Document Design - Volume 2, Issue 1, 2000

This paper aims to compare the persuasive strategies used by English and Chinese letters of invitation to trade fairs, from a sociocognitive perspective mainly based on genre study (Swales, 1990) and schema theory (Rumelhart, 1980). Cross-cultural persuasive strategies involving ethos, logos, and pathos are compared in a top-down process. In this approach, a corpus of forty letters of invitation (twenty in Chinese and twenty in English) was examined. It was found that although the English and Chinese letters share the ultimate goal of inviting the reader to the trade fair, they exhibit di¬erent preferences as to whether they appeal to emotion or to logic. The English invitations were found to appeal strongly to logic. The Chinese invitations, by contrast, tended to emphasize an appeal both to logic and to the emotions; the latter is characterized by a formal and respectful register.

Karen A. Schriver is the author of dynamics in document design: creating texts for readers, an extensive, multidimensional portrait of what readers need from documents and of ways to integrate word and image in order to better meet those needs. She is the former codirector of the graduate program in technical communication and document design at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania). She has been a visiting professor at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands and at the University of Washington in Seattle. A popular speaker, she has presented her ideas in Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, and across the United States. Winner of five awards for her research, she now heads her own company, KSA Document Design & Research. She helps organizations improve the quality of their paper and electronic communications through strategies based on research and best practices. She is now working on a book about the nature of expertise in information design. When she is not writing, working with clients, or running to catch a plane, she spends time playing with her two crazy dogs: Cody (a Bearded Collie) and Tika (a little Muttley). She can be contacted via e-mail at: [email protected]

This paper attempts to identify linguistic regularity underlying text-internal type variation by analyzing three different text types in relevance-theoretic, pragmatic perspective, and suggests a unitary text-classification criterion. It is assumed that text type variation is a matter of how tightly or loosely the text producer constrains the text interpretation by controlling the verbal givenness of information. This assumption is tested through the analysis of text interpretation processes focusing on what types of utterances and referring expressions are used in each different text type (academic text, news text, poetic text) following the relevance-theoretic account of utterance type variation. The result of the analysis shows that a certain degree of interpretative constraint at the utterance level is kept constant throughout a text and that text types vary according to the degrees of interpretative constraint. Such a finding provides a theoretical basis for explaining how text types form a continuum for practical relevance.

In an electronic publication environment, a scienti¼c article can be structured more e¬ectively and e~ciently if it is presented as a coherent collection of well-characterized and explicitly linked modules, rather than as a traditional linear essay. In a linear printed article, the abstract primarily ful¼lls a selection and substitution function. In a network of modular electronic articles, the abstract is primarily an orientation tool providing insight into the ½ow of the discourse. In order to ful¼ll this function, the abstract must provide a balanced representation that explicitly refers, in the informative mode, to the main stages in the problem-solving process. The orientation can be facilitated by hypertext links that connect phrases of the abstract to the related modules, enabling the reader to switch smoothly between the abstract and its source text. Each link has to carry a label that informs the reader about the speci¼c relationship between the phrase at hand and the module referred to.