Business and Professional Writing

This course will prepare students to participate in the Hispanic commercial world. In order to accomplish this, we will focus on three specific areas: vocabulary and written commercial forms, knowledge of the commercial arena in specific Hispanic countries, and the preparation and presentation of a series of projects related to this topic. Besides increasing their vocabulary and improving their production of correspondence and commercial documents, students will present case studies of Hispanic countries and specific industries. The themes we will analyze in the first part of the course will serve as the basis for our final major project: the actual (or virtual) creation of a business, using the materials and procedures we have learned from the Hispanic commercial world. We will cover sequentially a series of topics such as organization of a business, differing administrative models, financial elements of a business, marketing and public relations, and other topics. (1 unit)

Required text: Doyle, Fryer and Cere: Éxito Comercial. Boston: Thomson & Heinle, 4th edition, 2006 (textbook and Cuaderno de correspondencia)

Recommended texts: 1) Diccionario económico y comercial (http://www.eumed.net/dices/ or http://www.eumed.net/cursecon/dic/ctc/index.htm ); 2) bilingual Spanish-English dictionary; 3) monolingual Spanish dictionary (either Diccionario de la lengua español [Real Academia Española], CD-ROM or online version of the RAE dictionary, or García Pelayo, Pequeño Larousse ilustrado en color ).