College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Three for four

Department of English faculty receive top awards from Association for Business Communication.
Charles Kostelnick, professor and chair of the Department of English, says it's "nothing short of incredible."

Margaret Graham, professor of English, says it proves that Iowa State's rhetoric and professional communication program is one of the best in the nation.
Perhaps Dorothy Winsor said it best.

"The research coming out of this program is the best in the country," the professor of English said. "We have the best collection of scholars in this department doing this type of research."

The proof is in the pudding and in this case it's the number of awards that the Department of English received at the recent Association of Business Communication (ABC) annual convention in Cambridge, Mass.

The department won three of the four awards that were handed out.

"This recognition is truly extraordinary," Kostelnick said. "To have faculty from the university win all of these awards is nothing short of incredible."

Graham received ABC’s Outstanding Researcher Award for her work that found that supervisors in different types of organizations request information differently in their written business communications. Along with Carol David, retired faculty member from the Department of English, she compared memos written by supervisors at Iowa State to memos written at a food manufacturing company.

"The supervisors at both locations used different linguistic strategies to ask basically the same thing," she said. "If, say, someone from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences asked a faculty member to fill out a survey they would write 'would you mind filling out the survey?' At the food manufacturing company, the company would either say 'please fill out the survey' or just 'fill out the survey.'"

Graham was also recognized for her work on gender bias in managerial communication.

For her book, Writing Power: Communication in an Engineering Center, Winsor won ABC's Distinguished Publication on Business Communication award. The book, published by the State University of New York, examines the way that texts, knowledge and hierarchy generate and support one another within a for-profit corporation.

For five summers, Winsor conducted ethnographic research in an engineering center at a large Midwestern manufacturing plant. She shadowed individuals on the job, sat in on meetings, and observed how people used writing in their jobs. She job shadowed the company's chief executive officer, mechanics, engineers and lab technicians.

"I was interested in written communication," she said, "anything they read or wrote. It could have been signs on doors, engineering reports or e-mail. I wanted to know what they were writing, why they were writing it and what the writing was accomplishing.

"They use writing to make knowledge not just to report."

The third and final award went to Helen Rothschild Ewald and Roberta Vann, professors of English. The pair won the Best Article Award for "'You're a Guaranteed Winner:' Composing 'You' in a Consumer Culture." The article, which appeared in The Journal of Business Communication, explores the functional elegance of direct mail as it constructs its target audience.

Ewald and Vann examined direct mailings including a nationally publicized court case in Iowa involving Publisher's Clearing House and articulate how the use of particular genre-based, rhetorical and linguistic strategies in these mailings constructed reader identity.

"We looked at what made these communications so persuasive," Ewald said. "This is a real sociological problem."

"This study made me realize it was a much bigger deal than I thought it was," Vann said. "There are a large number of people that are taken in by this type of direct mail communication every year."