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Business Communication

579	Alred, Gerald J. " 'We Regret to Inform You': Toward a New Theory of Negative Messages." Studies in Technical Communication: Selected Papers from the 1992 CCCC and NCTE Meetings. Ed. Brenda R. Sims. CCCC Committee on Technical Communications. 17–36. Five factors determine how direct or indirect the communication of a negative message should be: (1) the reader's and writer's stakes in the message; (2) expectations of the discourse community or culture; (3) the ethos or value the writer wishes to project; (4) the writer's anticipation of the reader's response; and (5) the writer's and reader's personality characteristics. Standard advice to "buffer" negative messages is incorrect. Sometimes a buffered message will appear obtuse or insulting, especially to an American. Hence, the five factors should be consulted. However, many other cultures value indirectness, so American business students should learn indirect style options for use when cultural conditions demand it.
580	Bazerman, Charles, and James Paradis, eds. Textual Dynamics of the Professions: Historical and Contemporary Studies of Writing in Professional Communities. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1990. In the workplace, "textual dynamics are a central agency in the social construction of objects, concepts, and institutions" (4). Fifteen essays examine the textual construction of professions, the dynamics of professional discourse communities, and the operational force of texts. Essays include Charles Bazerman, "How Natural Philosophers Can Cooperate: The Literary Technology of Coordinated Investigation in Joseph Priestley's History and Present State of Electricity (1767)"; Greg Myers, "Stories and Styles in Two Molecular Biology Review Articles"; James Zappen, "Scientific Rhetoric in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Herbert Spencer, Thomas N. Huxley, and John Dewey"; Robert Schwegler and Linda Shamoon, "Meaning Attribution in Ambiguous Texts in Sociology"; Carl Herndl, Barbara Fennell, and Carolyn Miller, "Understanding Failures in Organizational Discourse: The Accident at Three Mile Island and the Shuttle Challenger Disaster"; and Amy Devitt, "Intertextuality in Tax Accounting: Generic, Referential, and Functional."
581	Beard, John D., Jone Rymer, and David L. Williams. "An Assessment System for Collaborative Writing Groups: Theory and Empirical Evaluation." Journal of Business and Technical Communication 3 (September 1989): 29–51. Group writing, ever important in business communication courses because of the prevalence of project teams in industry, is difficult to grade and often produces dissatisfaction among students and teachers. A system applying 50 pecent of the grade to the final product (all group members get the same grade), 25 percent to oral interaction (an individual assessment), and 25 percent to the composing process (an individual assessment) proved to be highly satisfactory to students in this study. This system requires informal observation of group meetings, collecting all working papers, assigning a journal focused on interactions and composing behavior, and a peer evaluation form. Participants reported high motivation to contribute to the group, a positive sense of the learning experience, and a belief that the grades were fair.
582	Beason, Larry. "Ethos and Error: How Business People React to Errors." CCC 53 (September 2001): 33–64. Non-academic readers may not share the notion that errors in written texts are serious only if they impede effective communication. Error must be understood in terms of its impact on judgments made about writers who create errors; at the same time, errors must be defined not as the breaking of handbook rules but as mental events or consequences outside the text. Fourteen business people, identified through purposive sampling, responded to questionnaires designed to gauge error gravity, and follow-up semi-structured interviews revealed that all subjects had concerns about the writer's image. While there are no quantitative formulas for anticipating reactions to errors, people's negative reactions to errors in business discourse seem to center on the writer's credibility and how it is jeopardized by errors. Image problems ranged from that of the hasty, careless writer to the faulty thinker, poor oral communicator, or a representative of the company who can be a liability.
583	Blyler, Nancy Roundy. "Theory and Curriculum: Reexamining the Curricular Separation of Business and Technical Communication." Journal of Business and Technical Communication 7 (1993): 218–45. Business and technical communication have conventionally been separated in academe, a separation supported by institutional practices and by a formalist rhetoric that posits business communication as chiefly persuasive and technical writing as chiefly informative. Social-epistemic rhetoric, which links language with knowledge and centers on the social context of discourse rather than taxonomies of finished products, posits that discourse does not reflect reality but presents visions of reality that have been accepted as true. Social-epistemic rhetoric treats both business and technical writing as thoroughly rhetorical, a view confirmed by studies of workplace writing. The curricular division has thus lost its rationale. Teaching that emphasizes the ways that social context influences content and form decisions is superior to labeling and dividing typical forms. Students are better served when they learn about the social construction of knowledge and the ways it illuminates the production and reception of workplace communication. See: Nancy Roundy Blyler and Charlotte Thralls, eds. Professional Communication: The Social Perspective [552].
584	Brown, Robert L., Jr., and Carl G. Herndl. "An Ethnographic Study of Corporate Writing: Job Status as Reflected in Written Text." Functional Approaches to Writing: Research Perspectives. Ed. Barbara Couture. London: Francis Pinter, 1986, 11–28. Despite convincing research, commonsense observation, and direct instruction, some professionals continue to use ineffective techniques such as excessive nominalization and long project narratives in their writing. These features appear to be signs of status and anxiety rather than decisions about effective writing. In a study, nominalization was greater for those whose job position had changed or seemed vulnerable. It was also greater in writing for the eyes of upper management and greater generally for those who worked in a corporation undergoing internal reorganization. Nominalization appears to be an attempt to be hypercorrect and to show sophistication. Inappropriate narration seems to come most from young technical professionals who are maintaining a distance from decision making (which depends on interpretation, not narration) and mirroring scientific method. These and perhaps other instances of less effective writing choices reflect social circumstances in the workplace. Stress tends to reduce fluency; nominalization and narration tend to preserve anonymity; hypercorrection reflects insecurity about status. These forces are more powerful than conscious knowledge about preferred writing conventions. See: Janis Forman, New Visions of Collaborative Writing [398].
585	Cross, Geoffrey A. "The Interrelation of Genre, Context, and Process in the Collaborative Writing of Two Corporate Documents." Writing in the Workplace: New Research Perspectives [575]. To consider how textual features are produced in organizational cultures by collaborators, this ethnographic study describes the collaborative writing of an executive letter and planning report for a large insurance corporation. Bakhtinian theory generates a view of group writing based upon the political situation and genre: group writing as cacophony, as monotone, and as symphony. In this study, generic and contextual differences helped create two very different collaborative processes: cacophony occurred in the letter-writing process because writers had different perceptions of the composite audience and of standard English. The subsequent report-writing process, on the other hand, was more monovocal as a result of a more stable corporate culture, a more multivocal genre, and postproduction re-routing. The interaction of genre and context caused a conflictive process with the letter and an accordant process with the report; genre and social forces must be considered together. More real-world studies of group writing of different genres need to be conducted to trace how generic conventions and social forces shape the group-writing process.
586	Geisler, Cheryl, et al. "Itext: Future Directions for Research on the Relationship between Information Technology and Writing." Journal of Business and Technical Communication 15.3 (July 2001): 269–309. Information technology (IT) used in text-centered interactions appears to be altering the very character of texts and the interactions of those who use them. Research on ITexts, (e-mail and the like), brings together and draws from a variety of research traditions that provide foundational understandings of ITexts: rhetorical theory, activity theory, literacy studies, genre theory, usability research, and workplace writing. Because specific issues arise when texts move from print to online, IT research must take into account, for example, the interplay of visual and verbal, credibility, or information overload. ITexts are bound to have an influence on the digital divide, organizational life, education, and everyday life. Building on skills and concepts derived from a rhetorical tradition that is design-oriented, research on IText must acknowledge the complexity of the meaning-making process, the historical forces that shape interactions with texts, and the powerful impact these new electronic environments are having on society.
587	Hagge, John. "The Process Religion and Business Communication." Journal of Business Communication 24 (Winter 1987), 89–120. Process activists argue that rigorous empirical research supports their claim of the superiority of process over product. However, process research suffers from many flaws, such as the assumption of protocol reliability and the tiny number of cases studied. Moreover, some research confirms that writers may prefer linear to recursive processing. Process pedagogy is problematic, even vacuous, often amounting to nothing more than repackaging of standard procedures. Process advocates often use mystical language in their claims for the liberatory effects of the process method. This utopianism arises from misunderstandings of the difference between linguistic competence and performance and from an arguable assumption about the existence of prior mental processes. Aside from its questionable basis in theory, the process method is inappropriate for business writing, which depends upon textual predictability and context-linked effectiveness.
588	Henry, Jim. Writing Workplace Cultures: An Archaeology of Professional Writing. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2000. A sea change in theoretical movements and technologies have reshaped the very conceptualization of writing; given this shift, composition must attend to a growing class of professional writers by investigating subjectivity based on empirical findings in workplace cultures. Over a seven-year period, eighty-four writers enrolled in an MA program in professional writing and editing conducted ethnographic analyses of workplace cultures and served as research subjects for this study, based on Foucault's concept of archaeological work. Researchers in a Cultures of Professional Writing class conducted autoethnographic work and engaged in intersubjective research; the results help to bring together academic understandings of subjectivity and lived workplace realities for a greater understanding of subjective work identities. Construing work sites as fieldwork sites gives writers the opportunity to take stock of the organizational structures and processes of workplaces and empowers them as a professional class by helping them to understand cultural production via writing in organizational sites. Composition theory aimed at exploring agency should consider the many workplace subject positions constructed in specific organizational contexts and must revisit theories of authorship. Appendices include researchers' abstracts of workplace ethnographies.
589	Jameson, Daphne. "Telling the Investment Story: A Narrative Analysis of Shareholder Reports." The Journal of Business Communication 37.7 (2000): 37–44. When the situation is complex in terms of ambiguous content, technical subject matter, and challenging writing processes, analyzing such documents as narratives offers a better understanding of writers' options and the implications of their choices. Studies of shareholder reports have rarely drawn on narrative theory; however, two methodological approaches, reading them as narratives and analyzing them as written texts, led to complementary conclusions about a random sample of shareholder reports, including all verbal components but excluding numerical components. Three dimensions create the report's story: level of directness or indirectness, underlying fabula, and the theme. The mixed-return reports were less direct than the top-return reports, with statistically significant differences. The mixed-return reports also develop a variety of themes (e.g., blame) that defy simple categorization as direct or indirect; mixed-return reports encourage readers to participate in constructing the story; offer multiple narrators; embed a variety of subgenres; and develop a nonlinear narrative hyperstructure. Each narrative element has both verbal and visual manifestations that interact with one another. Winner of Outstanding Article for 2000 in The Journal of Business Communication.
590	Jameson, Daphne A. "Using a Simulation to Teach Intercultural Communication in Business Communication Courses." Bulletin of the Association for Business Communication 56 (March 1993): 3–11. It is nearly impossible to explain the enormous variety of cultural differences using real cultural information. Moreover, presenting cultural "differences" masks the fact that Western culture is also "different." Simulation games have, however, been successful in sensitizing people to the nature of cultural difference as well as providing concrete suggestions about successful interaction. In simulations, participants assume a role spelled out for them by instructions, then interact in character. Debriefings following the game are reliably lively, revealing a vast range of cultural assumptions and ideas for improving intercultural relations. Jameson describes a successful simulation game in which participants learn to represent three invented cultures coming together in a business venture.
591	Kogen, Myra, ed. Writing in the Business Professions. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1989. Fourteen essays investigate professional and pedagogical concerns in the development of business communication as an academic discipline. Essays include Linda Flower, "Rhetorical Problem Solving: Cognition and Professional Writing"; Jack Selzer, "Arranging Business Prose"; Edward P. J. Corbett, "What Classical Rhetoric Has to Offer the Teacher of Business and Professional Writing"; Janice Redish, "Writing in Organizations"; George Gopen, "The State of Legal Writing: Res Ipsa Loquitur"; John DiGaetani, "Use of the Case Method in Teaching Business Communication"; David Lauerman, "Building Ethos: Field Research in a Business Communication Course"; C. H. Knoblauch, "The Teaching and Practice of 'Professional Writing'"; and John Brereton, "The Professional Writing Program and the English Department." See: Mary M. Lay and William M. Karis, eds., Collaborative Writing in Industry: Investigations in Theory and Practice [565]. See: Kitty O. Locker, "What Do Writers in Industry Write?" [566].
592	Locker, Kitty O. "Factors in Reader Responses to Negative Letters: Experimental Evidence for Changing What We Teach." Journal of Business and Technical Communication 13.1 (January 1999): 5–48. Traditional textbook advice about writing negative messages—a set of six principles, including the use of a buffer—has been contradicted by empirical evidence and various points of critique. Two bodies of evidence suggest that it is time to change what we teach about the content and arrangement of negative messages: a summary of the scholarly debate over the past twenty years, and studies conducted on negative messages in recent years. Most of the quantitative research on negative messages deals with content and arrangement, and the literature provides the most support for the principle "explain why you are refusing." This researcher tested with university students three of the traditional principles—use a buffer, place the reason before the refusal, and end on a positive note—with a credit refusal pretest design and a graduate school rejection experiment design. Pretests and experiments suggest that in negative letters, buffers do not matter, strong resale is counterproductive, and giving a brief reason before refusal makes people more likely to say the decision is fair. Also tested were the effects of gender and situational context, but results suggest that gender is not a factor in readers' responses to negative messages. Implications for writers of negative letters are outlined, along with implications for further research.
593	Matalene, Carolyn B., ed. Worlds of Writing: Teaching and Learning in Discourse Communities of Work. New York: Random House, 1989. Adequate understanding of writing in the workplace cannot be provided by traditional academic analyses of texts and processes. The special concerns of collaborative writing, audience constraints, and the conventions of workplace writing must become part of the undergraduate writing curriculum. Twenty-three essays analyze discourse communities of work, including Kristin Woolever, "Coming to Terms with Different Standards for Excellence for Written Communication"; Stephen Doheny-Farina, "A Case Study of One Adult Writing in Academic and Nonacademic Discourse Communities"; Janette Lewis, "Adaptation: Business Writing as Catalyst in a Liberal Arts Curriculum"; Theresa Enos, "Rhetoric and the Discourse of Technology"; Nancy Wilds, "Writing in the Military: A Different Mission"; Janis Forman, "The Discourse Communities and Group Writing Practices of Management Students"; Carolyn Matalene, "A Writing Teacher in the Newsroom"; Aletha Hendrickson, "How to Appear Reliable without Being Liable: C.P.A. Writing in Its Rhetorical Context"; Philip Rubens, "Writing for an On Line Age: The Influence of Electronic Text on Writing"; John Warnock, "To English Professors: On What to Do with a Lawyer"; and James Raymond, "Rhetoric and Bricolage: Theory and Its Limits in Legal and Other Sorts of Discourse." See: Lee Odell and Dixie Goswami, eds., Writing in Nonacademic Settings [571].
594	Rogers, Priscilla S. "Analytic Measures for Evaluating Managerial Writing." Journal of Business and Technical Communication 8 (October 1994): 380–407. Persuasiveness, not correctness, is the most desirable quality of good managerial writing. But persuasiveness is difficult to judge. Holistic evaluation—widely used for M.B.A. writing assessment—does not provide a useful tool for identifying persuasiveness, and is not useful for teaching or research. Two other assessment tools are superior. One, the Analysis of Argument Measure, assesses writing in terms of Toulmin's argument attributes—claim, data, and warrant. Evaluators were able to reach a high degree of consistency in the tests of this measure. The other tool, the Persuasiveness Adaptiveness Measure, assesses writing in terms of achieving the desired reader response. Higher scores are awarded to writing that is clear about recommendations, deals with potential reader objections, demonstrates the desirability of the recommendation, and so on. Here, too, graders reached a high degree of consistency. While high scores on these two measures do not ensure success, the measures do identify important elements of persuasive writing and can sensitize writers to rhetorical considerations. See: Rachel Spilka, ed., Writing in the Workplace: New Research Perspectives [575].
595	Rogers, Priscilla S. and Jone Rymer. "Analytical Tools to Facilitate Transitions Into New Writing Contexts: A Communicative Perspective." The Journal of Business Communication 38.2 (April 2001): 112–50. How can we help writers move into new writing contexts? What writing skills carry over from context to context? A field study using essays from the Analytical Writing Assessment (AWA) of the GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) led to the development of a set of analytical tools for diagnosing students' potential problems in MBA writing assignments. MBA writing experts and students in two contrasting business schools participated in this exploratory field study, designed to explore how to use the AWA to help new graduate students identify deficiencies that might interfere with their development as effective MBA writers. The study identified and described traits for successful performance in MBA writing and developed them into analytical tools for use in consultations with students; these tools were subsequently tested for their appropriateness in bridging discourses.
596	Smart, Graham. "Storytelling in a Central Bank: The Role of Narrative in the Creation and Use of Specialized Economic Knowledge." Journal of Business and Technical Communication 13.3 (July 1999): 249–73. Narrative plays an important role in professional discourse and a central part in the analytic and policy work of Bank of Canada economists. Both genre theory and distributed cognition theory contribute to understanding the collaborative process of narrative construction. A view of genre that encompasses "an organization's drama of interaction" clarifies the nature of the collaboration through which an organizational narrative is constructed and used. Distributed cognition, an extension of activity theory, attends to the symbolic representations that groups employ for reasoning and for accomplishing work. One particular narrative—the monetary-policy story—operates as a vehicle of organizational thought, evolving across a number of written genres, and serves several purposes within the institution. Eventually the monetary-policy story, presented in one version of the White Book, is used by the bank's executives as a shared cognitive and rhetorical resource for conducting and communicating policy. A wide variety of qualitative data, collected over several years, traces how the monetary-policy story is constructed in three stages, over time and across a set of written genres and how knowledge-making is constructed within a professional organization.
597	Suchan, Jim. "The Effect of High-Impact Writing on Decision Making within a Public Sector Bureaucracy." The Journal of Business Communication 35.3 (July 1998): 299–328. Readers interpreting reports written in a high-impact style—theoretically more effective—did not make significantly better decisions than readers interpreting the same report written in a bureaucratic, low-impact style, one in keeping with the organization's norm. Organizational context factors—perceived work roles, job design, organizational structure, report genre expectations, and organizational language norms—were more important for readers' assessments of reports than high-impact style. Report Assessors at a medium-size federal government agency make decisions solely on the written reports of Information Gatherers. Seven report characteristics were revised to reflect high-impact writing; however, because they had developed a variety of creative means to sort and organize information, Report Assessors perceived the high-impact treatments as abnormal discourse. Both qualitative and statistical data were used to conclude that the theoretical frameworks and the assumptions that shape teaching in business and managerial writing need to be seriously re-examined.
598	Sullivan, Patricia and Jennie Dautermann. Electronic Literacies in the Workplace: Technologies of Writing. Urbana: NCTE, 1996. Fourteen chapters in four sections address issues of written literacy and electronic literacy in workplace settings and the challenges to traditional views of writing. Chapters include the following: Jennie Dautermann, "Writing with Electronic Tools in Midwestern Businesses"; Brenda R. Sims, "Electronic Mail in Two Corporate Workplaces"; Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber, "After Automation: Hypertext and Corporate Structures"; Tharon W. Howard, "Who 'Owns' Electronic Texts?"; Craig J. Hansen, "Networking Technology in the Classroom: Whose Interests Are We Serving?"; Nancy Allen, "Gaining Electronic Literacy: Workplace Simulations in the Classroom"; Robert R. Johnson, "Tales from the Crossing: Professional Communication Internships in the Electronic Workplace"; Cynthia L. Selfe, "Theorizing E-Mail for the Practice, Instruction, and Study of Literacy"; James E. Porter and Patricia Sullivan, "Working across Methodological Interfaces: The Study of Computers and Writing in the Workplace."
599	Tyler, Lisa. "Ecological Disaster and Rhetorical Response: Exxon's Communications in the Wake of the Valdez Spill." Journal of Business and Technical Communication 6 (April 1992): 149–71. Following the Valdez spill, Exxon contributed to public perceptions of its corporate arrogance through eleven communication practices that damaged its credibility and antagonized the public. These include understating the likelihood of a spill and overstating the company's ability to respond; slow response by corporate leaders following the spill; refusing help by local residents; emphasizing its efforts rather than its accomplishments; excessive optimism; presenting itself as a victim; attempting to control information flow; and anger and rudeness. Exxon fell into a spiral of defensive communication, blaming others, attempting to maintain control, and generally being self-regarding. This is an excellent case for teaching about ethical business practices and crisis communication, for the implications—regarding promises, responsibilities, and post-crisis behavior—are exceptionally clear.
600	Varner, Iris, and Linda Beamer. Intercultural Communication in the Workplace. Boston: Irwin McGraw-Hill, 1995. Both domestic diversity and international commerce demand competence in intercultural communication. Culture is a learned, coherent view of the world that determines what is important, evaluates attitudes, and dictates behavior. High-context cultures rely on complex and implicit messages, value relationships, and avoid giving negative messages. Low-context cultures make messages explicit and value directness. Cultures differ in terms of their assumptions about the source of knowledge (e.g., from received wisdom or from experiment), about the value of doing versus being, about the centrality of the individual or the group, about privacy and authority. Students can learn to use basic differences, and categories of questions to ask. By knowing some of the basic differences among cultures and the implications of interpersonal, group, and written communication when applied to each, students can broaden their repertoire of behaviors and become successful at intercultural communication. Twelve chapters cover these topics plus nonverbal communication, information gathering and decision making, negotiation, legal concerns, and the impact of business structures on relationships.