Taking care of business at the writing center.

Scheer, Ron

A colleague who teaches business writing here at the University of Southern California likes to say that the academic world is no different from the so-called "real world"--it just pays less. I laugh and agree, because I know what he means. But, in fact, he is only partly right. Returning to university teaching after fifteen years as a working writer and consultant for an international marketing communications agency, I know how those two worlds can both mirror each other and exist in totally different realms. In my current role as director of the university's writing center, I also know that each has something to contribute to the other.

Writing in a business environment has a bracing effect on a writer used to the conventions of academic writing. At its best, business writing is self-consciously addressed not to the intellectually curious but to decision makers. It values brevity and clarity over expansiveness and ambiguity. While it may at times educate and inform, its main goal is to get things done. It cuts to the chase.

As a working writer, I had to be results driven. I often used my analytical and problem-solving skills and my ability to quickly research a new subject. I also developed a heightened awareness of audience, an appreciation for the rhetorical dimension of document design, and a set of stylistic strategies for making complex information easy to read without compromising its integrity.

The relationship between business and writing is reciprocal. While writing serves the goals of business, business organizes writing as an enterprise of its own. Collaborating with and supervising other writers and graphic designers on projects for corporate clients, I had to acquire organizational skills for completing deliverables on budget and on time. Meanwhile, compared to academic writing, the stakes were much higher. It was like taking a pass/fail course in which you have to get an A+ to pass. As I said, it has a bracing effect on a writer.

Corporate models

Given this background, when I think of how a university writing center might work, I tend to model it after the various in-house agencies that exist within large corporations to serve other departments within the company, all of which are potential "clients."

If you are in a communications department, for example, someone with a new product can ask you to develop, design, and produce promotional "literature" to introduce and sell that product. You manage their expectations and do everything you can to deliver what the client wants by an agreed deadline.

Like any vendor, the continued existence and growth of an in-house agency depends on its ability to satisfy and exceed the expectations of its clients. So, as much as possible, you use your expertise to "add value" to the project. Finally, you deliver service with a smile. People like doing business with people who make them feel comfortable.

Also, you don't wait for business to come to you. You make yourself known by aggressively promoting your service through your organization's communication channels. More of a challenge is doing your own market research, proactively developing new services and new ways to package and deliver your current ones.

Marketing does this to you. It gets you thinking about how well your services meet the felt needs of your client base. You don't offer something that people ought to want. It should be something they actually do want. You don't make clients do business with you in a way that's convenient for you; you make it convenient for them. So when I think about the writing center, my chief concern is just that--satisfying the customer.

I am grateful for the writing center research that has been done because a great deal of it is aimed directly at getting closer to the goal of customer satisfaction. I am more ambivalent, however, about the literature that models the writing center as a center of subversive activity, challenging the ethos of the university power structure. Adopting a business model does little or nothing, on the face of it, to challenge the status quo. In my defense I'd say that sooner or later students will be trying to make a mark for themselves in the world of the status quo, and we are remiss if we don't help them acquire skills they can use to their advantage, both now and later.

Like critics of the university, I also hope to empower students, and I believe the writing center is in a unique position to help them learn how to get what they want. I also believe that being in a college or university these days means they probably want a career with opportunities for advancement and corresponding levels of compensation for their efforts--if only to pay off their education loans. We can lament this state of affairs or--as one of my consultants has said--embrace it. It's no less an opportunity to make a difference for students.

Finally, customer satisfaction isn't just yielding to every wish of the customer. If that were the case, the writing center would simply write students' papers for them. Satisfaction is the result of conscious negotiation, and I can recommend two wise and thoughtful books on the subject. One is The Tao of Sales: The Easy Way to Sell in Tough Times, by E. Thomas Behr, Lao-Tzu Tao Te Ching, and Laozi Dao De Jing (Element, 1997), that articulates a view of vendor-client dynamics that is refreshingly unencumbered by the expectations that tend to block productive relationships. Also clarifying is High Probability Selling: Re-Invents the Selling Process by Jacques Werth and Nicholas Ruben (Bookworld, 1997).

Who's the client?

Something else that troubles me in the literature is the adversarial relationship some writing center professionals adopt toward faculty. Yes, there are some members of my faculty who have expectations of the Writing Center that don't square with mine, and they pose a challenge. However, I don't dismiss them or get into debates with them.

Faculty members are surely the center's clients as much as the students who walk through our doors. I don't forget that faculty are at the receiving end of the papers students write. Like the customer who receives direct mail or who walks by a rack of brochures at the bank or who sees a billboard, a faculty member is someone on the receiving end of a message intended to elicit a favorable response.

So for me, the best strategy for the writing center is to help students solve the problem of getting that favorable response--or, to use a phrase from business, to help students negotiate a win-win situation with their instructors. And in this regard, it helps to remember that the customer is always right.

Audience focus

My experience as a working writer makes a difference now in how I think about the teaching of writing. I'm often asking myself, "Which writing skills are going to be most valuable to students who in a few short years will be thrust into the world I just came from--the various corporate and organizational environments where they'll be expected, sooner or later, to write something?" On this point, from a marketing perspective, the answer is pretty easy--knowing and focusing on the audience.

I've learned that focus on audience is often an undeveloped and unfamiliar strategy for students in the writing process. Many seem unaware that closely reading an assignment or the instructor's comments on previous essays has much bearing on the paper they're trying to write now. Instead, students are usually focusing on something else--often an elusive ideal of the perfect essay or paper.

My consultants and I are sometimes drawn into situations where a student wants us to validate their belief that a paper deserves a better grade than it got from an instructor. On some absolute scale, they argue, sometimes tearfully, the paper more closely approaches an A and by giving it a C+ the instructor is being unfair and unreasonable. (The equivalent in a business environment is the "crazy boss" who nearly everyone ends up reporting to at one time or another.)

The opportunity for learning and empowerment is in students' willingness to focus on the instructor as a key variable in the problem immediately facing them. We often have to remind them that the measure of writing is situational and always audience driven. So we ask: What has been the instructor's feedback on your previous papers? What has your instructor been talking about in class? What has the instructor assigned you to read? What does the instructor say in the assignment? What can we tell from all this about what the instructor wants?

If a student can't answer these questions and the instructor remains an unknown quantity, the fallback for consultants is to help the writer make the following assumptions:

* The reader is busy and probably easily distracted

* The reader doesn't have time or energy to figure out the point of a paper that's unclear

* The reader wants the paper to be interesting

When you consider what it's like as a teacher to read through a stack of papers, none of these assumptions should be surprising.

Student writers can also benefit from knowledge of a few other basic strategies that work with most audiences, such as:

* Think of the reader as someone who has to make a decision on the basis of what you've written

* Structure the paper as an argument with a thesis and supporting evidence

* Get to the point of the paper in the first paragraph

* State the point of each paragraph clearly in a topic sentence

* Write as though the reader is always prepared to disagree

* Use a clear, explanatory title

* Proofread and spell check

These also happen to be features of good business writing, where a long, disorganized, unfocused memo or report is almost certain to go unread.

One last word on this subject, however. The practices of standard business writing don't apply across the board. One exception is a kind of academic writing that is highly theoretical, analytical, and speculative--in other words, deliberately difficult. Here the purpose of the writer is to show evidence of a heroic struggle with slippery concepts and abstractions and not to strive for clarity, which would diminish the complexity of the subject.

I confess, this kind of writing gives me a headache, but the challenge for us at the Writing Center is to help the student of the instructor who expects it. Finally, and I agree with Mort Sahl, who said this 40 years ago: you have to speak a language that people understand. When your audience wants a kind of writing that recognizes authentic thought only when it's represented by densely complex prose, you give them what they want.

Authorship

The concept of authorship is understood somewhat differently in the business world, where collaboration is often the norm. Documents prepared by teams can pass over so many desks and through so many rounds of revisions that it's nearly impossible finally to determine who wrote what. Writers in a corporate environment also learn to have their work reviewed by others before it gets to its intended audience. ("Can I run this by you?") A second or third pair of eyes typically generates needed changes.

The consultants at the writing center give students an experience of that kind of collaborative writing. By being interested and knowledgeable readers with feedback, they help reinforce an important lesson about written communication--a second opinion is better than just one's own.

The writing center consultant also performs another important role. As someone who is more familiar with the culture of the university, the consultant can mentor students in "how things are done here." This can help students begin to understand the absence of absolutes across organizational cultures, where tone, terminology, buzzwords, style, etiquette, and levels of formality are always relative--and mastery of them reflects credibility.

As an example of this, I can point to a significant difference of expectations between the corporate world and the academy, where educators prize critical thinking and the ability to closely analyze and find the weaknesses in any assumption, claim, or argument. By comparison, corporate culture tends to conflate critical thinking with being critical, that is, negative. In this world, enthusiasm and being positive are preferred. Problems are opportunities. The fiercely guarded independence of many academics doesn't tend to find a home in corporate culture where people are expected to be team players and surrender their individualism to a kind of groupthink. (That's not to say there's no groupthink among academics; it just takes different forms.)

The emphasis on audience permits consultants to raise student writers' awareness of both the expectations of the individual instructor and the university's own corporate culture. It can position critical thinking as one set of analytical and argumentative skills among many.

Process vs. product

There's a more critical point at which the academy and the business world part company, however, and I believe it leaves the writing center squarely in the middle. Whenever the literature addresses the writing center's position on proofreading, editing, and correctness, it reveals its ongoing struggle with this issue.

For twenty years, Stephen North's belief that we improve writers not writing has dominated our concept of the writing center's mission. While the business world would not deny that writing is a process, it would insist that the measure of the writer is in the final product. A poorly drafted document, with grammar, spelling and usage errors, is likely to be perceived as below standard and its author as lacking credibility.

In fact, this ideological fault line cuts right through the academy. Especially at a university like our own, with a large population of second language students, the writing center is frequently challenged on the issue of correctness by dismayed faculty whose students "can't write." Process theory advocates in the academy can insist that correctness is no predictor of good writing, but the complaints don't go away. Some may insist that these faculty should "learn how to read" papers that use nonstandard English. Not surprisingly, the complaints continue.

My experience as a working writer in the business world biases me, I suppose, but my belief is that the writing center must more aggressively address this issue. For many audiences, correctness matters. A lot. So when we devote tutoring sessions to helping students learn to proofread and edit their own writing, we're doing the right thing. Every workshop on grammar, mechanics, and usage is doing the right thing. These are not departures from the basic mission of the writing center--to empower writers. In fact, we need more such solutions.

So what does all this add up to? The writing center is in a key position not just between students and instructors. The worlds of business and the academy are linked by the students who pass through both of them. In what it has to offer student writers, a writing center helps to build a bridge between these two worlds.

The writing center occupies a place that opens onto the world beyond the academy, where students will communicate to organizational, corporate, and professional audiences they have yet to imagine. By modeling itself after similar agencies in the corporate world, the writing center can do much to help prepare students for these challenges, in whatever real world they happen to find themselves.

Ron Scheer

University of Southern California

Los Angeles, CA