Methods of Teaching Business Communication

Bovee and Thill: Leading Textbook Authors in Business Communication Instruction

Bovee and Thill have led the business communication instruction field for more than 30 years with innovative, high-quality textbooks that have consistently been on the leading edge. They were the first to

Textbook Support

cover digital media
cover social media
cover mobile business communication
cover essential communication technologies as they went mainstream in the business world, such as email, blogs, microblogs (Twitter), data visualization, e-portfolios, infographics, text messaging, and virtual meetings
cover business etiquette
cover communication in a diverse world and recognize the importance of diversity in photographs and exhibits
cover developing presentations in a social media environment
cover enhancing presentations with slides
discuss and show pictures of real companies and to include a Company Index
write chapter-opening vignettes to help students see how real professionals use chapter concepts and skills
write about real companies in exercises and cases
include cases that involve the full range of contemporary business media, from blog posts to text messaging
cover digital video as a major business communication medium
create the name and concept for "Letters for Analysis"
create the name and concept for "Document Makeovers"
create the name and concept for “On the Job” business communication simulations
receive an Award for Excellence from the Textbook Authors Association for a business communication textbook

Instructor Support and Interaction

become active and widely known users of emerging digital media, developing hands-on experience that is reflected in their textbook content
have a business communication blog
offer a business communication news service, Business Communication Headline News, for adopters and their students
provide Real-Time Updates, a web-based service featuring the latest articles, videos, PowerPoints, infographics, websites, and podcasts to adopters and their students, categorized by the chapters in Bovee & Thill's textbooks
offer online magazines, 10 in all, each one dedicated to an important business communication topic along with a weekly newsletter of the most popular articles
offer a Business Communication Pictorial Gallery on Pinterest
have a business communication channel on YouTube
have a Teaching Business Communication group on LinkedIn and on Facebook (with a combined membership of over 4,300 instructors)
be on Twitter as business communication authors
offer dozens of business communication slide programs that they've created (available on SlideShare)
to email a video newsletter several times each semester
have a website that focuses on instruction, “Teaching Business Communication”
have been recognized for their contributions to the field by the Governor of Massachusetts and the Boston Red Sox.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Bovee and Thill should be proud, because they’re the most imitated authors in the field. Their texts set the standard by which other textbooks in the field are judged. For outstanding business communication instruction, there simply are no other texts to be considered.

Bovee and Thill have the most extensive collection of free resources for instructors and students in the history of business communication publishing. You can see the full list at http://blog.businesscommunicationnetwork.com/resources.

August 24, 2016

The (sub)genre of the executive summary

When a business professional needs to influence other people to do something not obviously beneficial to them, the individual often writes a persuasive document. That’s why we have proposals, business plans, recommendation reports, white papers, etc. Because such documents present complex information, they are usually lengthy. But readers are busy! So writers need to provide their audience with a way…

March 16, 2016

Feds make better grades in 2015

The Center for Plain Language recently released final grades for US federal agencies. After completing a rigorous evaluation process, they concluded that Participation by agencies in the Center for Plain Language Federal Plain Language Report Card reached an all-time high: 23 agencies submitted materials for review, including all 15 Cabinet-level departments. Compliance scores increased overall: Eight…

November 20, 2015

Reaching (and respecting) veterans with plain language

To honor our US veterans today, let me share an example of exemplary writing practice from the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA). A team working on a form wanted to use the question, “When were you last (gainfully) employed?” They felt that the term “gainfully employed” would gather more legally sufficient and accurate information than just…

November 11, 2015

Readers label you based on your style

I’m in Seattle at the Association for Business Communication conference. Erin Kane and I will present “Reader Perception of Workplace-Writer Attributes” this afternoon. (Our fellow researchers, Nicole Amare and Alan Manning couldn’t make the trip.) We had more than 600 working adults in the US tell us whether they preferred the more plain or less…

October 30, 2015

Does essay writing help you succeed as a writer at work?

Today’s post is in honor of the National Day on Writing. U.S. students spend years writing essays. They believe they know how to write. (And also often believe that writing is meaningless.) What they do not know is that different rhetorical contexts (different goals, audiences, content) give rise to different ways of organizing and presenting information in effective written messages.…

October 20, 2015

Lost in (virtual) space

We are regularly asked whether our flagship book Trees, maps, and theorems is available in PDF or any other electronic format. (No, it isn’t, and if you own a copy, you can probably guess why.) Recently, a reader asked me about the e-book movement. A difficult question: ebooks have definite advantages, yet I find I am skeptical, perhaps because I value visual structure so much.

July 4, 2012

What The Artist is telling us (silently)

Recent winner of five Academy Awards, seven British Academy Film Awards, and three Golden Globes, Michel Hazanavicius’s
2011 silent movie The Artist must have done some things right.
Besides providing viewing pleasure to many of us, it reminds us
of three basic principles of effective communication.

February 29, 2012

Do not keep your rocking horse on a leash

After a visit to Saint Petersburg, my friend Marc Parisel sent me a picture of a delightful set of signs—a perfect reminder of the intrinsic limitations of visual representations. Essentially, pictures are always ambiguous and condemned to be concrete.

December 31, 2011

Chart of the day… but for other reasons

On 24 June 2011, Business Insiders featured this display as their chart of the day—a page that even made LinkedIn Today (“the most shared news on LinkedIn,” they say). I discuss it on this blog as my own chart of the day, but for very different reasons: this graphical display exemplifies several shortcomings typical of the charts produced these days.

June 26, 2011