Hear from Accounting Prof. Laura Wiley

Transcript

Two things I do–Number one, I show them examples of poor communication. Typically, I focus on writing, the written communication, I find, that's where they are the weakest is with their written skills. So over the years, I have found typos in newspapers, typos on menus, typos and advertisements. So I've saved them, and I showed them in the class. You know, if this was your company, you had this typo, you know, how's that going to impact your company? You might lose customers, because I don't know that I would want to work with a company that can't even spell their own company name correctly. So that's, that's one way to kind of show them the importance of written communication. And also, I have a guide sheet, you know, my, my students are accounting majors, they like kind of step by step by step, they kind of like to follow rules. So over the years, I have again accumulated the most common errors that my students make. And so I put that in kind of a guide sheet. And we go over that together in class. So that's how I kind of explicitly tell them, here's how you can improve your writing. Get rid of the slang and let's beef it up to some more professional style writing.