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...student a rarefied academic environment, I wrote with proper citations. My students did not. I spent classroom time discussing citation practice. Their performance did not improve. In this article, I describe an approach to citing sources in a business context that has improved students' performance.
Students have long struggled with citation (Moeck, 2002; Wilhoit, 1994), and the causes of their poor performance are uncertain. The ESL literature does suggest one cause: Students from some cultures find the concept of intellectual property immoral, so for that small subset there is an explanation for poor citation practice (Thompson & Williams, 1995). But studies of U.S.-born students show that a large number of individual and contextual factors may be implicated (McCabe, 1992; McCabe, Trevino, & Butterfield, 2001). Students continue to feign ignorance or deflect criticism onto others, even after prior instruction has been documented.
My approach to the performance problem has been to assume that business writing is different from academic writing and that if those differences are fully embraced, one may find new motivations to cite and different formatting requirements. The idea stemmed from my experience with students who came to business communication thinking they could not write well (as evidenced by their reflections in the self-assessment memo assignment in Locker, 2003) but who found they could write better and more confidently when they had definite tasks and readerships for guidance. Could their citation performance also improve if presented with a business context? There was not much information available on actual business citation practice then, so the ideas in this article only partially reflect recent findings (Krapels & Davis, 1999). I also suspected that good citation performance would not completely mirror academic standards for citation (Hiemstra, 2002) because a business reader's needs might be different from ours.
In recasting citation as a business practice, I was mostly guided by one general principle: orientation to the business reader. A one-page handout summarizes the results of my research and experiments in class (see the appendix) and has helped students understand the process. The rest of this article comments on each of the major sections of the handout.
REASONS FOR CITING
Students mention the law frequently in class as the reason for citing sources, but they have yet to make their living by producing intellectual property, either as writers or performers or as academic professionals. Right now, intellectual property rights intersect with students' lives primarily through attempts to freely download music and video from the Web. Unless they have been professional musicians themselves, it is in their interest to acquire music for free. Some students may envision a future personal interest in intellectual property rights, but at present, as undergraduates struggling to put together a paper for a course, they may calculate as slim their chances of being caught using a source's ideas or words without giving proper credit. Thus undergraduates need other reasons to cite properly. The handout notes two that work well: consequence and vertical relationship management (credibility).
Using comments from nontraditional students or from students who have returned from internships, we discuss in class the kinds of consequences that can follow from actual business writing. What one writes may lead to the hiring or firing of colleagues. Large sums of money, too, can ride on what one writes. Presently, I introduce citation concurrently with an assignment in which students are to imagine they are university purchasing officers. They have to research and write a report that may lead to the university's purchasing of a product or service. I tell them a story, about someone who recommended one model of a copier-fax-printer-scanner for a company's business offices based on its superior service warranty. Because a $100,000 purchase was riding on...
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