A primary goal of most introductory business and technical communication courses is to introduce students to the idea that the professional communication most of them will engage in is different from the writing they do for academic purposes. This overall idea covers several principles concerning professional writing. However, implementing active learning that applies these principles authentically can be challenging. The makeup of many business and technical communication courses means that not all students share expertise in a given field that they can draw on for common assignments. In this article, the author describes the radio public service announcement (PSA) assignment, which aims to provide students with a real communication situation in which they would be asked to grasp a specific rhetorical context, select content from knowledge available to them, and employ organizational and stylistic strategies appropriate to a particular medium. This need to apply concepts from professional communication to a real situation leads to productive class discussions in which students learn the importance of context. Through this assignment, students engage in a process, in miniature, that they can use for future professional communication tasks. (Contains 1 note.)