Genres and Conflicts in MBA Writing Assignments

Abstract

This project has been part of our lives for a long time. It began in 2011 when all the editors were working at the Michigan State University (MSU) Writing Center, Trixie Smith as the director and the rest of us as graduate students. Every day we found ourselves grappling with issues and ideas connected to graduate writers through our work at the writing center: working one-to-one with graduate writers, facilitating graduate writing groups, and offering workshops for graduate students, such as our Navigating the Ph.D. workshop series. The work was also personally relevant to most of us since we were graduate students at the time, frequently finding ourselves experiencing imposter syndrome and letting our identities as graduate students consume our lives. Little did we-excepting Trixie, perhaps-know then that our interest in graduate writing would intensify when we became junior faculty and found that we still faced many of the same writing-related concerns that we did as graduate students.Our motivations for developing this edited collection on graduate writing across the disciplines began when we turned from interacting with graduate writers to researching graduate writers and graduate writing. When the Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures department at MSU began an initiative to create research clusters that bring faculty, staff, and students together to engage in conducting academic research and developing publications, we decided that a research cluster focusing on graduate writing would be ideal. We participated in this Graduate Writing Research Cluster for the two years that we were all still at MSU and continued to collaborate when we began moving into faculty positions outside of MSU. Our collaboration culminated in a special issue of Across the Disciplines and this edited collection. What

Learning about research writing across the disciplines

“…In fact, some have combined surveys with interviews to tap into faculty's perspectives on writing in their disciplines. Caplan (2020), for example, conducted an online survey to ask the MBA faculty at his university to rate the importance of 23 learning tasks. He also conducted four think-aloud interviews with faculty.…”

“…Some supervisors have been found to be even ill-equipped to offer constructive feedback on the drafts of the part-genres in their students' dissertations (Basturkmen et al, 2014). Others have been noticed as unaware of the criteria by which they evaluate students' writing (Caplan, 2020). These observations cast doubts on whether these "disciplinary insiders" can articulate their insights about disciplinespecific discoursal practices in a way that is helpful to LSP practitioners.…”

“…Balancing these pathways, while taking stock of the values and problems in each, offers great potential for LSP practitioners to enrich their knowledge of discipline-specific discoursal practices. For example, as noted earlier, Caplan (2020) interviewed MBA faculty about the case analysis genre. I noticed that the business case analysis genre has been analyzed by genre analysts who have described in detail its rhetorical organization, lexicogrammatical features, and rhetorical context (e.g., Forman & Rymer, 1999a, 1999bNathan, 2013Nathan, , 2016.…”