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BASE (BCOR Applied Semester Experience) is a semester-long interdisciplinary course that all sophomores at Leeds take as part of their BCOR (core) requirements. Students apply tools from the functional business disciplines to business problems, solutions and decisions, as part of the well-rounded business education provided at Leeds.

Thanks to Dean Matusik’s Career Impact initiative—and feedback from employer-partners and alumni—BCOR created space for a business writing to be integrated into BASE in the past year to improve students’ communication skills. Leeds Communication Instructor (from the division of Professional Effectiveness) Bonnie Auslander helped to spearhead these efforts.

In fall 2018, Auslander invited Leeds Senior Sydney Burckhardt to help work with her BASE class. The pair co-presented about the newly piloted business writing curriculum at the Association of Business Communication national conference in late October in Miami. Typically, undergraduates are not presenters at this conference, and Sydney Burckhardt was indeed only one of two undergraduate student presenters at this event, making this a significant achievement for her and the Leeds School.Ìý

Sydney told Leeds about her experience teaching with Bonnie and presenting at a national conference:

LSOB: Tell us and how you got started as a teaching assistant for the BASE course.

SB: Bonnie Auslander was my professor for Communication Strategy. We stayed in touch, and in the fall of 2018, Bonnie asked me to join her in teaching business writing skills to the BASE cohort. She realized that her budget was limited, but it was important to her that Leeds students learn how to communicate effectively.

LSOB: What did you teach the students?

SB: We focused on three basic things.

• First was putting the bottom line on top. Academic writing often teaches students to bury their main takeaway, so we focused on helping students state their recommendations up-front.
• Second, we helped students with tone. In the BASE course, the students’ target audience was senior managers at various companies. Executives often expect more concise writing with a professional tone.
• Recognizing that executives are often pressed for time, we also helped BASE students with document design (headings and subheadings) which makes it easy for readers to follow along, especially if they’re not going to read the whole document.

LSOB: Tell us about your experience presenting at the national conference.

SB: Bonnie and I shared the results of our pilot incorporation of business communication into the BASE classroom. We showed that this was a successful addition to the program, and by the end of the semester, students wrote more concisely and used more effective organizational frameworks.

Presenting at the conference was a lot of fun. I was the youngest person there by far, but it was really great opportunity. It was very rewarding to develop a presentation with Bonnie and then share it with other educators.Ìý

LSOB: What were your key takeaways from the conference?

SB: The thing that stuck out to me most is what a good job Leeds does teaching presentation skills. Many presenters talked to the screen instead of to their audience, and their slides were often too wordy which was distracting.

I remember Bonnie teaching our Communication Strategy class that your audience is either going to read your slides or listen to you, but they’re not going to do both. She also taught us that if there are too many words on your slides, you, the presenter, will fall to the background and your audience will read your slides instead. I noticed many presenters making these kinds of mistakes. I was so pleased with my education at Leeds for teaching me how to avoid that.