824703

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BCQXXX10.1177/2329490618824703Business and Professional Communication QuarterlyWatson

Article
Business and Professional
Communication Quarterly
Using Professional Online 2019, Vol. 82(2) 153­–168
© 2019 by the Association for
Portfolios to Enhance Business Communication
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McClain Watson1

Abstract
Although most students have learned to succeed academically, by the time they enter
our business communication courses, their time as students is almost over. This
article describes the challenges facing “students who will soon stop being students”
and introduces the professional online portfolio as a project which enables them
to develop the confidence, the capacity, and a concrete platform with which to
communicate with the world outside the black box of school.

Keywords
eportfolio, professional development, personal branding

An objective of business educators is to make our graduating students more marketable. A

business communication course helps by providing students with the oral and written
communication skills that are demanded by companies. (Soares & Goldgehn, 1985, p. 17)

Very little—and very much—has changed in the 30-plus years since Soares and
Goldgehn began an article in this journal with these sentences. In terms of clarity and
practicality, their simple description of the primary objective of most business com-
munication educators would be hard to improve upon. Some might quibble with the
clear priority placed on meeting the “demands” of companies and counter that our job
is to provide companies with more than “market-ready” products ready and eager to be
assimilated into the corporate hive. Others might say that making our students more
marketable is not an objective but the objective of business educators and that those
who think otherwise are not only out of touch with the working world as it actually is
but are also foisting that obliviousness upon their credulous students.

1The University of Texas at Dallas, USA

Corresponding Author:
McClain Watson, SM43, Naveen Jindal School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas,
800 W. Campbell Road, Richardson, TX 75080, USA.
Email: mcclain.watson@utdallas.edu
154 Business and Professional Communication Quarterly 82(2)

One thing that all would probably agree on, though, is that the pressure on our stu-
dents to engage with professional audiences while they are still students is becoming
greater and greater. Several combined factors—particularly the fact that business
schools pump more than 364,000 graduates into the job market every year—create an
environment where students feel constantly torn between being students and becom-
ing professionals (National Center for Education Statistics, 2018, para 1). This tension
is pertinent to all college students, but particularly for those taking a business and
professional communication course, many of whom are already networking with and
interning for professionals in their desired field.
Business and professional communication educators often do not do much to alle-
viate this tension. Our assignments typically place students in a fictional future where
they are already comfortably employed and have to respond in an effective and profes-
sional way to a realistic—but imaginary—assignment scenario. These scenarios push
students to create imaginative bridges that can be very useful for pulling them out of
their student selves. But, within the context of most courses, student work is only ever
seen by the instructor, and it ceases to matter to the student the moment the assignment
is turned in and scored. These structural limitations do not make the job not worth
doing, of course, but they do create real obstacles to achieving the goals described by
Soares and Goldgehn, goals that most of us still aspire to.
The main topic of Soares and Goldgehn’s article is the use of portfolios in business
communication education. They sketch out how the use of portfolios could be a way
for business communication educators to more reliably achieve what they saw as our
goal: to transition students from the classroom into the professional world. Subsequent
commenters (Brammer, 2007, 2011; Campbell, 2002; Dubinsky, 2003; Graves &
Epstein, 2011; Okoro, Washington, & Cardon, 2011; Powell & Jankovich, 1998) have
helpfully expanded on this topic. In this article, I describe a particular kind of eportfo-
lio—what I call the professional online portfolio (POP)—and pitch it as a means of
enhancing both the relevance of student work in the business and professional com-
munication classroom and the stakes that work has for students’ futures.
Previous scholarly discussion has focused primarily on defining the portfolio as a
means of creating a narrative of academic success that can be shared in the context of
a job search. The POP engages a wider frame and is concerned as much with creating
a sense of personality, enthusiasm, and warmth as it is with establishing a sense of
academic or technical credibility. In addition, because the POP is a website that is
online and can be seen by anyone on earth—indeed, students are pushed to have it seen
by as many people as possible—it is not something they do “for a class.” It is instead
a public-facing platform for personal branding, network development, and storytelling
designed to introduce its creator to the world outside the box of school.
In the first section of the article, I describe the strange predicament students find
themselves in as they come to the end of their student journey. Having spent their entire
lives developing the skills, habits, and attitudes necessary to make them good students,
they are facing a sort of crisis moment in which they will learn that “what made you suc-
cessful at school may not necessarily make you a star performer at work” (Riesco, 2013,
para 4). I also briefly walk through how the POP project is communicated to students. As
Watson 155

with any learning opportunity, the instructor’s description of and justification for an
assignment are critical. They not only lay out instructions for fulfilling requirements but
also, more important, persuade students that the assignment has value both for the course
and beyond (Wlodkowski & Ginsberg, 2017). This is especially true for the POP since,
unlike most course projects, its site of application is outside of the course and its target
audience is not the instructor but potential employers and professional allies in the world
outside the classroom. This is a very new prospect for students, and so care and time
must be taken when unveiling and justifying the POP project to students.
I begin the second section of the article with a brief overview of the POP. Then,
because most existing work about portfolios typically only tells what is contained in
portfolios rather than shows actually existing portfolios, I provide a discussion of the
key features of POPs and their rationale using screenshots from strong portfolios.
Showing the key components of actually existing POPs enables me to describe what
makes them strong and allows readers to see and feel how the POP, as a unique species
of eportfolio, enhances the already understood unique power of portfolios as a vehicle
for communicating credibility and building a personal brand.
In the final section of the article, I offer practical advice to instructors or program
directors who might be interested in incorporating the POP project into their under-
graduate business and professional communication or business school curriculum.
This advice is based on more than 5 years of experience helping thousands of students
in a large business school create POPs and push them out into the world. Since 2013,
the POP has been deeply embedded in my business school’s curriculum, and all under-
graduates have been required to create a POP in the mandatory “Advanced Business
Communication” course. This deep embedding of the POP in the undergraduate cur-
riculum has earned the university international recognition and, much more important,
has provided students with a platform of lasting professional value as they enter the
professional world with an attitude—and a visible record—of grounded confidence,
warmth, and competence.

Challenges Faced by Soon-to-Graduate Students

In the first week of Advanced Business Communication, the course in which students
construct a POP, I tell them that a college course—all of school, really—is like a
black box. People outside the box have no idea what happens inside the box, and
people inside the box are typically very bad at explaining to those outside what they
are doing on the inside. Every parent knows well the frustrations that ensue when
they ask their child, “What did you do in school today?” You might get a mumbled
response, but most kids will simply sigh and look out the window. It may be frustrat-
ing, but when you think about it, why should we expect them to be able to answer any
differently? Students never have to worry about what people outside the box think or
know because they are outside the box. School is school, classes are classes, and this
goes on for 15-plus years by the time they enter our business and professional com-
munication classroom. After all that time inside the box, their ability to translate their
interests, skills, or hopes to people outside the box, and their interest in doing so, is
156 Business and Professional Communication Quarterly 82(2)

as diminished as it has ever been. Having been inside the box for so long, third- and
fourth-year college students are like the young fish in this David Foster Wallace
(2009) scene:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish
swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?”
And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at
the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” (p. 3)

Like those fish, students will one day awaken to see a crack in the black box around
them. As required classes and projects near completion, there is a sense that they will
soon stop being students and become something else, although what they will become
is not exactly clear. For a vast majority of our students, the full reckoning comes just
before or after their foot hits the floor on the other side of the stage at graduation. At
that moment, the walls of the black box fall away, and the intense light, sounds, and
activity of the poststudent world flood in for the first time. In the days and weeks (and
months and years?) that follow, our former students will be asked questions they have
been asked before but never really registered: “What did you learn in school?” “What
do you know how to do?” “What are you really good at?” “Where do you want to go?”
The questions are similar to the ones they heard as a child, but the stakes of their
answers—or their inability to answer—are terrifyingly greater than the mild annoy-
ance of their parents.
In his influential article “The Brand Called You,” Tom Peters (1997) revolutionized
the challenge of personal and professional reinvention:

Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in,

all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own
companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer
for the brand called You. (para 5)

This framing is especially powerful for students, whose default brand inside the box
has always been student. Whether branding pet food or people, “the first step is visibil-
ity,” Peters (1997, para 26) writes, and this is why companies spend millions to put
their products at eye level in the grocery store. “Eye level is buy level,” as the saying
goes. But, for students inside the box, visibility is precisely the thing they do not have.
Almost all of the work they do is only seen by others inside the box and only has rel-
evance or credibility inside the box. Even if students realize this problem well before
graduation, simply going to class and getting good grades does not help them address
it. Meaningful personal and professional development helps students realize that they
are inside a box and need to start breaking out before graduation. If we are only help-
ing them be good students, we aren’t really helping them at all.
A second key point Peters (1997) makes is that, when striving to become visible
outside the box, “It all matters. When you’re promoting brand You, everything you
do—and everything you choose not to do—communicates the value and character of
the brand” (para 32). While business and professional communication educators
Watson 157

understand this, students may be shocked to learn that the world outside the box
wants—and needs—to know more about them than their degree and their GPA. Yes,
their résumé and cover letter need to be great, but they will be seen by very few people,
and most are reading those materials within a hiring context that positions the student
as a subordinate, whereas the POP presents them as a confident, mature, and free-
standing agent. Students are often surprised to hear that if they postpone any personal
brand promotion behavior until they begin applying for jobs, they will be doing too
little too late (Schawbel, 2009). This is the life moment our students are in during their
final 2 years of university study. They need to make themselves known outside the box
but have very limited ability or means to do so.
Meanwhile, outside the box, employers are using the web more and more to find
information about applicants that they could never get through a résumé or cover letter
(Corlett, 2012). Because the vast majority of people our students will be competing
against for jobs are going to have the same basic credentials (a degree, an internship,
an academic project, etc.), employers are desperate for more and richer information
about applicants so they can distinguish one candidate from the other. A recent survey
by CareerBuilder (2017) found that 69% of hiring managers use Google to research
applicants, and 57% are less likely to interview an applicant if they cannot find the
person online. Historically, the advice to students was that information about them on
the web would only hurt their chances in the job market, but that advice is disastrous
for students who are trying to become visible. Employers are no longer looking only
for disqualifying information online but also for affirmative reasons to take an appli-
cant to the next stage of a job search process. A study by Reppler (2011) found that,
although 7 out of 10 employers rejected candidates based on what they found online,
the exact same percentage actually hired someone based on information they learned
online. In fact, 39% hired someone because information they found on the web “gave
a positive impression of their personality and organizational fit,” 36% hired someone
because information found online “showed [the] candidate was creative,” and 33%
hired someone because information “showed [the] candidate was well-rounded”
(Reppler, 2011, para 3). Even more recent surveys by CareerBuilder (2016) and the
Society for Human Resource Management (2017) had similar findings. This evidence
suggests that, if our students are still “Google ghosts” in their final year of college,
their path forward is likely going to be rough. The POP project exploits these hiring
trends as an opportunity to positively position students in the categories of personality,
creativity, and well-roundedness before they enter the job market.
The more time instructors spend in class building this context for students, the
greater the pedagogical success and practical impact of the POP project will be. I urge
students to see that they will benefit most from it—and from the remainder of their
time as students—if they start thinking of their remaining days before graduation as a
diminishing resource to be spent developing skills, habits, and attitudes that will pro-
vide lasting value and help them open doors once they are outside of the student box.
The POP empowers students to showcase their best qualities and create their own
place on the web, rather than hoping a blind Google search will not surface incomplete
or out-of-context details. Instructors should make it clear that the POP is something
158 Business and Professional Communication Quarterly 82(2)

students do for themselves, not merely for a class. If this point successfully comes
across, students’ standards for their own work will rise and they will push themselves
to create and maintain something they are proud of. This is what makes the POP a
hinge experience through which students are motivated and given the tools necessary
to begin breaking out of the box of school.

Parts of an Effective POP

In this section, I walk through the most important parts of a POP and show samples of
strong POPs so that readers have a clear idea of what is possible when students are
motivated to enhance their ability to create a warm, confident, and professional home
on the web. First, I share the basics.
The POP is a website. It is 100% created, controlled, and owned by the student
and has no technical or branding dependence on the university. Students create the
POP in a business and professional communication course, but the POP is not con-
tained by the course. It is a public-facing platform intended to enhance a student’s
ability to make a friendly and professional impression online. Students build the site
using one of several free site-building platforms and need no technical or coding
knowledge. Students are encouraged to publicize the site in every way they can and
to continue updating and evolving the site after the course is over. In the sections
below, I showcase what I consider to be the key components of a POP. Because stu-
dents have absolute control over the content and design of their POP, they can choose
not to include the following components, but a significant part of the POP’s appeal
and power will be lost if they do.

An Attractive, Simple Home Page

Figure 1 shows the front page of my former student Rebecca Wu’s (n.d.) POP, which
featured all of the key “should dos” of a POP home page. Her photo shows a smiling,
friendly person, which encourages visitors to read further. She identified The University
of Texas at Dallas, her major, and her timeline to graduation. These are critical items
that helped brand Rebecca as a student, for now, while demonstrating that she will
soon be graduating and ready for a professional opportunity. The word links at the top
of the page, especially “leadership” and “experience,” also helped brand Rebecca as
someone who, although a student, was going beyond the bare minimum and develop-
ing her work and leadership skills.
Tim Van’s (n.d.) front page, shown in Figure 2, struck a similar note of enthusiasm,
engagement, and professionalism. His front page was wordier, but his use of bold and
screen-friendly font made his text engaging and easy to read.
Creating a front page that communicates a sense of confidence, warmth, and desire
to engage is not technically difficult to do, but it does require students to think of them-
selves as independent, mature professionals rather than as anonymous students hived
away in a classroom. Working on the POP project throughout the semester both helps
students develop this confidence and gives them a way to project it into the world.
Watson 159

Figure 1.  Front page of Rebecca Wu’s POP.

Source. Wu (n.d.). Reproduced by permission.

An Engaging, Narrative About Me Page

Omar Dellawar’s (n.d.) About Me page exhibited the value of writing about more
personal topics than one might expect to be included in the POP (see Figure 3).
Students often ask, “Why would a potential employer care where Omar was born or
that soccer has always been a part of his life? Don’t employers just care about Omar’s
professional skills?” Instructors can use the question to point out how narrowly stu-
dents tend to define “professional skills” and how they are much broader than the sort
of technical, “right or wrong” skills tested by Scantron exams. Instructors should
remind students that the whole point of the POP is to show them as smiling, engaged,
connection-minded, and three-dimensional people rather than the two-dimensional,
flattened, and disembodied version of themselves that is projected by their résumés.
Omar’s About Me page helps illustrate another point of power for the POP. On one
level, he simply described his upbringing and favorite pastime; but, on another level, he
hit crucial psychological and interpersonal notes that will make a positive impression
on visitors who view this page. Namely, the first paragraph showed Omar as multilin-
gual, as able to adjust to and thrive in new circumstances, and as possessing confidence
based on his life experiences. In the section about soccer, he described the skills, habits,
and attitudes he gained from the sport and listed the things he is better at because of his
experiences with soccer. This point is key when writing the About Me or Interests page.
Students should be pushed to not simply look backward into their past (e.g., “I took a
cool trip” or “I fixed this old car”) but rather to state in a forward-looking way how they
160 Business and Professional Communication Quarterly 82(2)

Figure 2.  Front page of Tim Van’s POP.

Source. Van (n.d.). Reproduced by permission.

have personally gotten stronger or sharper because of those experiences—for example,

“I like to travel because it has taught me two very important things about the world” or
“Fixing this classic car has helped me improve my attention to detail, appreciation of
the big picture, and, above all, patience.” This kind of writing can be challenging for
students—and first drafts typically read like Wikipedia entries—but with guidance over
several drafts, they will improve as writers and thinkers who can communicate better
about themselves with others in a context where it really matters for their future.

A Confident, Competence-Enhancing Projects Page

Cuddy, Glick, and Beninger (2011) identified warmth and competence as “fundamental
dimensions along which people are judged” and examined the role of nonverbal and
verbal behaviors that can lead us to project—or not project—a sense of warmth and
competence in the minds of others (p. 74). Because these impressions are typically
strongest early, often at first contact with a new person, it follows that this moment of
Watson 161

Figure 3.  About Me page of Omar Dellawar’s POP.

Source. Dellawar (n.d.). Reproduced by permission.

first impression is critical for students seeking to become visible outside the school box.
The two components of a POP that have been discussed—the home page and the About
Me/Interests page—are primarily working on the warmth dimension, with their smiling
photos, personal background, and first-person narration. The Projects page, on which
students show and describe at least three academic or community projects they want to
share with visitors, is geared more toward strengthening the competence dimension.
Tim Van’s Projects page showed how this page is best done (see Figure 4). Indeed,
“shows” is really the key goal for the Projects page. While many students will describe
an academic project on their résumé, that information can only ever be hearsay because
the résumé doesn’t give any way for students to offer proof of the finished product. The
résumé is basically one stranger telling another stranger, “Trust me. I got this degree,
worked in this job, and did this academic project.” Hiring managers may believe with-
out questioning what they see on a résumé, and surely often do, but it’s much better—
and more effective for creating a sense of competence—to offer a way to show the
project itself by embedding it in the POP. Few visitors will actually read the document,
but simply showing it sends a signal that the student is confident in his or her work,
wants to share it, and is eager to use it as the basis for relationship creation.

Other Possible POP Pages

Students often feel empowered to feature information on their POP that does not fit
onto the pages described above. For example, information about military service,
162 Business and Professional Communication Quarterly 82(2)

Figure 4.  Projects page of Tim Van’s POP.

Source. Van (n.d.). Reproduced by permission.

extensive work experience, a life-threatening illness, athletic accomplishments, com-

munity organization leadership, or many other sorts of information are welcome on the
POP and can extend its relevance, impact, and power out in the world.

Hard-Won Advice for Implementing the POP

In the final section of the article, I offer a few pieces of guidance for those who are
considering implementing a POP project at the class, program, or business school
scale. This advice is based on my experience in getting administrators and fellow fac-
ulty to buy into the POP and to support its implementation for more than 1,200 stu-
dents per year in a large business school. Because the POP implicates and draws on
students’ whole-self professional development and educational experience writ large,
it is important to seek input and collaboration across the entire range of stakeholders
in our students’ success. The appendix provides examples of student and employer
testimonials and how they can be used.

Get Your Dean on Board Early

Most business school deans really like two things: when their graduates get “good jobs”
and when their students, faculty, and staff do innovative things that achieve visibility
outside the academic community. Since the POP project will definitely do the latter and
Watson 163

probably the former, your dean will likely “get” the power of the POP to help students
break out of the school box. Still, it is important to actively recruit your dean as a POP
champion and make him or her fully aware of the project before it is put into action.
This is because, despite your best intentions and the excellent motivation of your stu-
dents, it is nevertheless likely that there will be many mediocre—or worse—POPs pro-
duced by your students. These will include glaring misspellings, unprofessional photos,
and all the things that keep your school’s public relations staff awake at night. You need
to prepare your dean to accept this fact by emphasizing that absolute control over their
POPs is essential for convincing students to buy in and treat it as something done for
themselves, not just a class. The high stakes and the fact that the entire world can access
and view this public website are what make the POP meaningful and effective. It is
important that your dean understands this.

Learn to Use the Technology, But Do Not Become an Expert

In my course, students may use whatever platform they choose to build their POPs, but
most end up using Wix (www.wix.com). There are several other free site-building
services, but most students find Wix to be the best and simplest. These platforms
require no coding experience or expertise, but they do require some time to learn and
discover what the services can do. Students may be initially anxious about the techni-
cal part, but they quickly relax after they play around in the system for an hour or so.
Instructors are advised to get familiar with these systems but are not advised to become
experts. Students need to be empowered to figure out for themselves how to use the
platforms to build the POPs they want to build. If the instructor becomes technical
support and the arbiter of site design choices, students may regress into “students who
are only trying to do what the teacher wants” rather than be independent creators who
chart their own path by creating their own sites.
With that being said, instructors should show examples of POPs from previous
students to demonstrate the broad diversity of approaches and directions current stu-
dents can take with their own POPs. I share the POPs of entire former classes with
students every semester because I want them to see the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Seeing the poor POPs can be just as instructive as seeing the strong ones.

Be Prepared to Address Student Fears of Going Public

As discussed earlier, students have been inside the school box for a very long time and
take for granted that the only people who will ever see their work products will also be
inside the box. For this reason, many students feel anxious that the POP will not only
make their school work visible to the world but also their name, face, and other per-
sonal information. It is important that instructors are understanding and patient about
this anxiety because it is understandable. Furthermore, overcoming this fear is a large
part of why the POP project can become an empowering experience for students.
Instructors should unveil the POP project early in the semester so that students have
164 Business and Professional Communication Quarterly 82(2)

time to settle in, learn the tech, collaborate with others, view previous students’ POPs,
and come to terms with the fact that their time inside the school box is coming to an
end. They will have better chances outside the box if they come to terms with their fear
and grow into public confidence sooner rather than later.
There may be rare cases where students will approach you after class with visibility
concerns of a more serious nature. They may be employed in a job that requires them
to remain invisible (e.g., with an intelligence agency or in a sensitive security position)
or be in another capacity where they cannot or should not publicize information about
themselves or their background. There may also be students who have legitimate con-
cerns about their personal security and need to remain invisible for that reason. For
these students, a working solution is for them to build the site and to be held to the
same assessment standard as classmates, but instead of making the site public on the
open web, they can send the instructor a password for access.

Get Input From Program Directors

The goals of the POP project are best accomplished by business and professional
communication educators inside a business and professional communication
course. However, there are limitations to how much a business and professional
communication instructor will know about, for example, what skills, habits, and
attitudes a risk management professional will want to see on the POP of a risk man-
agement student or what coding projects should be featured on the Projects page of
an IT Management major. Students benefit from program-specific input, and as we
are not in those fields, we should find ways to get those voices in front of them as
they are working on their POPs. My solution for this was to record a 5-minute con-
versation with each program director about what specific skills and knowledge
students in their program should feature in their POPs. These interviews are on
YouTube and are available for instructors to show throughout the semester. One
nice side benefit of these videos is that when students see their program director
speaking positively about the POP, it encourages them to buy into it. An additional
benefit of these videos is that, because students benefit from featuring major-spe-
cific projects on their POPs, it can be a nudge to instructors in those programs to
move away from exam-based assessment and toward the kind of writing, speaking,
and applied projects that will have more value on the POP. This helps achieve
greater visibility for business and professional communication instructors and com-
munication skills across the curriculum and could strengthen the institutional capi-
tal of the team in the long term.

Encourage Students to Push Their POPs Into the World

If a POP is online but no one sees it, has anything been accomplished? No. Once they
are comfortable with their POP version 1.0, students should begin publicizing it in
every way they can. Their POP URL should appear beside their LinkedIn URL on their
Watson 165

résumé, on their LinkedIn profile, in their email signature, on their Facebook profile,
on their business card, and in the final paragraph of every cover letter they write.
Because students typically finish their POPs toward the end of the semester, and an
instructor’s influence recedes rapidly once they no longer see a student every week,
emphasis should be made throughout the POP-building semester that the student’s
work will be for naught if they forget about the POP the day the course ends. This is
something program directors can bolster since their connection with students is typi-
cally longer lasting, and they can ensure that subsequent instructors express awareness
of the POP and keep it at the front of students’ minds.

Every Student Can Be a POP Star

I began this article by describing the unique circumstances our students find them-
selves in during their final year of college. After 15 years of being inside the school
box, students are, on the one hand, desperate to get out of the box of school but, on the
other, so conditioned to life on the inside that they need more than a simple heads-up
that things are about to radically change for them. They need vehicles that will help
them (a) enhance their ability to describe themselves to people outside the box and (b)
demonstrate that ability on a platform they own and that is visible to anyone. The POP
can be that vehicle. In my experience rolling out the POP project in a required business
communication course in a very large business school, it has provided a pedagogical
focal point not only for the business and professional communication team but also,
because of its synergistic quality, for the entire undergraduate curriculum and faculty.
Because the project is designed to challenge, empower, and equip students for life
after they stop being students, it is an example of how business and professional com-
munication educators are uniquely positioned to affect students both inside and out-
side of the box of school.
166 Business and Professional Communication Quarterly 82(2)

Appendix
Student and Employer POP Testimonials

Author’s Note
The Institutional Review Board of The University of Texas at Dallas determined that this
study did not require review. Student comments and screenshots from online portfolios
are reproduced by permission. Parts of this article benefited greatly from feedback
received at the 80th annual meeting of the Association for Business Communication,
Seattle, WA, 2015.
Watson 167

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

References
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Author Biography
McClain Watson is a clinical associate professor and director of business communication pro-
grams in the Naveen Jindal School of Management at The University of Texas at Dallas.
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