Wendy Boswell, associate professor of management in the Mays Business School and a Mays Research Fellow, had good reason for wanting to a teach a W course. When her department first began considering how to implement W courses, Boswell quickly agreed to transform her Managing Human Resources course into a writing-intensive one. At the time, Boswell was directing the master’s program in human resource management, a position that gave her many contacts in the business world.

“I know firsthand how poor our students’ writing has been, and I heard a lot from recruiters about that being a huge issue. I saw it myself and knew it was affecting student job placement and long-term careers,” Boswell says.

She adds that deficient writing skills were not unique to Texas A&M or the Mays Business School, but while many universities were struggling to contend with the problem, Boswell knew it wasn’t an area she and her faculty colleagues could afford to ignore.

Boswell’s course already had several writing requirements, so, she acknowledges, “I foolishly thought ‘Oh, it won’t really have to change.’”

That assumption proved a bit naïve once she got into the process of developing a proposal for the W course committee. Boswell quickly realized there was a difference between merely providing writing opportunities and meeting both the students’ and the committee’s expectations for a course that would help Aggies learn to write as managers.

Still, Boswell, who has now taught the course twice, says meeting the requirements wasn’t ultimately that difficult. “I’m drawing on resources that are general to writing and communication, but tailoring them to human resource management,” she explains.

She now includes one full class session on the writing process and encourages students to develop what she calls “good practices,” such as reading a passage out loud to get a sense of its flow or sharing work with others to get more feedback.

With the concerns of those recruiters always in mind, Boswell keeps her course focused on the practical.

“This is academia; we rely on theory and we rely on research,” she explains. “I probably consider myself a scholar before a teacher, but we’re here to prepare students for something. If I can prepare them, through research and theory, but connecting that to the real world, that’s what it’s all about. I’m a big believer in the connection between what I’m talking about in class and what they’re going to be doing in the world.”

One result of that emphasis on real-world skills is Boswell’s inclusion of several group writing projects. In the business world, she says it’s “teams, teams, teams,” and students need to learn that writing, which they usually regard as highly individual, is often done in collaboration.

Another big concern for Boswell is teaching these future managers to write concisely. Or, as she puts it, “Get to the point, answer the question, say it professionally in a way that suits your audience, but be concise, because in the real world your boss is never going to read past the first page.” Boswell’s assignments, which typically ask students to put themselves in a common management scenario, seldom include a specific length requirement.

That’s deliberate on Boswell’s part, because she wants students to learn to make that assessment for themselves, noting that a boss will seldom say “I need this on my desk tomorrow, and it needs to be two pages or less, double-spaced.”

Boswell also shares with students some recent articles discussing the impact that poor writing has on the business community. Boswell acknowledges that not all of her future managers will turn out to be exceptional writers, but she’s determined that all of them will appreciate both the cost of miscommunication and the value of writing well.