Document Design - Volume 1, Issue 3, 1999

Genre is realization of a set of communicative purposes embedded in recurring rhetorical contexts displaying typical cognitive structuring. Most professional documents display their typical 'generic integrity' which is often identifiable in terms of a combination of text-internal and text-external factors. Although generic integrity is somewhat flexible and fluid, and dependent on participant relationship and institutional discursive practices, it is one of the important contributors to effective and successful design and development of professional and public documents. In this paper, I would like to consider examples of public documents from legal and business settings to focus on the generic integrity of these documents in the context of issues like the simplification and easification of legal documents, selection and appropriation of linguistic resources in the textualization of professional genres, reader accessibility of professional and public discourse, suggesting implications for the writer's commitment to the intended message and readership(s), in the act of document design, and the relationship between the design and performance of professional documents in their real contexts of use.

This paper focuses on the way in which production tasks — in this case writing an instructive text — can provide us with data, which can be used to evaluate textual variables which are assumed to be relevant in processing, using, and hence designing instructive texts. The second and third sections describe the set-up and results of a production experiment in which subjects had to write an instructive text given one of two users' conditions: they had to assume that their readers either had to execute the instruction only once (reading-to-do) or that they had to learn the instructions described (read-ing-to-learn). This independent variable was claimed to have an effect on the strategies writers choose, in particular on the way in which they use two important types of information in instructive discourse, goal vs action information. As such, this experiment sheds light on the interaction between use conditions and design characteristics of instructive documents. As the method used in the experiment is not self-evident in assessing the effectiveness of text design variables, the last section evaluates the use of production tasks as a way of replicating, amending, refining and perhaps even outperforming data obtained from other methods.

This paper presents a model designed to analyze written business genres within their business context. Within a context specified at the levels of organization, business sector and business community, business genres are studied with respect to writing, distribution and reading practices. As such, the model extends beyond generic textual features and allows analyses of individual and collective writing activities and textual choices writers make (i.e., writing practices), the selection of particular channels and text formats for generic textualizations (i.e., distribution practices), and the way recipients read genre texts and make choices based on their readings (i.e., reading practices). In the model, the actual analysis of textual features of genre texts is clearly embedded in a wider situational framework. This paper argues that such a framework is a prerequisite for a proper understanding of textual realizations of business genres. Moreover, it provides business professionals with a tool to design texts that are effective responses to specific communicative needs.

Wim Pols (45) is Chief Editor of the Editorial Department of the Corporate Communications and Strategy Division of ING Group, a diversified financial services group headquartered in the Netherlands with more than 90,000 employees in over 60 countries. Wim and his team do the speechwritingforthe Executive Board and produce several publications such as regular bulletins for shareholders, brochures, financial reports and special project bulletins.Wim Pols started his career as a translator with the shipyard Wilton-Fijenoord in 1973 and switched to corporate communications after a few years. In 1983, he joined the insurance company Nationale-Nederlanden as a writer for the international staff magazine. Later, he became editor of corporate publications of Nationale-Nederlanden. When the company merged with the NMB-Postbank Group to become ING Group, Wim Pols began to work for the holding, where he built up the Editorial Department.

This paper extends the concept of genres of organizational communication proposed by Yates and Orlikowski (1992), to allow for the contextualized linguistic analysis of genre text-ualizations in multinational organizations. It does so by drawing on the findings from previous studies that have reported on cross- and inter-cultural variation in business genres and also on the work of genre analysts working in the fields of applied linguistics, organizational communication and rhetoric. The analytical constructs of Context and Situation are first discussed and this is followed by Genre and its formal and substantive characteristics. The final section of the paper outlines the approach to the linguistic analysis of discourse provided by Bhatia (1993), and shows how this may be of particular relevance to organizational communication across cultures.