Undergrad takes 1st Place in national writing competition

Gainesville, Fla. – The Center for Management Communication is pleased to announce that Nicole Thomas, a graduating senior and a student in Warrington’s “Writing for Business” course, placed first in the Association for Business Communication’s (ABC) national 2008 Student Writing Competition.

This is the second time in three years of entering the competition that a Warrington undergraduate has won first prize (UF students placed first and third in their first year of competition). In this year’s ABC competition, students had to respond as director of human resources for a company to a real-world business case, writing, designing and promoting a specific plan for notifying employees of corporate downsizing. With this scenario, the ABC contest designers aimed to encourage students “to think critically about how communication shapes an organization’s relationship with a community, and how that relationship can influence the organization’s bottom line.”

The ABC is an international organization that promotes excellence in business communication scholarship, research, education, and practice. Fiona Barnes, Ph.D., director of the Center for Management Communication, is pleased with UF’s continued success in this competition, for “The ABC Student Writing competition, with its real-world cases and two-tier system of academic and business professional judges, effectively complements the course’s emphasis on the real-world applicability and value of persuasive communication skills.”