I greatly enjoy going to the Association for Business Communication conference, and this year was no exception. One major element of my appreciation for the conference is in their generosity: in addition to eating excellently the whole time (an expense greatly appreciated), I received a Graduate Student Travel Scholarship for the second year in a row. Thank you, ABC!
I also presented a talk called “Business communication genre use by extra-institutional musicians,” which highlighted the genres that the extra-institutional musicians I’ve been studying use in comparison to genres that I teach in my business and technical writing classes. That the genres differ from my teaching and from each other is important; indie rock musicians skew heavily toward digital media genres, while classical musicians rely heavily on oral communication. These differences are related to the different audiences and expectations of their fields, which is an area I will explore more in my dissertation. I conclude with a call to look at more extra-institutional individual types to understand their communication practices more.
In addition to the good food, the award, and the talk, the conversation with the many attendees was engaging and exciting. I look forward to going in 2017, hopefully, as they will be headed to Ireland!