College and Business Composition

A New Writing Adventure 

By Prof. Randee Baty at The Lukeion Project

For years we’ve taught students to be prepared for the demands of college writing before they get there. We’ve offered College Composition, Advanced Research Writing, and rigorous writing assignments in most of our literature, history, and language classes. Many former students have sent us excellent feedback over the years, letting us know how well prepared they felt as they moved through their freshman year of college and beyond. This year, we’re building on our strong writing foundation and making it even better. Starting with the fall of 2026, we’re adding business communications to our composition class.

At The Lukeion Project, we recognize that our talented and ambitious students take many paths after graduation. Many go on to college, but many are already entrepreneurs or continue with apprenticeships, family businesses, the military, or training programs. They may need to understand how writing changes in a business setting compared to an academic setting and be prepared to deal with the types of communication present in business every day. With my undergraduate degree in accounting, which included Business Communication classes, and my graduate degree in English, where I studied all kinds of writing, I’m excited to add this element to our writing program!

If you are headed to college, all the elements that you need to feel confident with academic writing will be there. We will cover such topics as writing a well-constructed thesis statement, using academic vocabulary and tone, citing sources with ease, staying in third person, and organizing your work. These are all essential to the well-written college paper.

We will write two academic papers in this class. Students entering their freshman year will feel prepared to face the types of writing college professors will expect after finishing this course. For those who know they are headed straight to college after high school, we still suggest that you consider adding our “College Research Writing” semester course to your spring semester to ensure comfort with college libraries, academic databases, dealing with sources appropriately, and planning out research timelines. This has always been the progression of classes we have suggested.

If you are not headed to college, or know that you will be in the business world after college (hint: everyone is--in some way--once you’re an adult), we’ll be covering such ideas as professional email writing and etiquette, professional letter writing, basics of marketing tone vs. informational tone, working on a project with a team, and drafting strong memos. An example of something we might do in the class is writing copy for a new product a student might promote at conventions or online or writing memos for various purposes. Our young entrepreneurs should be able to clearly show the benefits of their products to a waiting audience.

Collaboration software is widely used in today’s business environment, so we’ll take a brief look at some of the more popular programs being used, such as Slack, Trello, and Google Calendar, which will give students a good idea of what they might encounter in business. Communicating clearly with an employer, your employees, or prospective clients will make everything about your business or employment more rewarding. Lack of effective writing skills is one of the key complaints of employers in survey after survey.

This type of instruction will also help when you deal with companies that you do business with as a customer. As an adult, being able to get help when needed, file a complaint, ask for a refund, or inquire about services that a company provides all fall under the umbrella of business communications. Many adults shy away from dealing with these types of issues because they are frustrated by their inability to get results. Proper communication techniques enable better results more quickly.

Fortunately, good writing is good writing from one arena to another.  Both types of writing require a clear purpose with an end-goal in mind. They both require strong audience awareness and an ability to adjust the techniques used to best address that audience. Both require the ability to organize and sequence ideas in a logical fashion. The writing for both must be clear and concise, precise and specific. Clarity and coherence are emphasized, and proper grammar and punctuation are a must in both settings. Both require integrity and honesty.

Today’s environment requires that both college students and business professionals transform written communication into other forms such as PowerPoint presentations. We’ll spend some time with that as well, talking about best practices and how to keep an audience engaged.

So, the bottom line is always, “Why should I take this course” or “Why should I enroll my child in this course?”  That’s the most important question to answer here. By the end of this course, the students should be able to

•          Complete college-level writing assignments competently and have the knowledge to keep leveling up the sophistication in their writing.
• Understand the core concepts of academic writing whether it is for research papers or other types of writing assignments.
• Acknowledge the audience that any writing project is for (college professor, scholarship committee, prospective clients, employer, employee) and adjust accordingly
• Understand the needs of strong business communications; information required and expected tone
• Write to employers or employees effectively
• Work in a collaborative business or educational environment comfortably
• Approach collaboration software programs with confidence

Our Lukeion parents and students stay with us because of the rigor and the support we provide. Both will remain the same for this course. A broader writing field, same expectations of hard work and integrity, varied and interesting assignments. I hope to see you there this fall!

Not Dead Yet

Latin & Greek are Still Practical

By Amy Barr, dir. Latin at The Lukeion Project

I spend a lot of time at home school conferences talking about the benefits of Latin and Greek during the high school years. People always want to know why they should bother with “dead” languages when live ones seem more exciting or at least more…modern. All things being equal, Spanish, French, or Italian seem pretty interesting and the restaurant field trips can be downright tasty.

Just a few decades ago people seemed to intuit the value of Classical languages.  Then a good education, as had been the case for hundreds of years, depended on a firm foundation in Greek and Latin to ensure a literate and logical mind. At the turn of the last century, for example, even an average high school graduate could handle Cicero, Vergil or Caesar with enough finesse to make a professor proud. Today, even the most ambitious high school student will rarely feel motivated to study these languages for more than two years. Have Latin and Greek fallen out of style?

Let’s look at why Latin and Greek have been foundational since Alexander the Great was just average. When a student first tackles these languages at an advanced level (say, age 13 and older), he will have to experience transformative intellectual changes before he can successfully decode the foreign sentences in front of him. This is a fancy way of saying that Greek and Latin students must jump into the deep end grammatically. There shouldn’t be much time learning how to order food in Latin or driving directions in Classical Greek. Since these languages are primarily learned for the purposes of reading (wherein lies the most benefit), students jump in at a relatively more complex level and advance quickly as they learn decoding skills. Though there are “natural” spoken-Latin programs out there, before moving to Golden Latin authors, a student must master Latin grammar no matter what.

In only chapter 3 of Wheelock, for example, students learn Seneca’s wise observation that nulla copia pecunia avarum virum satiat, “No amount of money satisfies a greedy man,” and therefore modum tenere debemus, “We ought to maintain moderation.”1 Are these lifechanging ancient ideas? Not necessarily but they are also not quick and easy exchanges of basic ideas as is common with learning modern spoken languages.

A Classical language student must always read everything syllable by syllable. This means her analytical skills will increase a thousand-fold as she practices her powers of deduction to decode the ever-changing language puzzles at hand. Progressing more quickly than she would in any spoken language, she rapidly learns to apply language mechanics and analysis to everything from math to music, English to exegesis, and calculus to composition. Learning Latin and Greek will make a student analytical and logical by necessity. She becomes a person who reasons.

Look at how Cicero explains why we humans are different from animals: “But man—because he is endowed with reason, he understands the chain of consequences, observes the causes of things, comprehends the relation of cause to effect and of effect to cause, draws analogies, and, connecting and associating the present and the future, he easily surveys the course of his whole life and makes the necessary preparations for its conduct” (de officiis, 1.11).

Becoming logical, analytical and well-reasoned is just one beneficial side effect. These subjects certainly have an impact on the quality of writing and composition skills, vocabulary, speech, and comprehension. Estimates of how many words have entered English from Latin and Greek start with a conservative 60%. Those who are legal, medical or scientific professionals might say it is closer to 80%. The study of Classical language used to be the primary lens through which we could better understand the mechanics and vocabulary of English. This is why previous generations were so much better at our own language.

Studies conducted by the Educational Testing Service show that Greek and Latin students consistently outperform all other students on the verbal portion of the SAT based on data from the past decade.2 These same studies show that Classics majors tend to have a higher GPA at the college level and have accelerated performance in nearly all other subjects such as math, music and history. According to the Association of American Medical Colleges, students who major in Classics have a better success rate getting into medical school than do students who concentrate solely on science.3 Classics majors also have the highest success rates of any majors in law school.

Latin is now on the decline in all public schools and most private schools. Good luck finding more than a couple of years in most programs. Classical Greek is nearly extinct except at The Lukeion Project. Since 2020, even the small offerings of these topics have stretched so thin that students rarely accomplish more than the basics even as schools extend the period of those basics from two years to three. The Lukeion Project has maintained the traditional high school pace that was the norm 20 years ago.

Consider the results: reasoning, logical, independent learners, thinkers, auto-didacts. Such nonconformists are poorly valued by a world that prefers cookie-cutter educations followed by lack-luster jobs. Home educators and some subsets of conventional students not only grasp the value of these skills but make every effort to achieve them.

Latin and Greek are still fundamental and Cicero was right about anybody who can think analytically: “he who is endowed with reason understands the chain of consequences, observes the causes of things,…easily surveys the course of his whole life and makes the necessary preparations for its conduct.” Golden Latin and Classical Greek aren’t dead. They are still bringing to life the brilliant intellects that we desperately need to frame our future world.    

1 Wheelock, Frederick M., and Richard A. La Fleur. Wheelock's Latin. New York: Harper Collins, 2011. 29. Print.

2 Annual reports from College-Bound Seniors — A Profile of SAT Program Test Takers from years 1999-2005, 2007 available at http://www.bolchazy.com/al/latadv.htm#sat

3 http://www.princetonreview.com/Majors.aspx?page=1&cip=161200

Totally Epic

Ancient but Valuable Life Lessons

By Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

The first powered airplane only flew 12 seconds on its maiden voyage and the first car could only move 2 miles an hour. The first Greek epic, however, was invented even before the finishing touches were put on the Greek alphabet in which it would eventually be recorded. Homer’s Iliad, and his smash sequel the Odyssey, have been moving the world ever since, all while being composed in a form of poetry known as dactylic hexameter. 

You probably have a copy of one of these epics on your bookshelf. You may even have tried to work them into your curriculum with varying levels of success or frustration. With a little background in place, most readers quickly learn that this 3000 year-old literature still offers food for thought and potent words for modern ears.

Troy, known as Ilion/Ilium to the Greeks and Romans and Truva to the modern locals, is a real place you can visit in northwest Turkey. I worked with the excavation team at this well-fortified Bronze Age city and witnessed how most tourists climb the giant Trojan Horse replica for a fast photo before hastily leaving. The site of Troy is no Coliseum or Parthenon because its claim to fame is its destruction. Archaeological evidence suggests that something calamitous happened there around 1180 B.C. when the city was nearly leveled. The relevant parts of the archaeological site look as one might expect for a long destroyed city.

Fast forward around 400 years to find Homer, a blind Greek-speaking poet living in Ionia (western Turkey), earning his keep by reciting a larger-than-life poem about heroes and fair Helen at ill-fated Troy. After the city falls, the Greeks make their way back home. Odysseus has so much misfortune that the poet composes a second epic to cover his 10-year trip back to Ithaca. While Homer included some very reliable details, he also filled in the gaps with tidbits from his own time and a big dash of imagination. He was, after all, making a living in the story-telling trade.

By the 1800’s most scholars dismissed Homer, Troy, and the whole gang, as pure poppycock, asserting all of it had been invented by some ancient creative committee. Puffing their scholarly pipes, they wrote-off a lot of ancient literature as silly figments of antique imagination. Luckily Heinrich Schliemann, a German publicity-loving entrepreneur, got in touch with Frank Calvert who firmly believed he was living at the actual site of Troy. These two began the tradition of using archaeology to vindicate ancient literature while stuffy institutional scholars ate crow.

The Romans believed the Trojan War was their starting point as a civilization. According to tradition, Rome was founded exactly 438 years after the fall of Troy (Velleius Paterculus 8.5). One of her founding fathers, Aeneas, would lead a gang of Trojan refugees from the burning city and settle them near what would eventually become a point of argument for Rome’s namesake Romulus and brother Remus. Be sure to add Vergil’s Aeneid to your reading list if you want the whole epic picture.

The heroes of Homer’s epics lived by a code which would guide behavior from Homer to Alexander the Great.  Uninformed readers might conclude the Trojan War was about stolen Helen or lost love. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was the heroic code that would drive hundreds of Greek ships against Troy, compel Achilles to sit angrily in his tent, force best friend Patroclus to take Achilles’ place on the battlefield and push an army to blockade a city for a full decade.

C. M. Bowra summarized the heroic code this way: 

The great man is he who, being endowed with superior qualities of body and mind, uses them to the utmost and wins the applause of his fellows because he spares no effort and shirks no risk in his desire to make the most of his gifts and to surpass other men in his exercise of them. [i]

The Romans would add their own flair to the heroic code. Vergil’s Aeneas, for example, embodied Roman pietas, a virtue which admonished us to put God, community, and family first before self.

While monsters and swashbuckling adventures keep the reader happy, Homer’s Odyssey is teaching the big life lesson that we are each defined by our generosity to strangers. From prince to farmhand the rule is the same: if you treat strangers with kindness, you’ll be remembered well. Hero Odysseus also teaches us to handle trouble with long-suffering patience so that we’ll eventually make it home safe.   

Ancient epics are an important addition to your reading list. They are a gold mine for further thought and discussion if we don’t insist our kids start on them too young. I recommend waiting until your reader is in the critical thinking stage (13+) because of the weighty issues presented in these stories. Parents will enjoy reading the epics with your junior or senior high student. My favorite translations are by Robert Fagles and Stanley Lombardo.

Originally performed from memory and accompanied by a stringed instrument, these tales were the blockbusters of the ancient world and the backbone of ancient Classical education. I leave you with the important words of Penelope, wife of Odysseus, spurring us on to generosity, 

For how would you ever find out, stranger, whether or not I surpass all other women in presence of mind, if you sit down to dinner squalid and disheveled here in my hall?  Our lives are short. A hard-hearted man is cursed while he lives and reviled in death. But a good-hearted man has his fame spread far and wide by the guests he has honored, and men speak well of him all over the world.[ii]

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[i] C. M. Bowra, The Greek Experience, New York: 1957, pp.20-21

[ii] Stanley Lombardo, trans.,  Odyssey, Hackett Publishing Co., 2000. 19.359-367