Carol David

Mythmaking in Annual Reports

Annual reports produced today increasingly include elaborate photographs and graphics in the narrative section. Financial analysts and many scholars have judged these reports on their clarity, accuracy, and honesty. Because the narrative invites interpretations, such criteria are not sufficient, and additional standards need to be constructed. A semiological analysis of the textual and visual elements allows for the discovery of the techniques used by document designers to promote their companies’ values. Artistic images may encourage positive readings of annual reports, which, combined with similar messages in other media and repeated over time, invoke cultural myths. By definition, myths are broadly accepted commonplaces that conceal details of their subject, and communicators must expose the missing details and judge the myths within a specific context. This kind of analysis, acknowledging the constraints of the rhetorical situation of a single report, can identify effective criteria for judging the narratives ethics.

Rereading Bad News: Compliance-Gaining Features in Management Memos

In this study we apply compliance-gaining theory to actual memos to determine if the principles explain the content and style of the memos, written by managers to their subordinates. The memos represent two tasks of managers: reminding employ ees of accepted behavior they have neglected to follow and announcing changes in policies and procedures. A textual analysis shows that features of compliance gain ing governing message production do explicate the power base, verbal strategies, and tactics, as well as the negotiating process underlying these memos. On the other hand, the advice for delivering bad news—buffer, reasons, implied refusal, and positive ending—does not describe the text of these memos. In addition, many con textual features are foregrounded in a compliance-gaining analysis of the memos. Compliance-gaining theory, with its grounding in organizational behavior, may be more appropriate in analyzing management memos than the bad news formula, which is based on sales principles.

Decorative Color as a Rhetorical Enhancement on the World Wide Web

Professional communication scholars have defined the decorative narrowly and subordinated it to informational text. Yet, current psychological research indicates that decorative elements elicit emotion-laden reactions that may precede cognitive awareness and influence interpretation of images. We conceive the decorative in design, and specifically color, as a complex rhetorical phenomenon. Applying decorative and color theory and analyzing design examples illustrating aesthetic, ethical, and logical appeals, we present a range of potential uses for color in electronic media.

After Enron Integrating Ethics into the Professional Communication Curriculum

Recent scandals in the business community have alerted professional writing teachers to the importance of highlighting ethics in the curriculum. From former experiences in teaching courses emphasizing ethics, the authors have adapted the curriculum to include a limited discussion of ethical approaches and terms and assigned group writing projects that consider the effects of business on the broader community. As a result of the integration of this ethical component into the entire course, students learn major ethical approaches; gain a vocabulary of ethical terms they can apply in the business world; interrogate the larger questions of business and its interactions with the local, national, and international community; and engage in the kind of dialectical discussions that require critical thinking.

Towards an emancipatory pedagogy in service courses and user departments

Critical thinking has led teachers of service courses and their user departments into common pedagogies. Motivated by calls from industry for students with problem‐solving abilities, both service courses and their user departments have incorporated higher‐level thinking modes into their assignments. Applying the interpretive mode of rationality posited by Habermas, innovative teachers are changing their pedagogical methods from the simple transference of information from teacher to student to assignments requiring team projects where students grapple with parametric problem solving that demands interpreting complex data. Applying the emancipatory mode of rationality, some assignments involve outside clients and working with community‐based social and political issues.

Conflicting Values Team Management Portrayed in Epic Metaphors

This article analyzes a CEOs use of extended epic metaphor in building corporate culture. Whereas much of the research on managements use of narrative has examined shorter stories and anecdotes, here the authors analyze the text of a speech written by a newly hired CEO for his upper management team. The speech, which was never delivered but was instead sent out in a leadership manual to managers in the conglomerate, begins with a narrative history of the CEOs first five months in office. In his description of events, the metaphoric language suggesting heroes and competition contradicts the principles of team management that the CEO intends to implement throughout the company. These heroic metaphors valorize individual achievement, agency, and action—values more likely to be familiar to the business culture than the cooperative values of teams. Drawn from war and sports metaphors common in the language of the popular American lexicon, the images generate more excitement and appeal than those of cooperative planning inherent in team management systems.

Power and Politeness: Administrative Writing in an “Organized Anarchy”

In addition to reflecting the social and power relationships between the writer and the reader as well as the degree of imposition, politeness strategies in administrative writing also reflect the values of the organization. Operating in the egalitarian climate perpetuated in a university setting, administrators obscured their legitimate power when they wrote nonroutine memos to faculty. Hiding and de-emphasizing their empowerment by using indirectness, tentativeness, indebtedness, and personalization, academic administrators achieved a high level of politeness. This intensified politeness contrasts with the moderated politeness used in a corporation that openly accepts hierarchy and promotes efficiency. This study, therefore, offers a context-based approach to analyzing administrative writing, an approach that can be used to uncover discourse strategies in other organizational sites.

The Rhetoric of Power: Political Issues in Management Writing.

Power, determined by rank, can be a primary determinant of how communication acts are structured by the writer and perceived by the reader. The sales model underpinning traditional business communication principles does not consider the effect of such power in memos written by managers to subordinates. Three rhetorical and linguistic strategies that reflect the construct of power in managerial communication are projecting leadership, assuming commonality, and controlling information. These strategies, which have not been sufficiently considered in theoretical and applied research, suggest the need to consider new ways of articulating principles for management communication.

Investitures of Power: Portraits of Professional Women.

As women take part in the workforce in greater numbers and in higher positions, they need representation in visual images that will signify their achievements. Because portraits of women have for centuries highlighted their beauty and passivity, the poses, expressions, and props chosen in the past elicit similar readings in current professional womens photographs, readings in opposition to the typical power and authority awarded to male portraits. Womens portrait features may signify a more friendly and open personality than the formal male portrait shows and often represent womens interests and professional affiliations. Currently working women choose a wide variety of poses and props, and cultural readings of the features of portraits have begun to change. A trend towards more informal poses has allowed mens and womens portraits to use some of the same features. Communicators can help to change the conventionalized readings of womens portraits through careful document design that highlights women and their achievements.

Report on Standards for a Business Communication Composition Course: Results of a Survey.

Courses in business communication have expanded rapidly in the last decade. As a result, many departments have set up new courses, and departments with established courses have developed new policies to meet the demand of increased enrollments. For the purpose of learning what policies and standards are in use, the Undergraduate Studies Committee of the ABCA surveyed members of the association as one of its 1980 projects.