Exploring the relationship of style instruction and writing quality: can you teach an old dog a new style?

Acting as teachers and author´s editors, the authors regularly comment on the style of others´ communication in an effort to improve the quality of their writing. In fact, all of the technical and business communication textbooks they´ve seen include discussions of style (usually a whole chapter on the topic). They are hopeful but not certain about the impact of these comments on the quality of future writing tasks. The paper describes one attempt to gather some empirical data to determine the impact of style instruction