Technical Communication Quarterly

(2002). Review of Writing Centers and Writing Across the Curriculum Programs: Building Interdisciplinary Partnerships. Technical Communication Quarterly: Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 476-478.

A project in writing-across-the curriculum was launched within a nationally ranked baccalaureate degree program in accountancy at a Boston area college. The project team, which comprised faculty from accountancy and technical communication, attempted to integrate technical communication skills, principally writing, into an accounting information systems course. To improve student writing in this way, the team had to determine what kinds of writing activities would successfully introduce accounting students to the discourse of their profession, and had to select, from all the communication skills that might be taught, only those that should be taught to complement the specialized content of the accounting information systems course. The team's collaborative process produced three critical planning decisions that greatly simplified the integration: 1) establishing Joseph Juran's TQM notion of fitness-for-use for evaluating the quality of student communications; 2) selecting only those forms of communication used in the profession's discourse community in assignments; and 3) teaching only those communication skills that support and enrich the principal technical skills taught in the accounting course. This strategy demonstrates that communication skills can be integrated within a technical course so as to enhance the students' understanding of technical content while improving the students' proficiency in written communication.