The book Effective Teaching of Technical Communication: Theory, Practice, and Communication discusses the pedagogy of teaching technical communication at the university level; Chapter 16, “Hidden Arguments: Rhetoric and Persuasion in Diverse Forms of Technical Communication” by Jessica McCaughey and Brian Fitzpatrick, examines the persuasive arguments embedded within forms of “objective” technical writing.

In this chapter, McCaughey and Fitzpatrick argue that current teaching methods do students a disservice by failing to explicitly acknowledge, and teach towards, the fact that instances of professional writing by necessity are persuasive in nature as they are written to achieve certain aims. They write “Inauthentic classroom experience ill equips newly graduated workplace writers with a generic sense of audience and purpose,” as these new professionals have been taught, at best, about rhetorical persuasive practices which are removed from their everyday workplace realities (304).

At first blush, their argument, which is targeted towards instances of technical writing, doesn’t seem applicable to the work of the Business Communication (BizCom) classroom. After all, the current curricula of BizCom at UMassD includes writing resumes, cover letters, and justification memos, each of which is designed to elicit acts of persuasive writing from undergraduates, many of whom are freshmen and sophomores who are still learning how to write at the college level.

But what can we and should we do to expand upon this base? Like McCaughey and Fitzpatrick say, we can “ask the following questions: In what unexpected/unexplored ways does persuasive writing happen in technical fields, and how do communicators learn to make these arguments? Further, how can writing instructors better prepare students for these particular writing situations” (304)? BizCom students run the gamut from business majors to political science majors, and our classroom is not equipped, in a 13/14 week semester, to handle the specific situations that each student may face. Instead, we must teach generally and hope that students learn to use their general skills in their specific situations.

We often tell our students to avoid using templates for resumes and cover letters, arguing that it’s a “genre-based” style of writing that leaves little room for an individual stamp of creativity — and in many ways, this is true. It is always easy to catch a student who used an online resume and cover letter builder because SafeAssign catches the phrasing and terminology which has proliferated across the Web as hundreds of resumes and cover letters were created with the same piece of software. But forms are an inescapable bureaucratic reality and, as McCaughey and Fitzpatrick’s work demonstrate, they, too, require persuasive writing skills.

McCaughey and Fitzpatrick continue their argument for teaching how to apply rhetorical skills to technical writing, saying, “In discipline-specific writing situations particularly, we do our students a disservice by not acknowledging and teaching towards the persuasive and rhetorical writing they can expect to encounter within technical forms” (307). In our BizCom classroom, which functions as a general ed space due to a diverse student population, we of course cannot teach towards specific types of professional writing. Our job is, instead, to support our students towards this goal, recognizing that they may not receive instruction down the line which explicitly teaches how to write persuasively within a strict genre.

At present, we have two units dedicated to learning how to write persuasively, followed by a unit where we ask students to apply those skills to analyze a real-life example of persuasive business writing. I am not arguing that this structure is poorly designed, or that it requires radical changes; in fact, I feel that this is a well-designed structure that takes the average BizCom student’s needs into consideration. However, we should look to see if there are instances where we can improve instructional outcomes and help students appreciate the pervasiveness of persuasive writing.