Attuned communication – An activity for improving students’ ability to take someone’s perspective

Abstract

The business communication curriculum often conceptualizes “audience” as the general public or an abstract community of practice. Employers, on the other hand, expect business-school graduates to produce person-centered writing. To bridge the disconnect, we compared student submissions to a contextualized writing assignment before and after instructor feedback using text analysis methods and multiple reviewers in order to establish whether the feedback was able to improve their ability to take someone’s perspective.