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Professionals and Professors: Substance or Style?

University of Nebraska at Kearney

Larry D. Theye

University of Nebraska at Kearney

To determine what aspects of writing are most important in a business context, previous researchers have often surveyed business professionals as well as business faculty. We recently took a different approach. We asked business professionals to critique and evaluate a set of writing samples. We then asked business faculty to evaluate the same samples, and we analyzed the results from the two groups. We found that professionals judge writing on different criteria than do faculty. While both groups emphasize organization, professionals also emphasize wording/style, content, and sentence structure more than do faculty, who emphasize conciseness, spelling/grammar, appearance, and purpose. In addition, professionals are signifi cantly more lenient in assigning grades than are faculty and spend less time in evaluating the writing. In general, business professionals judge papers more on substance (content) and less on style (mechanics) than do business faculty.

Key Words: Assessment of communication skills • standards of good writing • writing style

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