John S. Fielden, Ph.D., University Professor Emeritus, was the Dean of the business schools at Boston University and the University of Alabama. He has been an Associate Editor of The Harvard Business Review, and a writing consultant to IBM, Kimberly-Clark, General Electric, Dun and Bradstreet, General Foods, and South Central Bell. He has authored nine Harvard Business Review articles, including the HBR classic, “What Do You Mean I Can’t Write?” and several best-selling texts on business writing. Dr. Fielden and Dr. Dulek have been credited with popularizing the term “Bottom Lining” in reference to communications.

Jean D. Gibbons, Ph.D., Russell Professor Emerita, was the Chair of the Applied Statistics Program at the University of Alabama and Associate Professor at The Wharton School of Finance and Commerce. She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the International Statistical Institute. She has published nine books on statistical methods for decision making and has been a consultant to South Central Bell and the United States Department of Defense. Her articles have appeared in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, and Technometrics, among others.

Ronald E. Dulek, Ph.D. is the John R. Miller Professor of Management and Chair of the Department of Management and Marketing at the University of Alabama. He is a consultant to IBM, OSHA, the United States Department of Health and Human Services, AT & T, Sony, and other public and private organizations. His articles on business communications have been published in Business Horizons, Journal of Business Communication, Personnel Journal, Personnel magazine, and IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications.