them and the instructor in which their argument isn’t so much an argument about whatever the assignment was but an argument for why they deserve an A.  And that’s just not how writing works in the real world.