A Small-Scale Client Project for Business Writing Students: Developing a Guide for First-Time Home Buyers (Innovative Assignments‪)‬

BUYING MY FIRST HOME helped me meet not only a personal goal but a professional one as well. It became an opportunity for a realistic assignment in my business writing class. After closing the deal, I mentioned to my realtor, Robin Stressman, that during the home-buying process, I would have liked some sort of guidebook for negotiating the process, especially one with a timeline for when things were supposed to happen and with explanations, in plain English, of all the forms I had to complete. Ms. Stressman agreed, telling me that her parent company did have a guidebook for sellers and did publish a home buyer's guide, but it is very expensive (apparently, the parent company does not supply them free of charge to its subsidiary agencies). After discussing the needs of her company and her clients, we decided that developing a guidebook that would be inexpensive for her company to produce and given free of charge to potential home buyers as a customer service would be a worthwhile project for my business writing students. This assignment reflects a client-based pedagogy, which is often used in technical and professional communication courses (cf. Blakeslee, 2001; Kastman Breuch, 2001; Wojahn, Dyke, Riley, Hensel, & Brown, 2001). Unlike service learning pedagogy, which emphasizes social activism, client-based pedagogy focuses on helping students to understand and respond effectively to "real-world" clients and their organizational contexts. Also, unlike case studies, which require students to play roles in fictionalized scenarios, client projects "ask students to complete workplace projects provided by clients," and they "potentially preserve more of the culture of the workplace, while also allowing students to address a variety of audiences" (Blakeslee, 2001, p. 170). Consequently, client projects can be "useful transitional experiences that bridge classroom and workplace contexts for students and expose them gradually to workplace practices and genres" (Blakeslee, 2001, p. 170).