Episodes
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Episode 64: How to write short reports
Of the many kinds of writing done at work, writing short reports to update others about our work must rank high on the list of important and frequent documents written. This episode describes how to write these reports well.
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Episode 63: How to write a good proposal
How do you write a good proposal? This episode, based on Chapter 10 of Business Communication: Rhetorical Situations, describes how to prepare both solicited and unsolicited proposals.
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Episode 62: Writing Persuasive Messages
How can you write messages that will persuade your readers to adopt your point of view or proposed action? This episode, based on Chapter 9 of Business Communication: Rhetorical Situations (broadview.com), describes how to organize both direct request messages as well as problem-solving...
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Episode 61: Say it ain't so: Writing Negative Messages
How can you deliver bad news while maintaining the best chance of not alienating your reader? This episode, based on Chapter 8 of Business Communication: Rhetorical Situations (Broadview.com), explains how to organize bad news messages.
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Episode 60: How to write a positive message
This episode focuses on how to write positive and informative messages.It is based on Chapter 7 of Business Communication: Rhetorical Situations (Broadview.com).
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Episode 59: Communicating Across Cultures
How do we adjust our communications for audiences from cultural backgrounds different from our own? This episode starts with advice on how to do this for audiences within North America and then considers how to communicate with cultural groups across the world. The episode summarizes Chapter 6 of...
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Episode 58: Writing in Teams
This episode identifies two models for writing as part of a team: hierarchical and dialogic. Good team behaviors and behaviors to avoid are also discussed, as well as ways to resolve conflict.
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Episode 57: Teaching Business Communication
This episode provides a guide to using the sample syllabus, lesson plans, assignments, and grading rubrics for our Business Communication: Rhetorical Situations book (all materials are at wecanwrite.ca).
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Episode 56: Writing Online at Work
This episode begins with an overview of how to write a good email message before moving on to give some tips on how to write for social media.
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Episode 55: Writing Style at Work
This episode considers the kind of writing style you should employ in business and professional contexts, including a discussion of plain language principles.
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Episode 54: Arguing persuasively in business contexts
This episode provides an overview of Chapter 2 of Business Communication: Rhetorical Situations. It helps listeners understand how to create a persuasive argument in a business setting.
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Episode 53: Audience, Purpose and Genre in Business Communications
This episode discusses three key elements of any kind of business communication: who you communicate with, why you are communicating with them, and what kind of communication you use.
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Episode 52: Presenting Technical Communication
People often fear giving presentations, but this episode offers strategies to ditch the fear and embrace the occasion.
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Episode 51: Technical Communication Online
To communicate technical communication effectively, we need to use online modes: file-sharing, pdfs, screencasts, podcasts, and more.
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Episode 50: How to Write a Lab Report
What are the basic elements of a laboratory report in the sciences? This episode describes the sections of the lab report and what to put in the different sections.
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Episode 49: Reports
This episode provides an overview of short and long reports from Chapter 7 of the Concise Guide to Technical Communication (Broadview Press).
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Episode 48: Essentials of Business Communication
What is the least you need to know to get started writing in an organization? This episode provides an overview of Chapter 6 of the Concise Guide to Technical Communication. We focus on audience, genres (email, memos, letters) and purpose (persuading, informing, building goodwill).
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Episode 47: When to use visuals in technical communication
When--and which--visuals should you use when communicating technical and scientific information? This podcast gives a short overview of the answers to those questions from Chapter 5 of our Concise Guide to Technical Communication.
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Episode 46: Supporting Students after an Academic Integrity Infraction
How do we help students come back after an academic integrity infraction? In this episode, I talk with Dr. Tyler Cawthray of the University of Southern Queensland about the strategies they employ to support students and finish their degree programs.
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Episode 45: Writing Technical Prose
This episode describes techniques outlined in Chapter 4 of the Concise Guide to Technical Communication (broadview.com) to make your writing clearer, more cohesive, and more concise.
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Episode 44: Ethical Issues in Technical Communication
This episode gives an overview of Chapter Two of the Concise Guide to Technical Communication where we discuss ethical issues that come up in technical communication.
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Concise Guide to Technical Communication: Author interview
What possessed us to write the Concise Guide to Technical Communication? In this episode Heather Graves and Roger Graves talk about why they wrote this new book and how their research and academic work contributed to it.
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Audience, Purpose, Genre, & Medium
This episode provides an overview of how audience, purpose, genre and medium affect the choices you need to make as you communicate.
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Researching Technical Information
In Chapter 3 of the Concise Guide to Technical Communication from Broadview Press, we discuss ways to generate information for technical documents through interviews, surveys, and online research. This podcast provides an overview and introduction to the chapter.
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The Talk: How to interview students about academic integrity violations
Cosette Lemelin and Roger Graves talk about The Talk: how should instructors go about conducting and interview with a student about a possible, probable, or even blatant academic integrity violation? We identify strategies and profile four different kinds of strategies students tend to use when...
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Academic Integrity, Take 2: How often do students cheat?
How much time should instructors devote to academic integrity? To answer that question for themselves, they need some sense of how prevalent cheating is. This podcast examines answers to that question, and looks at cheating by professors before suggesting two strategies instructors should adopt…
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Academic Integrity Online
Academic integrity manifests itself somewhat differently in online instructional contexts. In this episode, Roger Graves talks with Ellen Watson of the University of Alberta's Centre for Teaching and Learning about how instructors can organize their online courses to discourage cheating and...
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Story, Science, and Simplicity
This episode combines ideas from the plain language movement with ideas about how to use narrative structures to explain complex research projects.
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Teaching Writing Online
What are some best practices for teaching writing online when you've been asked to move a class online with little notice? This episode identifies 6 specific things to do to survive and maybe even thrive the abrupt move to an online learning environment.
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Writing the Teaching Philosophy Statement
This episode talks about how to go about drafting and revising your teaching philosophy statement. Why do you teach the way you do? How do your students learn? What new techniques do you think you'll try next?
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Style in Research Articles
Can I use the word "I" in a research article? This and other perplexing questions about the range of styles you can employ in your research writing are answered in this episode.
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Feedback about Feedback
How can you get students to read your feedback to their assignments? First, separate formative from summative feedback. Second, structure opportunities for peer feedback. And third, give feedback to the class through annotated model papers.
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Clear and concise
In this episode we consider specific ways to write more clearly and more concisely. Clarity and concision both affect the overall style in which you write, and while both clear writing and concise writing are good things there are times when some writers need to produce elaborate discourse and...
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The Plain or Low Style
Of the three main styles of writing, the plain (or low) style may be the most useful. This episode of Teaching Writing descirbes the plain style of writing and gives examples of how it is used in writing for academics as well as non-academic audiences.
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Styles of Writing
In this episode I define writing style in academic writing, and consider the three levels of style: low or plain, middle or forcible, and high or elaborated. Using these as a rough guide to readability, we use a style analysis tool to both examine our own writing styles and those of other writers...
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Styles of Academic Writing
In this episode we'll examine writing style: the low or plain style, the middle or forcible style, and the high or florid style. Using those definitions, we'll describe ways to analyze the style a document is written in as a way to develop the ability to write in several different styles.
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Becoming a Productive Writer
In this episode we’ll review some of the advice given to academics who write, including Helen Sword’s Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write, and map it against Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. We’ll consider the map those books provide in the context…
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The Rhetoric of Oil
Heather Graves and David Beard, co-editors of a new collection of essays on the rhetoric of oil published by Routledge, speak about their book, their favorite chapters, and why this is an important book for them and for your students.
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I paid for an A!
Despite a recent news story posted on CBC.ca, students have been buying essays for over 100 years--this is nothing new. New artificial intelligence software promises to make it even easier to produce an essay without writing one. What can instructors do about this age-old problem?
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Better writing through AI: Online writing tools
What software tools and applications exist that might help you, and your students, write better documents? In this episode of Teaching Writing, we review what tools are out there that might help with different aspects of the writing process.
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Helping graduate students write better
How can we develop better graduate student writers? In this episode I discuss several strategies: mapping out a plan of development over the entire degree program; developing and using specific models of the genres students need to master in order to graduate; and four specific strategies to…
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3 Things Graduate Student Supervisors Want to Know
At the start of a recent workshop, I asked graduate student supervisors what they most wanted to know. In this podcast, I provide an edited version of my answers. How can your students write more efficiently in your lab? How can you give good feedback to the students? and what strategies might…
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Mastering Academic Writing: An interview with the authors
In this episode I talk with Boba Samuels and Jordana Garbati, authors of the textbook Mastering Academic Writing. You'll hear about how their wealth of experience working with students in writing centres informed the way they wrote this book and the kinds of needs the book fills.
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Beyond words: visuals in documents
How can we help students, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, understand how to create appropriate visuals to include in their documents? In this episode, I talk about research I've done with Chemical Engineering professors and with writing studies colleagues on the role of visuals in...
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Genre, format, and purpose
In this episode we consider the concept of genre, as writing studies researchers have framed it, to think about the kinds of writing we assign to students and that we encounter at work. What does genre add to our understanding of what needs to be written that purpose and audience do not already...
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Purposes for writing in the disciplines
In this episode I focus on purpose, both in academic and in professional writing contexts. The four main purposes for writing are to inform, to persuade, to deliberate, and to reflect. As instructors, we need to orient students to the purpose for their writing.
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Purposes for writing
This episode examines purposes for documents, and, in fact, other communication situations. What is the purpose of a document? Referential, expressive, and persuasive are three of the main purposes that documents serve. When we communicate with students, we need to be clear about the purpose…
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Audience and rhetorical situations
Requiring students to write for different audiences is crucial for their development. In this podcast I review how audience is one of the three key characteristics of what Lloyd Bitzer termed "rhetorical situations."
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Teaching writing today
I taught my first writing class 38 years ago. What advice would I have given myself then based on what I know now? In this episode, I begin to explore that idea, examining audience, peer response, and grading rubrics as some of the first things that come to mind.
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Writing Assignments Across University Disciplines:
In this episode, Roger Graves and Theresa Hyland talk about their 2017 edited volume, Writing Assignments Across University Disciplines, and the implications that research has for instructors, students, and university administrators.
About this show
This podcast talks about ways post-secondary instructors in all disciplines can help their students and themselves become better writers.
Hosted by
Roger Graves
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