By Tom Snee

As a novelist, Claire Lombardo (MFA17) has seen her critically acclaimed books appear on best seller lists and get optioned by Hollywood. Her latest, Same as it Ever Was, published in June 2024 to more good reviews.

But before all that, she taught business writing to students at the Tippie College of Business.

Lombardo was a student in the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the time and worked as a writing tutor in the college’s Frank Business Communications Center from 2016 to 2018. 

It’s one of the unique perks of learning at Tippie, that many of students will be able to improve their writing and communication skills with guidance from future best-selling authors—potentially even Pulitzer Prize winners.

Hiring the best

The Frank Center employs seven full-time writing faculty for undergraduate students, along with three or four adjunct instructors every year and a handful of writing tutors. Director Carl Follmer said the center usually employs tutors recruited every year from the Writers’ Workshop and often an adjunct (though they don’t have any adjuncts this year). 

For the writers/tutors, the job helps pay their bills while working flexible hours so they can work around their class and writing schedules. For Tippie students, it’s a chance to improve their business writing skills from authors who go on to write great things, such as Lombardo and her fellow novelists Ayana Mathis and Stephen Markley; award-winning poets like Kiki Petrosino; and Hugh Ferrer, who would become associate director of the university’s acclaimed International Writers’ Program.

Follmer said that as some of the best young writers in the country, Writers’ Workshop tutors bring a respect of the written word and an understanding of writing that’s important for undergraduate business students to learn. 

“Many students think that they’ll need to communicate only with other business people in their careers, and that’s not true,” he said. “They’ll need to communicate with many different audiences, so it’s good to bring in people from outside the business school to show them how to write to different groups of people who are smart, but don’t necessarily speak the same ‘language.’”

What they teach

While the tutors from the Writers’ Workshop are used to working with metaphor and symbolism in their fiction and poetry, they start with the basics when they work with Tippie students because metaphor and symbolism would be out of place in a two-page business memo. They begin with structure and organization, urging students to put the main idea up front, avoid adverbs, run-on sentences, and buzzwords, and to use active voice when they can.

Once they have these basic mechanics down, they can start thinking about “voice” to set their writing apart. 

Follmer said he’s found poets tend to make the best business writing instructors, since they focus on clarity and brevity, using as few words as possible to convey in the clearest terms what they’re trying to say. A goal they share with effective business communication. 

How it started

The precursor to The Frank Center, the Accounting Writing Program, was started in 1998 by Dan Collins (BBA68/PhD73), then the chair of the Department of Accounting, in response to concerns from alumni and working professionals that accounting students needed improved communication skills upon graduation. Pam Bourjaily took over as director two years later and started hiring writing tutors and teachers to provide one-on-one writing help. Eventually, the center expanded to help all Tippie students develop their business communication skills. 

Tippie recruits from the Writers’ Workshop in large part because it is a rich source of writing talent just three blocks down Clinton Street. Bourjaily said the students have the skills to help Tippie students see the power of the written word and how to improve their writing to develop their careers by telling better stories.

She said the Workshop writers also bring a level of empathy to their tutoring, knowing most of the Tippie students are still learning how to be effective writers. 

“They work in a gentle, low-key way that our students really respond to,” Bourjailly said. “They’re also sensitive to what it feels like to be on the end of critical feedback.”

Ferrer noted that it brings together humanities and business, likening it to building a bridge between two cultures. He said working on their writing also improved the quality of Tippie students’ critical thinking.

“They ask better ethical questions of themselves,” said Ferrer, who worked as a tutor from 2001 to 2003. “In that way, they become more accountable accountants.”

Learning from each other

Many of the writers find that working in business, even on the edges as a writing instructor, introduced them to a world where many have not spent much time. Ferrer enjoyed the window to a place he knew pretty much nothing about.

“A writer wants to understand the world, and accounting and business are such a big part of it. This was a great way to learn about it,” he said. 

Lombardo enjoyed working with business students, whom she otherwise would likely not have encountered during her time on campus. She had held previous office jobs and worked as a social worker providing educational advocacy for children in Chicago before coming to the Workshop. But working with business students introduced her to people “whose brains did not work the way mine did, conceptualizing things in ways I did not grasp.

“As a writer, I draw inspiration from wherever I can, so who knows what exchange I had with a student stuck in my brain and wormed its way into something I wrote later on,” said Lombardo. 

She remembers how hard Tippie students worked and how focused they were on life goals— far more so than she was as an undergraduate (or even a graduate) student. 

“They took their work with me seriously and really wanted to make their work better,” she said. “They wanted to learn.”

Media contact: Tom Snee, 310-384-0010 (o); 319-541-8434 (c); tom-snee@uiowa.edu