by Nathan Nikolic
Note: This is part one of a two-part article; part two, which discusses student assignments and group work, will be published in our forthcoming Spring 2025 Issue.
“I’m tired of shoving literature down these business major kids’ throats.” This thought was my first step in the process of designing the section of ENGL 2150 (First-Year Writing II) that I am presenting here. The class that emerged, however, became so much more than just a reaction of frustration. I have now taught it twice and had what I consider great success each time.
After subjecting my Baruch students to Robinson Crusoe during the spring 2022 semester, I decided I would do something different in the fall. I thought about my students and their majors: business, finance, accounting, marketing, public relations. Seventy-five percent probably fall into one of these areas. 2150 is supposed to introduce students to academic research. Why not have a class where they investigate a company or nonprofit, I thought. That way they could write about a topic they felt was more relevant to their lives and future professions. I could have them work in groups on a semester-long project, a comprehensive report of their entity, in which they describe its history, labor conditions, environmental impact, profit and success, and ultimately present an evaluation to potential investors/donors explaining why they should(not) invest or donate. That should get their attention, a self-directed research project that simulates complex, long-term, team-oriented projects they may encounter in the workplace.
I was excited. I have always preferred syllabus structures that give students significant control over, and responsibility for, their writing and learning. They could pick their groups along with the company or nonprofit, distribute subsections and tasks among themselves, conduct their own research, set up interviews, and debate definitions of value and understandings of ethical categories that they themselves had constructed. Equally importantly, we could use class time to write and talk about writing. We could do a half-hour workshop on active and passive voice, talk about sentence order, brainstorm lists of transition words, workshop topic sentences extensively, read over their framing paragraphs, discuss footnotes, figures, headings and subheadings, in short, do all things we didn’t have time for while I was dragging students by the ears through Defoe’s 18th-century prose.1
With all this in mind, I set about designing the 2150 syllabus I call “Investigating the Corporate World,” which I share here and am happy to discuss with anyone who would like to adapt it or teach a similar course.
Business Writing or Writing about Business?
There are a tremendous number of books that claim to teach students how to write for the business world. From dignified titles like The Elements of Business Writing (1991) and Business Writing at its Best (1994) to ostensibly practical guides like 10 Steps to Successful Business Writing (2008) and Style Guide for Business Writing (2018) to irreverent catechisms like Writing without Bullshit (2016), there is a vast array of texts for students and teachers to choose from. Unsurprisingly, there’s also a large body of literature on teaching business writing.
“Investigating the Corporate World” is not a business writing class, though some of the skills I try to help students develop are also emphasized in the texts mentioned above: clarity, organization, and economy of language. What’s the difference? Almost all business writing manuals assume that the writer comes to the blank page with their purpose fully formed. Their task is to convince a particular audience to buy (literally or metaphorically) a specific product or idea. While my students end their reports with what is meant to be a persuasive evaluation, they form this evaluation over the course of the research/writing process. Indeed, many students pick gigantic companies or nonprofits they admire at the beginning of the semester, such as Apple or Goodwill. But when they learn about the abysmal treatment of Foxconn employees in Apple’s overseas iPhone factories or the legal loophole that allows Goodwill to pay disabled employees far below minimum wage, their opinions often sour. While business writing treats writing as merely a tool, a means to an end, in my section of 2150, we write about business in such a way that the research, writing, and revision processes play a critical role in determining the ultimate purpose of the writing itself. Because of its focus on writing as a means of critical inquiry, “Investigating the Corporate World” has much more in common with traditional humanities classes than one might first expect. For instance, we spend lots of class time discussing the validity of various sources. Early on in the research process, after students complete their annotated bibliographies, we have to talk about using their company or nonprofit’s website as a source. Should we use an entity’s website to investigate it? Why or why not? In what ways?
I find this to be such a valuable teaching and learning moment. Students first tend to approach this question through a framework of objectivity and bias–the unanimity of this language says a lot about the way high school students are taught to think about sources, at least in NYC’s public schools. Here is an excerpt of a student’s entry from my Fall 2022 section: “This source is the primary source because I found the history on the Nestle website and it was edited by Nestle employees. It was published by Nestlé. I think this source is more credible, first of all, partly credible because it is the history of Nestlé, which is an objective fact.” I put the question to the class, “What do we think about this?” “A company’s website is biased, it’s not objective,” allowing for paraphrasing, was one of the first comments. “Fair enough,” I responded. “Is a New York Times article or an encyclopedia entry or an academic book objective?” This led to a rich conversation where we concluded that perhaps we can talk about levels of objectivity (though it’s also rather unclear what that means), but no source is going to be entirely free of bias. In that case, is the objective/biased framework really the best way to look at the problem, I asked. Maybe a better question is: what can we learn from a company’s website? As soon as I put it this way, someone answered very quickly: “We learn how the company presents itself, how it wants us to see them.” Every source tells us something, but we have to figure out what, and this requires reading critically, asking questions about the author and their purpose, examining the evidence they present, and searching for the assumptions and implications of their arguments.
Once students submit their first drafts, we also have a workshop where we talk about what I call PR (public relations) language in their writing. I pull some examples anonymously and project them on the screen. Here is one from my Fall 2023 class (the student was writing about executives at IHOP: “Climbing your way to the top requires risks to be taken and people who are willing to take those risks.” It is only natural that our writing tends to acquire some of the style of whatever we are reading at the moment. Students submerged in corporate biographies and histories will adopt some of that language whether they are aware of it or not. This serves as a good opportunity to talk about trying to maintain a critical distance from your sources. Returning to the example, I asked the students, how is this presenting the IHOP executives? What kind of message is it sending? What assumptions is it making about where success comes from? We joked about The Wolf of Wall Street and the image of a daring entrepreneur or finance bro. So, what should we do? As the class sat quietly looking rather stumped, I suggested that maybe there was a much simpler solution, just change the framing. Instead of presenting the above sentence as a neutral statement of fact, contextualize it: “IHOP’s CEO [or whoever is speaking] attributes the company’s success to individual daring and business acumen.” At this point, I saw some lightbulbs go on. Making sure not to single anyone out, I challenged the whole class: “I’m sure you can all find instances of PR language in your drafts. One of your tasks for the final draft is to locate and change one of them.”
Designing and teaching this class has expanded the way I think about what composition classes can be. Coming from a literature background, at first I defaulted to literary texts to structure my classes. But when I started from a blank slate and critically examined the course goals, my students’ interests, and the way I use class time, my whole approach changed. My 2150 syllabus allows me the flexibility to respond to my students’ needs. I ask them what would be helpful as they’re working on their drafts. We plan classes together to a large degree. If they need 45 minutes to look for sources, we can do that. If they want us to work together as a class to workshop the issues of coherently combining writing by multiple individuals, we can do that. And my initial fear that switching from literature to an analysis of the corporate world would somehow hollow out the critical and intellectual content of the course turned out to be entirely unfounded. In fact, some of the most fruitful, critical discussions of power, social relations, ethics, authorial intent and genre I’ve ever participated in with students are a result of this class.
- I want to make clear from the outset that I do believe in requiring students to take literature classes (and history, mathematics, foreign language, and science classes for that matter) regardless of their majors. I believe everyone should be exposed to as many facets of intellectual inquiry as possible during their undergraduate education. In short, I believe in the value of liberal education. In my experience, however, writing-intensive classes are not always the best place to sell students on the joy and value of literature. Introductory literature courses, I think, should prioritize reading and discussion of texts, paired with shorter low stakes writing assignments. Class time should be dedicated to close reading and interpretation. Cramming intensivewriting instruction and research methods into a literature syllabus, especially for introductory courses, has left me unsatisfied with my treatment of both literature and composition. ↩︎