This book takes an inductive, inclusive approach to business communication. It has the following goals:

• To meet the needs of a diverse student population, including English language learners, students from diverse cultural backgrounds, mature students, and students who are LGBTQ+, neurodiverse and/or disabled. The author has taken care to include activities, examples and reflection exercises tailored to a wide range of students, and to collaborate with communicators from diverse backgrounds.
• To offer an inductive, iterative approach to business communication that focuses less on genre and more on the decisions communicators make.
• To encourage students to reflect on their own attitudes, beliefs and assumptions about communication, and to connect their learning to other courses and/or their workplace experience. Each chapter begins with a ‘Questions for Reflection’ section so that students can reflect individually or in a learning journal and ends with suggested reflection activities that an instructor can assign.
• To prepare students for a diverse workforce by including the voices of communicators from many different backgrounds.

This book also contains narratives by Brenda Fernie, who is the President of Seyem, the economic development branch of the Kwantlen First Nation. Students are invited to read her narrative then reflect on it as they read the rest of the chapter. Instructors may choose to have students freewrite about the connection between the narrative and the chapter in order to deepen their understanding of both.

Thank You

This book was made better by the many students who analyzed previous versions of this textbook. Thank you for your insight. I’m also grateful to KPU Open for a grant that allowed me to compensate collaborators.