Xin Chen is a Senior Lecturer in Communication, Professional, and Computer Skills in the Kelley School of Business. She participated in a faculty learning community in 2026, in which she wrote the following guide for her students in BUS-C 204: Business Writing. If you want to share or reproduce this guide, please make sure to attribute it to Dr. Chen.
Our work in business writing is deeply rooted in the study of rhetoric and communication, focusing on how people use communication to make decisions, solve problems, and achieve organizational goals. Throughout the term, our primary objective is to help you become an effective, strategic, and ethical writer. Our core goals include learning how to inform, persuade, prompt action, and produce clear, actionable messages within professional contexts. To achieve this, we approach every communication situation strategically by analyzing fundamental elements such as audience, purpose, and context.
In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), these goals are even more important. AI tools can help professionals brainstorm, draft, summarize, edit, and analyze information, but they do not replace the writer's responsibility to think strategically, evaluate evidence, protect confidential information, and make ethical choices. In this class, you may learn to use AI as a writing aid, but your final communication must reflect your own judgment, accountability, and awareness of audience needs.
Contents:
- Core Values & Threshold Concepts
- What and How We Write
- Golden Rule for Success
- Learning Expectations by Student Level
Core Values & Threshold Concepts
A common misconception for newcomers or outsiders to our field is that sounding formal or sophisticated makes writing better. In reality, overly complicated or “formal-sounding” language is rarely valued. Instead, business communication requires navigating complex organizational, social, and strategic contexts where clarity and intentionality are paramount.
Our curriculum is built around five interrelated “threshold concepts” that are essential for thinking and practicing successfully in this discipline.
First, Audience-Centered Communication means shifting from writing based on what you want to say to focusing entirely on what the reader needs to know, understand, or do, which requires adapting your voice, tone, level of detail, and format for specific readers and situations.
Second, Purpose and Action Orientation recognizes that professional communication is purpose-driven and specifically designed to support organizational decision-making or guide the reader toward a specific outcome.
Third, Clarity and Concision prioritizes direct and efficient language over complexity, ensuring information is organized logically so busy readers can easily understand and use it.
Fourth, Evidence-Based Reasoning involves supporting your claims and recommendations with relevant data, examples, and analysis while explaining exactly how that evidence informs professional choices.
Finally, Professional and Ethical Discourse means understanding that your choices in language and content carry serious ethical implications that directly affect relationships, trust, and credibility.
AI use should be guided by these same threshold concepts. Before using an AI tool, ask: Who is my audience? What action should this message support? What information must be accurate, verifiable, and relevant? What tone is appropriate? What risks might arise if I share sensitive data, rely on unsupported claims, or submit AI-generated language that I do not fully understand? Responsible AI-assisted writing begins with rhetorical judgment, not with a prompt.
What and How We Write
Our disciplinary values and threshold concepts are embodied in how and what we write. As you enter the program, you are expected to stop viewing writing as a simple way to express personal ideas, and instead see it as a tool for helping others understand information and make choices. You must remain highly aware of how your choices in organization, tone, and detail affect how your message is received.
In our courses, you will practice writing in professional genres such as emails, memos, proposals, reports, and slide decks. We engineer these documents for impact, and we rarely write purely expressive, long, or overly academic and theoretical essays that lack a practical purpose or a defined audience. To succeed in these genres, it is essential to understand how professional writing is shaped by audience expectations and credibility-building strategies.
When establishing credibility, you will build trust by addressing audience needs directly, presenting a clear and actionable message, organizing information logically, and using relevant data, real-world examples, or credible professional and research-based sources. Furthermore, our citation practices reflect these professional goals. Rather than relying on extensive direct quotations, you will learn to use evidence selectively, focusing on the relevance, usefulness, and credibility of your sources to support your key points efficiently.
When AI is permitted for an assignment, use it as part of a thoughtful composing process rather than as a substitute author. Appropriate uses may include generating topic questions, testing whether a draft is clear to a non-expert audience, creating an outline, identifying overly wordy sentences, or suggesting alternative tones for different audiences. Inappropriate uses include fabricating sources or data, submitting AI output without revision or understanding, allowing AI to make unsupported claims, or sharing private, proprietary, or personally identifiable information in a tool that has not been approved for that purpose.
AI-generated material must be treated as something to evaluate, not as evidence by itself. AI tools can produce fluent language that is incomplete, biased, outdated, or incorrect. When you use AI to support your work, you are responsible for checking facts, locating credible sources, verifying quotations and citations, and ensuring that the final document represents your own analysis. If an assignment asks you to disclose AI use, your disclosure should be specific enough to explain how the tool contributed to your process.
Golden Rule for Success
Effective writing in our field should be well-structured, clear, and concise communication that helps readers quickly understand a situation and take informed action. As you draft assignments, focus on your audience and purpose first, communicate clearly and efficiently, support your points with relevant evidence, and always consider how your intentional choices help the reader make a decision or take action. In AI-assisted writing, the golden rule still applies: technology may help you draft, but you remain responsible for the message, the evidence, the ethics, and the effect on the reader.
Learning Expectations by Student Level
While everyone will engage with these foundational principles, writing expectations are tailored to your specific academic pathway:
Undergraduate General Education Students are expected to understand the baseline importance of audience, purpose, and clarity. You should demonstrate basic audience awareness and produce clear, concise, and professional communication tailored primarily for a general or non-expert audience. If AI tools are allowed, you should use them only in ways that support learning, revision, and clarity, while making sure the final work is accurate and genuinely your own.
Undergraduate Business Majors are expected to take these skills further by actively analyzing business situations, strategically tailoring messages to specific professional audiences, and producing well-structured, evidence-based documents that support real-world decision-making and action. You should also begin developing AI literacy as a professional skill: knowing when AI can improve efficiency, when human judgment is essential, and how to document, verify, and ethically manage AI-assisted work.
Graduate Students are expected to master advanced strategic communication. You must demonstrate the ability to communicate highly complex information strategically, seamlessly adapt your writing to diverse professional and organizational contexts, and integrate data and research into persuasive arguments with a high level of precision, credibility, and ethical awareness. At this level, responsible AI use includes critically evaluating AI outputs, understanding limitations and risks, protecting sensitive information, and making transparent choices about how AI fits into a larger research, writing, or decision-making process.