Chris Mayer
Assignments & Activities Archive
Activity Description
This two-class sequence, which is an ideal fit for professional writing or business communication courses, helps students see how grammatical and lexical choices shape the ethical and practical work of workplace communication. The project culminates in students drafting a one-page memo delivering bad news through announcing policy changes and examining how organizational genres can frame policy changes (including cost-cutting and shifting responsibility and blame) as stability, competitiveness, and shared benefit – and where that framing crosses into euphemism or concealment. A common workplace genre for announcing policy updates is the short internal memo (McLean). When updates involve disappointing news, effective messaging typically aims to convey the change while sustaining employees’ trust in the institution and its decision-makers, which is particularly important as this can support employees’ receptiveness to change (Yue et al.). The activities are designed for business communication, workplace writing, and technical/professional communication courses, especially when instructors want to connect sentence-level instruction to questions of power and accountability. The approach draws on critical language awareness, which treats language as both reflective of and constitutive of social relations (Weninger and Kan). It also draws on research on organizational bad-news communication, including how omission and politeness strategies are used when delivering bad news (Lee). Finally, it treats grammar as a rhetorical resource: for instance, hedging is one way writers calibrate commitment and manage risk (Hyland), along with voice choices which can foreground or background responsibility. Although Hyland analyzes academic research writing, hedging functions similarly in workplace genres as a tool for calibrating commitment and managing interpersonal risk.