The scholarship of Kitty O. Locker.

Kitty Locker made an enormous contribution to the discipline of business communication through her textbooks, articles, papers, and vivid personal presence. This article reviews five primary focuses of her contributions: rethinking the formula for negative messages, connecting pedagogical scholarship

Keywords: Kitty Locker; business communication textbooks; British East India Company; negative messages; disciplinarity

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In a printed interview (Locker, 2001), the editors of Issues in Writing asked Kitty Locker how she had become one of the "nation's most respected authorities on business communications" (p. 4) and how other people could also succeed in the field. Her answer was "Follow what you love" (p. 24). It is obvious to all who knew her that Kitty Locker loved business communication. She loved the subject matter and believed that business communication helped families and friends as well as workers lead happier, more productive lives. She also loved the people in the discipline--colleagues, graduate students, conference attendees--and generously passed on her wealth of knowledge to those who asked. Through textbooks, articles, and papers, her scholarship has made an enormous contribution to the discipline of business communication. She helped move the field away from sales and toward management and helped move textbooks away from lore and toward researched techniques, away from short, formulaic assignments and toward complex, real-world assignments. She provided an important boost for historical research in business communication and helped the discipline identify boundaries by articulating distinctions among business communication, technical communication, professional communication, and general composition. She accomplished all this in a relatively short time span. She received her PhD in 1977, began teaching at Ohio State University in 1985, and died at age 56 on September 9, 2005. In the last 5 years of her life, more and more of her energy was required to fight the cancer spreading through her body.

This article reviews five primary focuses of her contributions: rethinking the formula for negative messages, connecting pedagogical scholarship to research, fostering the disciplinary research community, presenting historical research, and mentoring the people in business communication.

RETHINKING THE FORMULA FOR PRESENTING NEGATIVE MESSAGES

Probably most business communication scholars, when asked to name Kitty's (1) greatest publication, will name her landmark article on negative messages, "Factors in Reader Responses to Negative Letters: Experimental Evidence for Changing What We Teach" (Locker, 1999). This line of research demonstrated her curiosity and her willingness to question standard practice. In her very first publication, "Patterns of Organization for Business Writing" (Locker, 1977a), Kitty discussed the difference between logical and psychological organization and offered organizational schemes for six different kinds of messages, but she did not discuss negative messages, perhaps because she was already questioning conventional wisdom. As she reported in her negative message article, she began studying buffers and resale in 1976 (Locker, 1999, p. 13). As she proceeded with her investigations, Kitty presented her findings in four papers at national conferences; she also wrote about the rhetoric of negative messages (Locker, 1982b). On the basis of her quantitative research findings, presented fully in the 1999 article, Kitty advised that buffers should no longer be considered the norm for negative messages and that strongly positive endings after bad news evoked negative responses and therefore should be avoided. In the article, she exhibited a hallmark Kitty Locker trait by buttressing her statistics with a thorough review of the conflicting scholarly literature on negative messages and an equally thorough review of the approach to negative messages of over 50 textbooks. Also, exhibiting yet another hallmark trait, she provided an extensive discussion of further research needed on negative messages.

CONNECTING PEDAGOGICAL SCHOLARSHIP TO RESEARCH

Kitty was passionate about teaching others to teach. One of her favorite maxims, from Quintilian via Fran Weeks, appeared in an early article: "The job of the teacher is to arrange victories for his students" (Locker, 1984, p. 8). All of her textbooks, pedagogical articles, and pedagogical presentations echoed this goal.

Kitty's curriculum vitae lists 6 published articles and over 40 presented papers on pedagogy. She wrote articles on teaching with transparencies, presenting numerical data, teaching abstracts, writing minireports, using Toulmin logic, and teaching tolerance (Gieselman & Locker, 1978; Locker, 1977b, 1982d, 1983, 1992d; Locker & Keene, 1983). She gave presentations on teaching the long report, grading, teacher training, ethics, creating assignments, and graphic literacy.

However, the bulk of Kitty's pedagogical scholarship exists in her textbooks. Over her career, she produced six textbooks. Four were coauthored:

* Business Communication: Building Critical Skills (Locker & Kaczmarek, 2001, 2004);

* Business and Administrative Communication (Locker & McLaren, 1995, Australasian ed.);

* Conducting Research in Business Communication (Campbell, Housel, & Locker, 1988); and

* Business Writing Cases and Problems (Weeks & Locker, 1980, 1984; Jameson, Weeks, & Locker, 1987).

Two were single authored:

* The Irwin Business Communication Handbook: Writing and Speaking in Business Classes (Locker, 1993b); and

* Business and Administrative Communication (Locker, 1989b, 1992a, 1995a, 1998a, 2000a, 2003a, 2006).

Of these textbooks, Business and Administrative Communication (BAC) is Kitty's greatest publication; it has proceeded through seven editions. In her "Introduction Memo to Instructors and Students" (Locker, 2004a) that she handed out at the beginning of her business communication courses, Kitty reported that BAC was the number one or two business communication textbook in the United States for the past decade. The significance of her textbooks and BAC in particular is that Kitty based her pedagogy on real-world experiences and a wide range of empirical research rather than unsupported common teaching lore.

BAC began with consulting work Kitty conducted for Ryerson Steel in Chicago. Ryerson wanted a writers' manual, and that manual was the foundation of the textbook, although very little from the manual made its way directly into the textbook. Ideas for BAC also grew directly from Kitty's teaching. In fact, Kitty wrote drafts of many of the chapters for the first edition as handouts for a business communication course she was teaching at the time. She would be up early (Kitty did some of her best work at 3 a.m.) on the day she needed the handout, pounding the keys of her computer (she was a terrifically fast typist but also heavy handed), printing off a copy from her computer, and racing to a copy store to make copies for her students (R. S. Mills, personal communication, November 21, 2005).

BAC is known for the depth of its scholarship. As Kitty noted in an article interviewing her (Locker, 2001),

   It always irked me that business communication books said "Research
   shows that ... " but didn't cite any sources. It seemed to me that
   where research does indeed show us something, there should be a
   footnote, an endnote.... when we do in fact have research to back
   something up, we should know it and our students should know it.
   This field is not theory-free as I think textbooks used to imply.
   (p. 5)

And footnote she did. The first edition of BAC had footnotes at page bottoms; the second edition placed the notes at the ends of the chapters. By the third edition, the notes were collected in the back: 10 pages, two columns, small print; sidebars had their own footnotes below their columns. The variety of sources shows the breadth of Kitty's scholarship: publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Black Enterprise; journals such as the Harvard Business Review, the Journal of Applied Psychology, the Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, and Management Communication Quarterly; and books such as Peter Elbow's Writing With Power, Yadong Lue's Partnering With Chinese Firms, Peter Lynch's One Up on Wall Street, Abraham H. Maslow's Motivation and Personality, Isabel Briggs Myers's Introduction to Type, Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence, Mike Rose's Writer's Block, Stephen Toulmin's The Uses of Argument, and Richard C. Whitely's The Customer-Driven Company.

Kitty devoted a huge portion of her life to BAC, always gathering new information to help both instructors and students. Many of us remember her at conferences, attending as many sessions as possible and avidly taking notes and collecting handouts on topics she would address in her text. She worked even harder at home. In addition to such obvious sources as the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, BusinessWeek, and Fortune, she also subscribed to and perused numerous other publications, including

* Advertising Age,

* American Demographics,

* Black Enterprise,

* Direct Marketing,

* Fast Company,

* Garbage,

* Hispanic Business,

* Inc.,

* Presentations, and

* Working Woman.

Mealtimes at her home were frequently quiet, with Kitty moving quickly through various publications (she was an extraordinarily fast reader) and clipping articles to use in her textbook as text, examples, sidebars, or problems. Stacks of clippings covered tables everywhere, including the meal table (and the floor next to her favorite chairs). BAC is full of fascinating examples gleaned from these sources: Rent-a-Wreck is thriving with its use of reverse psychology; an apple grower successfully markets his hail-marked apples as beating evidence of their superior flavor (developed by the cold); WearGuard Corporation shares trained workers with a company having a different peak season (Locker, 2003a, pp. 37, 227, 230). (2) Kitty also packed her text with examples from big-name companies: Ford's humane and communication-intensive closing of its Thunderbird factory; Mattel's substitute for out-of-stock holiday Barbie dolls; Blockbuster Video's problem-solving strategy for high-demand videos (pp. 189, 190, 239). Many of these fascinating examples appeared in sidebars. These sidebars became so popular that a former publisher of BAC told Kitty that other publishers were trying to find authors willing to write "Locker knockoffs": books with sidebars and footnotes.

Kitty was always updating her content, removing old material and inserting new. For instance, she removed her example about Three Mile Island, even though it was an interesting historical example of faulty miscommunication, because she learned that many current students had never heard of it. She was continually adding new content to the textbook: The fourth edition (Locker, 1998a) added greater emphasis on e-mail communications and introduced Web coverage; the sixth edition (Locker, 2003a) added more information on brochures as well as new information on behavioral interviews and e-mail resumes. In her letters to students and instructors at the beginning of her textbooks, she asked readers to give her feedback and told them how to reach her.

FOSTERING A DISCIPLINARY RESEARCH COMMUNITY

The development of business communication as a respected academic discipline was a subject dear to Kitty's heart her entire career: her curriculum vitae lists seven articles and 28 presentations on the subject. In one of her early articles, "Making Business Communication Courses Academically Respectable" (Locker, 1979), she was already delineating the need for more knowledge in the field, knowledge to be acquired by researching some of business communication's basic tenets, using rigorous research standards, and exploring related fields. In her presidential address to the ABC (Locker, 1996b), she asked all members to contribute to the discipline and provided a long list of ways they could do so. Her last published article, "Will Professional Communication Be the Death of Business Communication?" (Locker, 2003d), opened with her belief "that business communication is in danger of being buried by professional communication and needs to preserve its own identity as a field" (p. 118).

In her scholarship on the development of the discipline, Kitty expanded on three major topics (Kitty would have appreciated the enumeration; it was one of the prominent features of her style): disciplinary definition, research practices, and interdisciplinary research.

Disciplinary Definition

Kitty was intensely interested in the definition of business communication and how it differs from professional communication and technical writing. In the "Business Communication" entry in the Encyclopedia of English Studies and Language Arts, a project of the National Council of Teachers of English, Kitty defined the discipline as "the study of instrumental discourse in organizations: businesses, government agencies, or non-profit organizations" (Locker, 1994a, p. 142). She feared that business communication risked being subsumed by professional communication, "a more sexy term for a discipline that is, to all intents and purposes, merely the old 'technical' communication" (Locker, 2003d, p. 123). In her mind, the distinctions between business and technical communication were clear:

   The archetypal problem in technical communication is represented by
   blinking 12:00s on VCRs across America. People ... don't know how
   to set the time. So technical writing attempts to explain. Technical
   communication focuses on exposition.... How can one make information
   clear?

   The archetypal problem in business communication, in contrast, is
   how to convince people ... not to do personal e-mail or Web surfing
   when they're being paid to work.... Business communication focuses
   on persuasion.., how do you make people adopt common goals? (Locker,
   2003d, p. 129)

Kitty admitted that the "easy binary" breaks down as communication becomes more sophisticated, but differences still remain, with a major one being that business communication focuses on the context of the organization (Locker, 2003d, p. 130).

Kitty also distinguished between business communication and general writing courses. First, she believed that in the Fatter, "fewer things are essential" (Locker, 2001, p. 22); a writer could argue for or against a particular proposition while omitting a certain argument, even a major argument, and still have an acceptable paper. However, if a writer were defending a business proposition with three parts and defended only two parts, the omission would generally not be acceptable. Second, she believed that details carry more weight in business communications; the standard example is misspelling the name of one's reader or the reader's company. Third, business communication documents need to meet the needs of an organization; essays do not.

Research Practices

A second major disciplinary concern for Kitty was research. As a researcher who conducted quantitative, qualitative, and historical research, Kitty was well prepared to discuss research practices of the discipline. She was one of the coauthors, with Campbell and Housel, of the ABC's Conducting Research in Business Communication (Campbell, Housel, & Locker, 1988), a publication that reflected and fostered the ABC's growing commitment to empirical research in business communication. She argued tirelessly for new research in both theory and practice, as well as methodological rigor (e.g., Locker, 1994b).

Interdisciplinary Research

Kitty's third major concern was the challenge of interdisciplinary research, the topic of her 1993 Outstanding Researcher Award lecture, "The Challenge of Interdisciplinary Research" (Locker, 1994b), printed in the Journal of Business Communication. She loved the richness and complexity interdisciplinary knowledge brings to business communication, as well as all the ways it helps us study new research problems, but she also worried about the difficulties of doing such research. In particular, she worried about the extra time and effort involved in keeping up with the research in several fields or learning about a totally new area: "This background learning, though time-consuming, doesn't 'count' in academia. One can't put on one's vita 'Summer, 1993: Read the literature on audience'" (Locker, 1994b, p. 139). She urged all researchers to explain the terms and concepts they used and gave as an example the confusion caused by her own use of the rhetorical term invention (Beamer, Bowman, Dauwalder, Locker, & Thralls, 1997, pp. 133-134). She asked everyone in the profession to read, appreciate, and use the work of others who use different research paradigms (Locker, 1998d, p. 36).

PRESENTING HISTORICAL RESEARCH

As good as her scholarship was in the research of business communication, pedagogy, and disciplinary concerns, the area in which Kitty's scholarship won awards was historical research. "'Sir, This Will Never Do': Model Dunning Letters, 1592-1873" (Locker, 1985b, 1985c) and "'As Per Your Request': A History of Business Jargon" (Locker, 1987) were both cowinners of the ABC's Alpha Kappa Psi Distinguished Publication Award. Kitty's historical research, in addition to providing the basic information promised in the title, was always full of interesting nuggets. In "'As Per Your Request,'" we learn that Daniel Defoe, of Robinson Crusoe fame, "appears to be the first person to criticize the use of business jargon" (Locker, 1987, p. 36). "'Sir, This Will Never Do'" provides details of the horrifying conditions for imprisoned debtors (Locker, 1985b), a section Kitty said she added in response to a question from the audience at an ABC convention (Locker, 1996b). In "The Earliest Correspondence of the British East India Company" (Locker, 1985a, p. 71), we get a report that the great mogul was exceedingly pleased with his present, an English mastiff that had killed a leopard, attacked a boar, and disgraced the Persian dogs.

Most of Kitty's historical scholarship directly related to the book she was writing on the British East India Company, The Development of the Faceless Bureaucrat: The Emergence of Bureaucratic Style in the Correspondence of the East India Company, 1600-1800. Sadly, although the entire book except for the last chapter exists in manuscript form, she never finished editing it. In an unpublished manuscript summarizing for some fellow researchers the introduction to the book (Locker, 2003b), Kitty gave these sketches of the book's eight chapters:

   Chapter 1, "The Language of Merchants in the Seventeenth Century,"
   shows that ... merchants use not only the plain style but also a ...
   florid style ... and a colloquial style.

   Chapter 2, "'Write as Often as You May': The Production and
   Transmission of Correspondence," ... notes the hierarchy of
   information flow ... and discusses the production and transmission
   of correspondence.

   Chapter 3, "Creating Formulae: The Emergence of Common Solutions to
   Recurring Rhetorical Problems," identifies the formulae that authors
   developed in response to ... recurring rhetorical problems.

   Chapter 4, "The Movement to the Humdrum," documents the deadening of
   styles after about 1750.... "Bureaucratic" prose becomes
   widespread--though hardly universal--in the second half of the
   eighteenth century.

   In chapter 5, "'Sharply and Nippingly': Vituperative Criticism," I
   survey the criticism that permeates the correspondence.

   Chapter 6, "'Ciceronian Sir': Rhetorical Pedagogy, Theory, and
   Practice as (Re)Sources for Style," examines changes from 1600 to
   1800 in how people were taught to write.... I argue that the
   emergence of bureaucratic writing is not due to changes in the
   teaching, theory, or practice of rhetoric from 1600 to 1800.

   Chapter 7, "How Corporate Culture and National Culture Shaped Prose
   Style," ... argues that, instead, the style shift is a response to
   forces in the Company's corporate culture and in national culture
   which changed relations between authors and audiences, creating a
   growing feeling of powerlessness accompanied by strict
   accountability and an increased need to retain the goodwill of one's
   superiors.

   [In] chapter 8, "Protecting the Self from Society: The Function of
   Bureaucratic Language," ... I argue that ... bureaucratic language
   is functional: it protects the self both from the organization and
   from society. Therefore, it will persist as long as writers' egos
   and livelihoods are in danger.

Fortunately for historical scholars, Kitty presented all but one of these chapters as papers at conferences, most of them at multiple venues (Locker, 1982a, 1982c, 1986, 1988, 1991, 1992b, 1993a, 1993c, 1994c, 1995c, 1995d, 1996a, 1998b, 2000b, 2000c, 2003c, 2004b) (3); only chapter 2, which she thought necessary for the book but not interesting to more casual audiences, was not offered as a paper.

During the last year of her life, Kitty was studying postcolonial claims about the British East India Company. In her proposal for a Modern Language Association paper (Locker, 2005), Kitty argued that "postcolonialists need to learn from scholars who study the history of business communication which aspects of Company correspondence were the norm and which were innovative in order to understand the role of documents in the Company's decisions and actions." She believed that claims were being made on the basis of inadequate samples of the company's correspondence. Not that she faulted historians for sampling. In the unpublished introduction to The Development of the Faceless Bureaucrat (Locker, n.d., p. 3), Kitty noted that the India Office Library in London alone holds over 48,000 volumes of documents; other British and Indian offices hold still more. In the same document, Kitty noted that she sampled 176 of these volumes:

   My primary sources include material from every decade from 1600 to
   1800. In order to survey as much of the correspondence as possible,
   I have used as many printed volumes as possible, thus skewing my
   sample toward the earliest correspondence, toward letters to and
   from the principal factories (Fort St. George and Fort William),
   toward correspondence surrounding controversial events, and toward
   the correspondence of men whose letters have been printed. My sample
   underrepresents military correspondence. If a random sample is not
   feasible--and it does not seem to be when there is such a vast
   number of primary documents, and no previous rhetorical analysis
   has been done to identify which parts might repay study--certainly
   it makes sense to focus on the correspondence written at the key
   locations, during the most important events, and by the most
   noteworthy people. (p. 8)

Throughout the manuscript of The Development of the Faceless Bureaucrat, Kitty paid meticulous attention to every detail of the British East India Company's correspondence: content, style, spelling, punctuation, capitalization. Of course, being Kitty, she also shared the wealth of knowledge she had accumulated about doing historical research in "Doing Research in the History of Business Communication" (Locker, Miller, Richardson, Tebeaux, & Yates, 1996). It may be a comfort to those who appreciate historical research to know that Kay Halasek and JoAnne Yates have agreed to work together to publish Kitty's book.

MENTORING THE PEOPLE IN THE DISCIPLINE

The fifth major disciplinary concern for Kitty, and by far the most important to her, was all of us: the people in the discipline. In the mentoring and encouragement she offered teachers and scholars, Kitty reminded us that disciplinarity is about people, not just intellectual products. Many of us remember her at conferences, welcoming both old friends and new attendees with her infectious grin and throaty chuckle. In this room, she would be encouraging graduate students in their presentations; in that hallway she would be inspiring a panel for next year; and in the lobby, she would be assembling a large group, including some new attendees, for dinner. Many of us have Kitty to thank for some of our professional achievements: She guided us through graduate school, helped us get jobs, taught us to network at conventions, provided insightful editing on our articles, and wrote superb letters for us as we became candidates for tenure, promotion, and awards. In fact, she evaluated so many sets of promotion and tenure materials that she consolidated her knowledge into an article on the subject (Locker, 1995b). She worried about her colleagues in the field and the "special conditions," frequently disadvantageous, under which they worked: "When we bring in faculty who labor under systemic disadvantages, we are discriminating against them even when we use the 'same standards' to evaluate all candidates. One can't build as many bricks when one must provide one's own straw" (p. 95). Again, she was particularly concerned about time constraints:

   The great majority of business and technical communication faculty
   did graduate work in other fields. Faculty in literature or
   agriculture commonly continue to develop as faculty the research
   interests they worked on as graduate students. Faculty in business
   communication, in contrast, must master several additional
   disciplinary literatures and research methods. Mastering literature
   and methods from related fields is enormously time consuming and
   rarely "counts" in the promotion and tenure process. (p. 95)

She was even more concerned about the time issues raised by teaching loads and grading:

   Faculty in business and technical communication teach many sections
   of writing. Even when their teaching load is ostensibly equivalent
   to that of faculty in other units (and on my own campus, faculty in
   English teach a heavier load than do, say, faculty in Veterinary
   Medicine), each course is extremely time consuming because of the
   large numbers of papers to grade. The practice of allowing or
   requiring revisions is pedagogically sound but drastically increases
   the paper load. (p. 95)

Kitty also worried about business communication faculty members being marginalized by their departments: business departments not valuing communication teachers, English departments not valuing "business" teachers. She knew that the large numbers of business communication faculty members in non-tenure-track positions lack both the job security of tenure-track faculty members and the time or rewards for publishing. She worried that too little of the knowledge of these faculty members makes its way into the disciplinary library (Locker, 2003d, pp. 125-127).

Kitty wanted people to stay in business communication because she knew that people are the discipline's greatest resource. She firmly believed in the potential of business communication professors:

   We who teach and study discourse in organizations can affect public
   policy, business practice, and scientific practice only through
   language--primarily language in organizations. Where are the
   pressure points? How does one persuade someone who disagrees? How
   does one find allies? How does the culture of the organization make
   it harder or easier for people to behave ethically? All of these are
   crucial questions not merely for our research programs, but for our
   students and our society. They are questions that are more likely to
   be asked by people who focus on "business" communication. We need to
   ask these questions--and we need to retain the perspective and areas
   of expertise that professional communication finds developed and
   ready at hand in "business" communication. (Locker, 2003d. p. 131)

Kitty herself considered the best research advice to be "Find a topic that really interests you." She considered business communication to be such a large, rich field that anyone, no matter how reluctant a researcher, could find a niche that was both interesting and in need of study (Locker, 2001, p. 25).

It is hard to know how to close a commentary such as this, for in one sense, we are also noting the passing of a beloved scholar, colleague, teacher, mentor, and friend. Perhaps the words of Tennyson's "Ulysses" (Kitty's PhD work was on Victorian poetry) will serve:

   Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
   We are not now that strength which in old days
   Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--One
   equal temper of heroic hearts,
   Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
   To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Ah, Kitty, we will miss you.

NOTES

(1.) Because everyone who knew her, from her graduate students to her colleagues at the Association for Business Communication (ABC), called her Kitty, I do likewise in this article.

(2.) This commentary uses the sixth edition of BAC because it was all Kitty's work. Additions were made to the seventh edition (Locker, 2006) by other people.

(3.) I make this connection between book chapters and conference papers to show that although The Development of the Faceless Bureaucrat was not published, much of the material in it was publicly disseminated.

REFERENCES

Books and Accompanying Resources

Campbell, P. G., Housel, T., & Locker, K. O. (Eds.). (1988). Conducting research in business communication. Urbana. IL: Association for Business Communication.

Locker, K. O. (1989a). Answers and analyses for exercises and problems to accompany business and administrative communication. Homewood, IL: Irwin.

Locker, K. O. (1989b). Business and administrative communication. Chicago: Irwin.

Locker, K. O. (1989c). Transparencies to accompany Business and Administrative Communication. Chicago: Irwin.

Locker, K. O. (1992a). Business and administrative communication (2nd ed.). Chicago: Irwin.

Locker, K. O. (1992c). Instructor's resource manual to accompany Business and Administrative Communication. Chicago: Irwin.

Locker, K. O. (1992e). Transparencies to accompany Business and Administrative Communication (2nd ed.). Chicago: Irwin.

Locker, K. O. (1993b). The Irwin business communication handbook: Writing and speaking in business classes. Homewood, IL: Irwin.

Locker, K. O. (1995a). Business and administrative communication (3rd ed.). Chicago: Irwin.

Locker, K. O. (1995e). Transparencies to accompany Business and Administrative Communication (3rd ed.). Chicago: Irwin.

Locker, K. O. (1998a). Business and administrative communication (4th ed.). Boston: Irwin/ McGraw-Hill.

Locker, K. O. (1998c). PowerPoint slides to accompany Business and Administrative Communication. Chicago: Irwin/McGraw-Hill.

Locker, K. O. (2000a). Business and administrative communication (5th ed.). Boston: Irwin/ McGraw-Hill.

Locker, K. O. (2003a). Business and administrative communication (6th ed.). Boston: Irwin/ McGraw-Hill.

Locker, K. O. (2006). Business and administrative communication (7th ed.). Boston: Irwin/ McGraw-Hill.

Locker, K. O., & Hendrickson, R. A. (1989). Teaching guide to accompany Business and Administrative Communication. Homewood, IL: Irwin.

Locker, K. O., & Kaczmarek, S. K. (2001). Business communication: Building critical skills. Boston: Irwin/McGraw Hill.

Locker, K. O., & Kaczmarek, S. K. (2004). Business communication: Building critical skills (Simplified Chinese ed.). Beijing, China: McGraw-Hill/Hua Zhang.

Locker, K. O., & Kaczmarek, S. K. (2005). Business communication: Building critical skills (2nd ed.). Boston: Irwin/McGraw Hill.

Locker, K. O., & McLaren, M. (1995). Business and administrative communication (Australasian ed.). Sydney, Australia: Irwin.

Locker, K. O., & Moneysmith, J. A. (1998). Instructor's resource manual to accompany Business and Administrative Communication (3rd ed.). Boston: Irwin/McGraw-Hill.

Locker, K. O., & Moneysmith, J. A. (2000). Instructor's resource manual to accompany Business and Administrative Communication (4th ed.). Boston: Irwin/McGraw-Hill.

Locker, K. O., & Weston, P. (1995). Instructor's resource manual to accompany Business and Administrative Communication (2nd ed.). Chicago: Irwin.

Weeks, F. W., & Locker, K. O. (1980). Business writing cases and problems. Champaign, IL: Stipes.

Weeks, F. W., & Locker, K. O. (1984). Business writing cases and problems (2nd ed.). Champaign, IL: Stipes.

Weeks, F. W., Locker, K. O. & Jameson, D. A. (1987). Business writing cases and problems (3rd ed.). Champaign, IL: Stipes.

Single-Authored Articles

Locker, K. O. (1977a). Patterns of organization for business writing. Journal of Business Communication, 14, 35-45.

Locker, K. O. (1977b). Teaching with transparencies. ABCA Bulletin, 40(3), 21-27.

Locker, K. O. (1979). Making business communication courses academically respectable. ABCA Bulletin, 42(3), 6-10.

Locker, K. O. (1982b). The rhetoric of negative messages. English for Specific Purposes, 64, 1-2.

Locker, K. O. (1982d). Teaching students to write abstracts. The Technical Writing Teacher, 10(1), 17-20.

Locker, K. O. (1983). Mini-reports: An alternative to formal reports in basic business and technical writing classes. In K. Sparrow & N. A. Pickett (Eds.), Technical and business communication in two-year programs (pp. 159-164), Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Locker, K. O. (1984). Arranging victories for one's students: A legacy from Fran Weeks and Quintilian. ABCA Bulletin, 47(4), 8-9.

Locker, K. O. (1985a). The earliest correspondence of the British East India Company. In G. H. Douglas & H. W. Hildebrandt (Eds.), Studies in the history of business writing (pp. 69-86). Champaign, IL: Association for Business Communication.

Locker, K. O. (1985b). "Sir, this will never do": Model dunning letters, 1592-1873. In G. H. Douglas & H. W. Hildebrandt (Eds.), Studies in the history of business writing (pp. 179-200). Champaign, IL: Association for Business Communication.

Locker, K. O. (1985c). "'Sir, this will never do": Model dunning letters, 1592-1873 [Abridged version]. Journal of Business Communication, 22, 39-45.

Locker, K. O. (1987). "As per your request": A history of business jargon. Iowa State Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 1(1), 27-47.

Locker, K. O. (1992d, Fall). Teaching tolerance in business communication classes. Business Communication Forum, 3.

Locker, K. O. (1994a). Business communication. In A. C. Purves (Ed.), Encyclopedia of English studies and language arts (pp. 142-145). New York: Scholastic.

Locker, K. O. (1994b). The challenge of interdisciplinary research. Journal of Business Communication, 31, 137-151.

Locker, K. O. (1995b). Evaluating the promotion and tenure materials of faculty in business and technical communication. In E. Tebeaux (Ed.), Issues in promotion and tenure for faculty in technical communication: Guidelines and perspectives (pp. 91-97). College Station, TX: Association of Teachers of Technical Writing.

Locker, K. O. (1996b). The more you give, the more you get (1995 presidential address). Business Communication Quarterly, 59(1), 109-114.

Locker, K. O. (1998d). The role of the Association for Business Communication in shaping business communication as an academic discipline. Journal of Business Communication, 35, 14-49.

Locker, K. O. (1999). Factors in reader responses to negative letters: Experimental evidence for changing what we teach. Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 13(1), 5-48.

Locker, K. O. (2001). Organizational cultures: A conversation about business communication with Kitty Locker. Issues in Writing, 11(1), 4-26.

Locker, K. O. (2003d). Will professional communication be the death of business communication? Business Communication Quarterly, 66(3), 118-132.

Coauthored Articles

Beamer, L., Bowman, J. P., Dauwalder, D. P., Locker, K. O., & Thralls, C. (1997). The audiences for research. Business Communication Quarterly, 60(3), 126-147.

Gieselman, R. D., & Locker, K. O. (1978). Presenting numerical data effectively. In R. D. Gieselman (Ed.), Readings in business communication (2nd ed., pp. 188-199). Champaign, IL: Stipes.

Locker, K. O., & Keene, M. L. (1983). Using Toulmin logic in business and technical writing classes. In K. Sparrow & N. A. Pickett (Eds.), Technical and business communication in two-year programs (pp. 103- 110), Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Locker, K., Miller, S., Richardson, M., Tebeaux, B., & Yates, J. (1996). Doing research in the history of business communication. Business Communication Quarterly, 59(2), 109-127.

Papers Presenting Chapters of The Development of the Faceless Bureaucrat

Locker, K. O. (1982a, December). The divergence of bureaucratic style from standard English prose style in the correspondence of the British East India Company, 1600-1800. Paper presented at the meeting of the Modern Language Association, Los Angeles.

Locker, K. O. (1982c, November). The teaching of writing and practical composition, 1600-1800. Paper presented at the meeting of the National Council of Teachers of English, Washington, DC.

Locker, K. O. (1986, April). The language of merchants in the seventeenth century. Paper presented at the meeting of the College English Association of Ohio, Columbus, OH.

Locker, K. O. (1988, March). Protecting the self from society: The function of bureaucratic language. Paper presented at the meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, St. Louis, MO.

Locker, K. O. (1991, March). "Sharply and nippingly": Vituperative letters of the British East India Company, 1600-1800. Paper presented at the meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Boston.

Locker, K. O. (1992b, November). From The Merchant's Avizo to business and managerial communication: The teaching of business writing, 1586-1992. Paper presented at the annual convention of the Association for Business Communication, New Orleans, LA.

Locker, K. O. (1993a, July). Audience, culture, and style: The case of the British East India Company, 1600-1800. Paper presented at the biennial convention of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Turin, Italy.

Locker, K. O. (1993c, December). Politics and prose style: How corporate culture and national politics shaped prose styles in the correspondence of the British East India Company, 1600-1800. Paper presented at the meeting of the Modern Language Association, Toronto, Canada.

Locker, K. O. (1994c, March). Creating formulae: The emergence of common solutions to recurring rhetorical problems. Paper presented at the meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Nashville, TN.

Locker, K. O. (1995c, July). Faceless bureaucrats: The emergence of bureaucratic style in the correspondence of the British East India Company, 1600-1800. Paper presented at the University of Warwick. Warwick, UK.

Locker, K. O. (1995d, July). From vituperation to decorum: Criticism in the correspondence of the British East India Company, 1600-1800. Paper presented at the meeting of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Edinburgh, UK.

Locker, K. O. (1996a, May). Ciceronian Sir: Sources of style in the seventeenth-century correspondence of the British East India Company. Paper presented at the meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America, Tucson, AZ.

Locker, K. O. (1998b, March). How prose style in the late eighteenth-century correspondence of the British East India Company was shaped by private fortunes and politics. Paper presented at the meeting of the Southwestern Federation of Administrative Disciplines, Dallas, TX.

Locker, K. O. (2000b, December). From The Merchant's Avizo to business and managerial communication: The teaching of business writing 1589-2001. Paper presented at the meeting of the Modern Language Association, Washington, DC.

Locker, K. O. (2000c, August). The Japan correspondence of the British East India Company, 1608-1623. Paper presented at the Asia Pacific Regional International Conference of the Association for Business Communication, Kyoto, Japan.

Locker, K. O. (2003c, May). How corporate and national cultures shaped prose style in the correspondence of the English East India Company in the eighteenth century. Paper presented at the meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America, Austin, TX.

Locker, K. O. (2004b, October). Protecting the self from society: The function of bureaucratic language in the correspondence of the East India Company after 1750. Paper presented at the annual convention of the Association for Business Communication, Cambridge, MA.

Unpublished Manuscripts

Locker, K. O. (n.d.). Introduction to The development of the faceless bureaucrat. Unpublished manuscript.

Locker, K. O. (2003b). From the introduction to The development of the faceless bureaucrat: The emergence of bureaucratic style in the correspondence of the East India Company, 1600-1800. Unpublished manuscript.

Locker, K. O. (2004a). Introduction memo to instructors and students. Unpublished manuscript.

Locker, K. O. (2005). Modern Language Association paper proposal. Unpublished manuscript.

Donna Stine Kienzler is a professor in the English Department at Iowa State University where she teaches in the Rhetoric and Personal Communication area. Her heartfelt thanks go to Robert Mills, Kite's husband, who spent many hours helping her reconstruct the history of Kitty's work and track down early work and unpublished documents. In addition, she drew on her own experiences with Kitty Locker, who she met in graduate school and with whom she discussed Kitty's work in the decades following that meeting. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Donna Stine Kienzler, Iowa State University, Center for Teaching Excellence, 202B Lab of Mechanics, Ames, IA 50011-2131; e-mail: dkienzle@iastate.edu.

Donna Stine Kienzler

Iowa State University