John Hagge

Linguistic Politeness in Professional Prose A Discourse Analysis of Auditors' Suggestion Letters, with Implications for Business Communication Pedagogy

Consonant with a trend toward investigating professional writing in naturalistic settings, this discourse-analytical study of a corpus of “suggestion letters” written in a Big Eight accounting firm demonstrates how auditors use negative politeness strategies to meet the complex demands of potentially threatening interactional situations. The study substantiates Brown and Levinsons claim that politeness is a linguistic universal by showing that the same politeness strategies found in speech also occur in written communication. Analysis of negative message strategies in ten leading textbooks shows that business communication pedagogy needs to modify strictures on the use of passives, nominalizations, expletive constructions, and hedging particles in light of research on the exigencies of real-world linguistic interaction.

The First Technical Writer in English: A Challenge to the Hegemony of Chaucer:

The claim that Geoffrey Chaucer was “the first technical writer in English,” which appears several times in the recent literature on the history of technical writing in early English, misleads because numerous Middle English technical prose texts either precede Chaucers Treatise on the Astrolabe or are contemporaneous with it. In fact, an important tradition of technical writing exists in both Old and Middle English and extends through the English Renaissance. Historians of technical writing will find it more profitable to investigate the tradition of English practical prose than to find further firsts for their field.

Early Engineering Writing Textbooks and the Anthropological Complexity of Disciplinary Discourse

The evolution of technical communication conventions in America is more anthropologically complex than the traditional linkage to the scientific plain-style tradition suggests. Analysis of leading ideas in early 20th-century engineering writing textbooks and other primary sources demonstrates that disciplinary discourse conventions develop from an intricate nexus of human motivations, beliefs, and social activity. This article explores currents in American social and intellectual history that explain this complex, sophisticated view of language, which combines a rhetorically sensitive formalism with the ideas of professional literacy and cultural reading to facilitate communication with various audiences and to reinforce the status and dignity of the emerging profession.

The Value of Formal Conventions in Disciplinary Writing: An Axiological Analysis of Professional Style Manuals.

The value of formal writing conventions has been diminished in mainstream composition scholarship; although research on occupational writing suggests that formal conventions are important, these findings are hard to generalize. This study, a content analysis of 12 professional style manuals, achieves generalizability by elucidating the institutional norms of disciplinary writing (a subset of occupational writing to which much scientific and technical writing belongs). Formal conventions prove to be highly valued. More important, the use of formal conventions often is justified on rhetorical grounds, suggesting that the dichotomy between formalist and rhetorical axiologies posited in composition scholarship is false.

Presenting the Teacher-Based Case: Discourse Analysis in the Business Communication Class

Case assignments have a venerable history in business communication. But recently Marilyn Butler has argued (Bulletin, September 1985) that many cases force students to assume professional roles with which they have little acquaintance. Moreover, authors of cases catch themselves on the horns of a dilemma. If they deliberately write vague, ambiguous cases to test students’ interpretive powers, students either get lost or read into

On the Value of Computer-aided Instruction: Thoughts after Teaching Sales Writing in a Computer Classroom.

Articles on computer-aided writing instruction have not yet begun to dominate The Journal of Business Communication and The Bulletin as they do College English or College Composition and Commlmicatiun, for example. Nonetheless, judging from paper topics at recent national and regional conferences, many ABC members are interested in teaching their students to compose with computers. Although some educators argue that the new computer technology presents powerful inducements to change traditional, time-tested teaching techniques, hard evidence to support such claims seems noticeably absent to date. Therefore, business communication instructors easily may become impaled on the horns of a dilemma

Responses to Bowman's "Review Essay: Megatrends: Unshocking the Future"

producing these things, (5) the people of the world differ greatly in the way they produce these things (some are still living in caves, still nomads, still tilling the soil by hand or ox, still undergoing their industrial revolution), (6) the United States, for whose people Naisbitt, Tofller, and company write, is not the whole world (thank God!), (7) computers are not, and never will, be capable of wisdom, and (8) data bases do not by themselves produce progeny, so there will always be need of consultants and their bases, the universities. Three cheers for Bowman! He has written what we need to read, digest, and continue to consider. But let us also rememher that &dquo;of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body&dquo; (Ecclesiastes 12:12).

Review Essay: Research in Technical Communication: A Bibliographic Sourcebook

RESEARCH IN TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION is a superb resource. Its somewhat steep price of

The Spurious Paternity of Business Communication Principles

57.50 notwithstanding, RTC belongs on the shelf of anyone interested in business, technical, even legal communication. Teachers and practitioners alike will welcome the book’s wealth of bibliographic citations, its comprehensive coverage, and its diversity of topics. Although primarily intended to advance work in technical communication, RTC contains several business-oriented chapters. All ABC members should profit from this valuable volume. Many no doubt will be provoked by one of its motifs-the contention that much business communication research is mediocre and inconclusive. Table 1 lists the author, title, number of pages, and number of citations for each bibliographic essay in RTC. This synopsis shows how widely RTC ranges, how much coverage a particular topic gets, and where research is scant. The final column in Table 1, somewhat facetiously dubbed Density of Information, gives the average number of citations per page in each article. Generally, lower numbers characterize essays that treat individual bibliographic items in some detail; higher DI numbers mark essays that rapidly survey much material. Having delivered an encomium on the book’s overall worth, now let