Communication across the campus: expanding our mission to practice what we profess.

Many of us who are members of the Association for Business Communication work on campuses where communications and communication environments do not always reflect the best practices we know and teach. Therefore, we have a host of promising opportunities close to home for advancing our work and

our discipline. Contributing to informal communication-across-the-campus efforts can include modeling best practices when we create teaching materials, compose e-mail, and respond to student work. We can also make valuable contributions by presenting campus workshops, writing guidelines for effective communication, and collaborating with colleagues who prepare campus communications. By increasing our visibility and value in some or all of these ways, we are likely to enjoy even greater satisfaction and success during the next 70 years of ABC's history.

Keywords: business communication; organizational communication; organizational identity; e-mail: collaboration

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As a business communication professional, I am impressed by the significant progress in our work and our discipline in the 70 years since the Association for Business Communication was founded. By reading extensively (e.g., Locker, 1998, 2003, 2005; Shelby, 1993; Wardrope, 2001) and by attending regional and national conferences, I have come to know the earlier years of this history, and in recent years, I have witnessed and participated in this progress. Our progress is especially noteworthy because of the challenges we have faced, such as less respect from other disciplines than we deserve (Graham & Thralls, 1998; Locker, 2003), the lack of "a consistent departmental home in US colleges and universities" (Locker, 2003, p. 125), heavy teaching loads that require extensive evaluation of students' written work (Suchan, 2004; Wardrope, 2001), the "consistently lower salaries paid to business communication teachers" (Wardrope, 2001, pp. 242-243), and a marked decline in the number of courses and graduate programs in business communication (Locker, 2003).

Despite these obstacles and setbacks, our achievements are noteworthy and numerous: As dedicated teachers, we have prepared large numbers of students around the world, students who have already entered the workplace and influenced the communication there or will do so in the years ahead. We are reflective teachers who have successfully adapted to significant changes in the content, delivery, and institutional support for our courses (Andrews, 2005; Eaton, 2003; Wardrope, 2001; Wardrope & Bayless, 1999). In addition to the knowledge we have gained and shared in our classrooms, we have engaged in rigorous quantitative and qualitative research (e.g., Clark, Gunnarsson, Skeldon, & Arnshoff, 2002; Huettman, 1996; Krieger, 2005; Zhao & Alexander, 2004), meaningful collaboration with other academics and practitioners (e.g., Bargiela-Chiappini & Nickerson, 2001; Booth, Dixon-Brown, & Kohut, 2003; Forman, 1991), and noteworthy service as communication consultants (e.g., Boiarsky, 2004; Suchan & Dulek, 1990). In all of these areas, the good work continues, and it should. These are worthy missions for us.

COMMUNICATION ACROSS THE CAMPUS

I want to suggest, though, that we have a valuable mission with untapped potential, a mission that I believe would both enhance and extend our influence and perceived value on the campuses where many of us teach and serve. In short, I am convinced that we need to do more to enhance the communications and the communication environment on our own campuses. With the same energy and efforts that many of us have applied to communication-across-the-curriculum initiatives, we need to initiate a communication-across-the-campus initiative in every institution we serve. They are, after all, our workplaces. Therefore, we should do everything possible to model for our students and colleagues the role of a professional communicator. Our teaching, scholarship, and service have prepared us well for this expanded role. And the need for our expertise is clear. Campuses are living laboratories where communication is of vital importance and where the principles for effective communication should be understood and practiced. And yet, too often, they are not.

Improving Academic Communication in Our Classrooms

I first became especially interested in campus communications when considering ways to achieve a central objective of our business communication course: to enable students to become analytical, effective, and ethical communicators in workplace environments. I decided that engaging business communication students in a study of academic writing might help them to understand the importance of clear, ethical, meaningful communication in any organization, agency, or business where they might choose to work. I talk with my students about the fact that they are currently members of an organization, an institution of higher learning. Their satisfaction and success within this organization will depend greatly on their participation as members, and the success of the organization will depend greatly on the success of its student members (Cheney, Christensen, Zorn, & Ganesh, 2004). Therefore, a second goal is to empower students while they are members of an academic environment by offering them structured opportunities to understand, analyze, and sometimes affect the communication going on around them. Cheney et al. (2004) use a metaphor to describe this process: "The communication of an organization is something we 'step into' like the flow of a river but also contribute to as we affect that flow or throw something into the stream" (p. 7).

With those objectives in mind, I developed a unit that I have now used for 3 years. I offer the following details about that unit, not to recommend a specific classroom approach but to demonstrate the need for improving campus communications and the value of working with our students to address that need. About a week before this unit begins, I gather official documents that are easily accessible on our campus: the mission and vision statements, the core values, and the strategic goals. Every semester, I learn that many students have not read these communications previously despite their publication in highly visible campus sources. We begin our conversations about these documents with the aim of learning as much as possible about our institution, with the belief that these documents should communicate effectively to internal and external readers the defining characteristics of our institution, in the same way that these kinds of documents represent businesses and other organizations.

We spend class time talking about words and phrases found in these documents like excellence, intellectual and personal growth, high ethical standards, respect for all people, courage, integrity, and so on. This discussion focuses on what these words and phrases mean as well as how they shape the ethos of our university. This consideration of ethos builds on discussions we have had earlier in the semester when we discussed the importance of a communicator's ethos and ways to strengthen that rhetorical appeal.

When I think all of us have a clear understanding of the stated vision, mission, and values of our university, a point we usually reach by the end of one 75-minute class meeting, I ask students to collect examples of campus communications that seem either to support or to call into question the ideals, principles, and values found in the official documents we have reviewed. They bring their samples to the next class meeting when I also bring samples--mostly from our campus, although I usually bring one or two from other campuses or from our state system's board of regents. During the next two class meetings, we read, analyze, and discuss each document from our own campus with two questions in mind: (a) Does it follow the guidelines for effective communication we have studied this semester? (b) Does it support the university's ethos as created by its official documents? For communications from other places, we answer the first question only. Sample passages and summaries of our analyses follow.

One passage we have analyzed is an excerpt from our university's Academic Integrity Policy:

   Following an allegation of violation, the associate vice president
   for academic affairs will conduct a preliminary investigation to
   determine if the charges warrant further consideration. If the
   associate vice president for academic affairs deems that they do,
   the individual bringing the charges will be asked to provide a
   written statement of facts outlining the alleged violations and
   stating each regulation which the student is alleged to have
   violated.

Because this policy is found in our Student Handbook, our analysis of this passage has focused first on whether the policy is as clear and brief as it needs to be, as judged by its primary intended audience: students. After reading the policy, students have commented that the passage is "dense," "heavy," "wordy," "too formal," "boring," and "hard to understand." And they have identified the diction, passive voice, and sentence length as factors that hamper the effectiveness of this passage.

To take our analysis a step further, I ask students to analyze the readability of this passage to give us specific data that we could use for revising the passage. Although the shortcomings of readability analysis have been persuasively outlined (Crow, 1988; Karlinsky & Koch, 1983; Selzer, 198 l; Stevens, Stevens, & Stevens, 1992; Suchan, 1998), I support the use of this tool as one strategy for improving the style of written prose. I agree with Lehman and DuFrene (2004) that "the value of calculating a readability measure lies in the valuable feedback you gain" (p. 137). As suggested by the textbook for this course (Lehman and DuFrene), the students use a Microsoft Word grammar and style checker for calculating several readability measures, and they use the definition of difficult words provided in that text: words with three or more syllables, excluding verbs with -ed or -es as the third syllable; proper nouns; and "compound words formed from smaller words (however or understand)" (p. 137).

Using that definition, a few of the difficult words in this passage are individual, preliminary, consideration, and violation. The last two of these difficult words are also camouflaged verbs, active verbs (consider and violate) that have been transformed into nouns, a change that increases their length and complexity, thereby affecting readability. The readability statistics for this passage are (a) Average Words per Sentence: 34; (b) Flesch Reading Ease: 4.3; and (c) Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 12.0.

After revision, this passage becomes clearer and its readability improves, as one possible revision demonstrates:

   Alleged violations should be reported to the associate vice
   president of academic affairs (AVPAA). He or she will then review
   the charges. If the AVPAA decides the charges warrant further
   action, he or she will ask the person bringing the charges to submit
   a written report. This report must list each violation and the facts
   that support it. Also, the report must state the regulations the
   student has allegedly violated.

Counting the acronym "AVPAA" as a difficult word, the passage now includes 11 difficult words; and the readability statistics for this passage are (a) Average Words per Sentence: 14; (b) Flesch Reading Ease: 46.3; and (c) Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level: 10.2.

When our analysis of a document's effectiveness in terms of style and readability is complete, we work together on determining whether a document supports the university's ethos, or institutional identity, as projected by its mission, vision, and values. Our assessment of the Academic Integrity Policy gave it high marks for supporting our university's stated values of honesty and integrity. However, another communication we analyzed--a description of the military program that was found in our Student and Faculty Handbooks at the time--was not judged as positively because students felt that it did not support the publicized ideal of always adhering to "high ethical standards." This document was brought to class by one of our cadets, and it prompted a lively discussion about ethics. The first sentence of this description reads, "Today, approximately fifteen percent of the student body chooses to be in NGCSU's nationally prominent ROTC program" (italics added). The latter part of this statement is true--this program wins a number of awards each year and has been recognized by distinguished leaders such as Colin Powell. However, the verb chooses prompted an immediate response from students (e.g., rolled eyes, laughter, quizzical looks) because all resident male students are required to join the Corps, even if they would definitely prefer to enroll as civilian students, as women are allowed to do. This restriction has caused a great deal of controversy on our campus and beyond, but the policy remains intact. The ethical concerns expressed by those who found this statement misleading are addressed somewhat by a sentence in the next paragraph of this description where readers discover the following: "In accordance with the criteria for military colleges, NGCSU requires that ... all resident male students become members of the Corps of Cadets, a military type organization with a proud history." The choice of a single verb might not have been of great consequence because the truth was fully revealed if one continued reading, but the dissonance between the two statements could have been easily revised to dispel any misunderstanding.

A third example we have studied comes from media accounts of a communication sent by Thomas Meredith, former Chancellor of the University System of Georgia. In an article published in spring 2004 by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, readers learned that Chancellor Meredith had sent an e-mail message to members of the University System's Board of Regents, saying that he had decided to pursue a similar position in Tennessee because part of his salary for the current year, an amount to be paid by the University System of Georgia Foundation, had been delayed (Simmons, 2004a). His message included the following: "Given the difficulty the Board is having in meeting its obligation, I thought I should at least look at the University of Tennessee situation" (p. B1). He added that his candidacy for that position was "not an attempt to leverage additional compensation" (p. B1).

The day after this e-mail was sent to the regents, it was leaked to the press by someone and was reported in newspapers across Georgia and beyond. This coverage prompted negative reactions from many readers. For instance, many taxpayers were outraged because they did not realize how much Chancellor Meredith was being paid--a total of $480,450--in a time when the state was struggling to deal with a paralyzing budget crisis. Faculty, administrators, and staff members who worked in the 34 state institutions of higher education were upset because they had received no raise in the previous year. In response to complaints about the lack of funding for raises, Meredith had pleaded with these college and university employees to sacrifice for the sake of higher education in our state. However, the disclosure of his e-mail message showed clearly that he was not willing to sacrifice by receiving his supplemental compensation later than expected. Because the regents were able to rapidly raise the funds he was owed, Meredith subsequently withdrew his name from consideration in Tennessee (Simmons, 2004b).

Nevertheless, the fallout from this incident continued to hamper his effectiveness. In a recent article that announced Meredith's decision to leave Georgia and take a similar position in Mississippi, Jones and Badertscher (2005) address the effects of Meredith's e-mail message: "While Meredith withdrew his name from consideration at Tennessee after the regents paid up, the publicity embarrassed some members of the board" (p. D7).

When we discuss the implications of the e-mail incident in my classes, students are quick to point out that the most obvious error Meredith made was choosing the wrong channel for his message. If he had chosen another channel, such as communicating his frustration privately to one or more members of the Board of Regents, he probably would have received his supplemental compensation right away, and he would have avoided serious damage to his ethos and his working relationships with those he served.

I believe the same communication principles we teach our students should apply when we create or choose materials for our classes: handouts, syllabi, texts, exams, Web sites, and so on. I remember vividly a student's reaction to an obvious error in the table of contents for a new edition of a textbook. The correct title for the 6th chapter had been repeated as the title for the 10th chapter. He expressed tactfully but strongly his disappointment at discovering this error in a published textbook that urged him to be a careful editor and proofreader. I understood that sentiment and felt somewhat responsible for having chosen a textbook that did not follow completely the principles I taught and expected my students to follow.

Furthermore, I am convinced that we can do more to model best communication practices when we respond to student work. For example, I realized a few semesters ago that I needed to revise some of my feedback if I wanted to follow the advice I had given my students when we discussed bad-news messages. We had talked about the negative connotations of words like fail, and we had agreed not to use second person when doing so called attention to a person's weakness or error. Then, a day or two later, I caught myself writing next to the first paragraph of a student's letter of complaint: "You failed to provide a buffer here." Almost immediately, I saw the error of my ways, covered this marginal note with a copious amount of whiteout, and wrote the following: "I had hoped to find a buffer here." I have recommitted myself, as well, to always providing a buffer in the general comments I write at the end of student work, a buffer that precedes a judgment or grade that is not good news to the student. Sometimes I can comment on the polished style of a document first before commenting on problems with its organization or content. Despite a heightened awareness, I often struggle to find the right words and combinations of words that will be properly instructive and compatible with the communication principles I profess.

Improving Academic Communication Beyond Our Classrooms

The academic communications that my students and I analyze and revise are representative of a wide variety of communications that could be more effective. I have read or heard about a wide variety of communications that have diminished enthusiasm and morale, hampered productivity, prompted undue controversy, caused avoidable confusion, and/or wasted time and effort. Over time, these communication failures have gradually become of great concern to me because I know that many could have been avoided if communication principles were more widely known and practiced.

Many of the ineffective communications on our campus are electronic messages. Regardless of where we work, all of us create and respond to an ever-increasing amount of e-mail. Our experiences with these messages have served as the basis for articles, conference presentations, Internet postings, and so on (e.g., Bordia, 1997; Langemo, 2003; Munter, Rogers, & Rymer, 2003; Rice, 1997; Vincent, 1999; Whitney, 2003). Even though electronic communication is now a seasoned technology that has been discussed and assessed by various experts, too many ineffective e-mails continue to be sent and received on our campuses. We react with amusement, disappointment, or even horror at the mistakes we make or see others make--mistakes in content, tone, style, and so on. Based on their study of e-mail practices, Munter et al. (2003) say, "Although e-mail is an essential communication medium in business today, many businesspeople and business students take it casually and fail to realize its full potential. Moreover, e-mail merits considerable attention because it comprises much of management work today" (p. 26). Therefore, more needs to be done to improve electronic communication so that we can take full advantage of the efficiency and ease offered by this channel of communication.

To address this need, we can use our expertise to improve the electronic communication on our campuses. We might begin closest to home by giving even more careful scrutiny to the messages we compose ourselves because they represent our work as professional communicators to people who may never enroll in one of our classes or read our scholarship. Recently, I made an e-mail error that caused me frustration and embarrassment. At the end of a summer semester, I had told the students in my business communication class to send me an e-mail message if they wanted to know their final course grades before the grades were officially recorded and available online and if they did not object to having their grades transmitted by an insecure medium. Several students sent requests, and I responded to each one before leaving town for an extended vacation. While I was away, I was able to check my campus e-mail occasionally, and I opened a message from one of these students who informed me that my e-mail message said that he had earned an "A," whereas our online system showed that he had earned a "B." He was understandably confused, and I was frustrated because I could not determine which grade was the correct one without looking at my records on campus. All I could do was e-mail him to apologize for the confusion and to promise a resolution of the matter as soon as I returned. When I was able to check my records, I determined that the online record was correct: The student had earned a "B." At that point, I had to write to tell him this and to apologize for sending him the incorrect grade by e-mail. Although I imagine that he accepted my apology, I regret having made that error, especially because I had stressed to his class the importance of always proofreading e-mail before hitting the "send" button.

Maintaining a careful watch over the tone of an electronic message can take more time than proofreading, but all of us understand the tremendous effect of tone on the interpretation of an e-mail message, on the perception of its sender, and on the relationship between its sender and receiver. As a consequence, I try to stop myself before responding hastily when I have been irritated or angered by a message, but this is not easy to do. I remember leaving my computer late one night at the end of a recent semester to prevent myself from responding to a message from our registrar's office that I interpreted as condescending and unfair to my department colleagues and me. Our registrar's message to me as interim head of my department said, "[A faculty member] did not assign a grade for a student in [a course he taught]. A grade of 'NR' [Not Reported] has been assigned and [this faculty member] will need to submit a grade change form to update the grade. Please remind your faculty of the importance of submitting ALL grades by the deadline. Thanks."

On a positive note, this message is clear, brief, and somewhat cordial because it includes please and thanks. However, the effectiveness of the message is impaired by using a deductive approach, which is generally not recommended for bad-news messages like this one (Lehman & DuFrene, 2004). Beginning with a buffer, perhaps thanking me and the other faculty in my department for submitting almost all of our grades on time, would have made me react more positively to this bad news. It was the third sentence, though, that was the most problematic part of the message to me. I reacted angrily to the inference that I would not already have talked with our department faculty about the "importance of submitting ALL grades by the deadline" because our department reported about 2,500 grades on time, a record we have maintained for several semesters and one that provides evidence that all of our faculty do understand the importance of reporting grades by the deadline. Of course, the use of all capital letters in the word ALL, known as "flaming," also contributes to the negative tone of this sentence.

Because this message angered me, I left my computer and remained in a self-imposed "time out" for about an hour. Then, I wrote and sent a response that opened by acknowledging that one grade had been submitted by our department 1 or 2 minutes after the 5:00 p.m. deadline. In the second paragraph, I responded to the third sentence of his message by saying, "I do remind our faculty every semester about the importance of turning grades in on time. Then, I spend a great deal of time monitoring the input of grades. In fact, [our department secretary] and I worked diligently on that today. Still, when you have more than 25 full-time and part-time faculty, 100% perfection is not always possible, so I'm hoping that you understand the limits of what department heads can do."

The next morning, I read my response again and decided that its tone could also have been more effective. For example, I could have apologized for the tardy submission of one grade because I am aware of the problems that late grades cause for our registrar's office. And I could have said nothing or said less in defense of the hard work that department heads and staff do to ensure that grades are reported on time. Nevertheless, my response led to another message from our registrar, a message that made me feel better about this situation: "Thanks for your diligence. I understand that it is not possible for 100% perfection, but that doesn't stop the problems from occurring when grades aren't entered on time. I am aware that you and [the department secretary] worked very hard to make sure your department was in compliance. You can only do so much, and I really appreciate your efforts yesterday. Take care."

As communication professionals, we might be able to prevent some of the problems illustrated by my e-mail exchange with our registrar by presenting workshops or seminars for training constituents from across our campuses. Or we might compose guidelines that could be posted on our Web sites to provide clear and detailed information about electronic communication. Information found in sources like "Business E-Mail: Guidelines for Users" (Munter et al., 2003), "Eleven Practical Strategies for Managing E-Mail" (Langemo, 2003), or "Business Communication: Are the Rules Different for E-Mail?" (Vincent, 1999) could provide worthwhile and accessible content for guidelines or workshops focused on electronic communication.

In addition, helpful information could be added to e-mail policies to make them more comprehensive than most are at present. Along with the necessary technical, legal, and regulatory information, they could provide instruction about the potential and benefits of electronic communication. An example of a policy that heads in the right direction is the Electronic System (Networks) Internet Policy that was developed by the Central Kitsap School District (2005) in Silverdale, Washington. That policy begins with the major heading "Instruction," followed by subheadings for Network guidelines. A section entitled "E-Mail: Acceptable Use Procedures/ Guidelines" follows. It lists a number of helpful tips including the following: (a) "Consider carefully who needs to know the information contained in the communication and copy accordingly. In initial communications it can be intimidating to copy a message to an employee's evaluator before approaching the person first to clarify the issue." (b) "Never say anything via e-mail that you would not be willing to say directly to a person or in a room full of people." If I were an employee of this school district, the tone, scope, and clarity of this policy would encourage me to follow these guidelines, and I am convinced that policies on college and university campuses could have the same effect.

Next, I would like to suggest that we take a greater role in the production of campus documents prepared by offices outside of our academic units. Most of us are not formally responsible for mission statements, press releases, annual reports, and so on. However, we can collaborate with those who are responsible by offering helpful feedback. I have found that my participation was welcomed and appreciated whether I offered it or it was requested. One example comes to mind. I received a frantic e-mail from a staff member in our University Relations office about 2 years ago. She begged me to edit our university's revised strategic goals, the 20-page culmination of a project to write or revise the strategic plans for every unit on campus as well as the university as a whole. She had been charged with doing the editing, but she did not feel capable of handling this responsibility and was most anxious to find someone who could and would.

I received her message on a Saturday afternoon at the end of an incredibly draining week during the first few months of my service as interim department head. In addition to attempting to learn everything one needs to know to chair a department of 25 faculty and two different disciplines, I was also teaching two business communication courses with a total of 50 students. As a result, I was weary and the prospect of editing 20 pages of dense, less-than-perfect prose did not excite me, but I sensed my colleague's desperation and understood the importance of the task, so I agreed to help. During the next few days, I devoted 7 or 8 hours to this task before sending her the revised document, I received, in response, a message that glowed with gratitude and praise and was copied to all of the upper-level administrators on our campus. Several months later, when I met one of these administrators for the first time, he broke into a smile when I introduced myself and commented that he knew of me as "the best editor in town."

Whereas my assistance with editing our strategic goals was requested, I recently called another colleague, our new vice president for academic affairs, Linda Roberts-Betsch, to ask her if we could talk more in the coming months about a statement she had made that improving communication on our campus would be one of her emphases as vice president. She responded enthusiastically and asked if we could go ahead and schedule a time then. About 2 weeks later, we met for lunch, and I learned that she was developing a plan for a newsletter that will focus on teaching and learning initiatives and accomplishments as well as a plan for collecting suggestions for improving our university from all of our constituents. After listening carefully to the plans she had already formulated, I offered my suggestions, such as the strategies for improving electronic communications that 1 have discussed in this article. She made notes as we talked, and I believe she will implement some of those strategies in the coming year.

The Rewards of Communication-Across-the-Campus Initiatives

Expanding our ABC missions to include additional efforts to enhance communication across our campuses will definitely require extra time and effort on our parts, thereby adding to our present workload, but I am convinced that the rewards of applying our expertise to this worthwhile effort will be justified and that worthwhile benefits will accrue: First, the quality of communications and the communication environments on our campuses will benefit from our willingness to model and apply the communication theory we know and teach. We will see the results of our good work, observations that are intrinsic motivators. Second, as a result of the increased respect of our campus colleagues at every level, we should be given more consideration when compensation, workload, promotion, and tenure decisions are made. By following Thomas's suggestion in a 2002 JBC article that we "integrat[e] teaching, research and practice ... to sustain a robust learning environment" (p. 385), we can use the learning we gain from this work on our campuses as evidence for scholarly articles and as sources for promising research questions. In addition, we can cite the contributions of our scholarly expertise as examples of the scholarship of application (Boyer, 1990), scholarship that may not carry the same weight as publications but can be used on many campuses now to augment a publication record that might not meet the standards for promotion or tenure by itself. Finally, what we learn and do as individual members and as an organization will enable us to "forge a path of generative learning" (Thomas, 2002, p. 386) that can provide us with even greater satisfaction and success in the next 70 years of ABC's history.

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Linda Stallworth Williams

North Georgia College & State University

The author wishes to thank Professor Claudia Buckmaster. the anonymous reviewers, and the editor for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. Linda Stallworth Williams is an associate professor of English at North Georgia College & State University. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Dr. Linda Stallworth Williams, North Georgia College & State University, 100 College Circle, Dahlonega, GA 30597; e-mail: lswilliams@ngcsu.edu.