Synopses & Reviews
This brief, inexpensive guide for business writers offers experience-based instruction as well as strong pedagogy emphasizing case studies, assignments, and models of business writing. The text covers a wide range of traditional topics, as well as important contemporary issues related to intercultural communication, writing for email and the Internet, audience, written and oral presentations, non-biased language and policy, and electronic job searches.
Description
Includes bibliographical references (p. 216) and index.
About the Author
William Murdick is Emeritus Professor of English, California University of Pennsylvania. He holds a B.A. in English from SUNY Albany, an M.F.A. in writing from the University of Iowa's Writer's Workshop, and a Ph.D. in English (Rhetoric and Linguistics) from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.William has business experience as co-owner of a computer company and as a consultant who wrote policy-procedure manuals. He is the author of five books: in addition to the two Portable books, he has written two composition books for Jain Publishing (2003 and 2005) and one on word processing (1984). He has also published many technical articles on computer use and scholarly articles, mainly on the teaching of writing.
Table of Contents
I. Business Writing Basics 1. Making the Grade in Business Writing 2. Letter Format 3. Memo Format 4. Composing E-Mail Messages 5. Planning Business Documents 6. Revising for Purpose and Audience 7. Revising for Tone and Style 8. Editing 9. Eliminating Biased Language and Policy 10. Communicating across Cultures II. Memos and Letters 11. Making a Personal Request 12. Complaints 13. Responding to Complaints 14. Good-News Messages 15. Delicate and Bad-News Messages III. Reports and Proposals 16. Background to Reports: Documenting Sources 17. Visuals 18. Short Report Based on Library Research 19. Short Report Based on Survey Research 20. Routine and Long Reports 21. Proposals IV. Addressing the Public 22. Sales Letters 23. Oral Presentations V. Job Search 24. Traditional Resumes 25. Job-Search Letters 26. Electronic Job Search References Index