Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen - Volume 28, Issue 1, 1987

In this article some comments are made on research into business communication as a new vogue in applied linguistics (instead of as enrichment in text linguistics). Critical remarks are also made, in terms of cost-benefit analysis, about the difficulties that liberal arts students have in finding a job within a business setting.The main part of this article is devoted to the writing and rewriting of instruction texts, with an example of the instruction for use of a steam iron. The rewriting techniques for clarifying this text are reduced to the suitability principle and maxims like the maxim of motivation and the maxim of disambiguity. Within this theoretical framework the (re)writing of business texts can be more than an activity for the Muses and will be of benefit to Mercury in enhancing the effectivity of instruction manuals and other texts.

A communication audit is a way to explore the communicative health of an organization. Following the audit of the International Communication Association (ICA) objectives and characteristics are expounded in this article. The emphasis falls on the description of a project involving the Dutch Telephone Company (PTT-Telecommunicatie). The research described in this article addresses two subjects:a. information needs of employeesBy means of interviews bottlenecks in the information supply will be examined. During the interview a specially developed question chart was used. The questions were among others: to what extent do you get sufficient information; to what extent do you get your information in time; to what extent does the information reach you via the appropriate channels.b. the subject directness and object directness of written communicationThis was a pilot study. During one week all in and outward letters of three department heads were collected and analysed. During that week the three men had to fill in a communication diary, marking how much time each writing/reading act took; to what extent the incoming texts were immediately clear, etc. An interview was held in order to clarify obscurities in the analyses and the diary notes.The results show that there is a lack of information on many subjects, while - on the other hand - there is also an information overload. The pilot study suggests that an explanation may be found in certain characteristics of the written texts.

This article describes a number of problems that the communication professional has to deal with, while analysing written business communication. Some of the problems have to do with analysing communication within training courses, others arise when analysing the communication and the flow of communication through an organization.The author presents a way to incorporate ALEXIS, a software package, into professional business communication. ALEXIS is an educational software package, designed to support staff teaching a writing course in a number of time consuming tasks, above all in supplying printed feedback on written assignments. ALEXIS has been used successfully in the writing curricula of Nijenrode, the Netherlands School of Business, and Twente University of Technology.Using ALEXIS helps to overcome some of the problems the communication professional has to deal with and tends to facilitate the process of analysing

For reasons of effectiveness it is better to start a text with a central question - CQ - than with a central theme, as is usually done in literature on applied linguistics. One can define a CQ as the most narrowly formulated question a text has to answer. In this article five types of CQ's and five types of corresponding texts are discussed. Starting from the author's point of view it is possible to relate CQ and textstructure. In writing a text, someone can benefit from this relationship. This will help him in the process of writing as well as in the judging of texts. Moreover, the relationship between CQ and text structure can play an important role in the development of so-called text scripts. The author also gives an overview of the kinds of mistakes that are caused by interpreting the relationship between CQ and textstructure incorrectly.

Written communication is becoming a problem issue in many firms and organisations. Hierarchical networks and communication structures are getting more complicated every day. Employees with a technical, juridical or commercial background have to perform complicated communication tasks as part of their job.Linguists can help structure business writing by developing textframes that are customized to the needs of a specific type of firm or organization. To do this, they can employ a method for structuring information in texts. In this method, the so-called 'central question' (the question to which the text is the answer) is connected to certain stock frames.The first step for a linguist working for a specific firm is to discover whether there are recurring 'central questions' behind a set of texts. Next he has to find a suitable stock frame that is connected with these central questions. The last and most difficult step is adapting the stock frame to the needs and wishes of the future users.In this article the steps that are mentioned above are described and illustrated. The example that is given is of a large Dutch semi-government organization, the "Sociale Verzekeringsraad" (Social Security Council).

The advice often given to writers of information brochures (distributed by governmental organisations, health organisations, etc) to use a reader based style to produce a more readable text, is difficult to follow. Especially the use of the pronoun you (creating a reader perspective, RP, in, for example: if you use tranquillizers, you may not be able to drive a car vs. Someone who uses tranquillizers may not be able to drive a car) is not always compatible with the kind of information, advice or instruction one wishes to convey. As a consequence, writers use a non-personal style throughout their text, or they more or less regularly switch their perspective from RP to a non-personal one, presumably at the cost of processing speed and ease on the part of the reader. The research reported in this article is concerned with- the linguistic means generallly used to introduce the RP insuch texts for the first time;- when and for what reasons the writer has to give up RP for a more general, impersonal perspective.A textual analysis of 20 Dutch brochures shows that these switches generally rest on rhetorical choices the writer makes concerning (a) the readers addressed, (b) certain aspects of the information given (negativity, complexity), (c) text structure, and (d) stylistic choices. Suggestions are given that may solve the perspective problem, but which in turn may interfere with other rhetorical strategies of the writer.

A text giving information about new measures must satisfy three rhetorical requirements: it must be attractive, understandable and acceptable. This article discusses the acceptability of a text. A text is acceptable when a critical reader is satisfied by its contents.Arguments are adduced for three theses: (1) In writing motivation of new measures one may benefit from the theory of the burden of proof in American academic debates. (2) The duty to motivate new measures is not taken seriously enough. (3) Further empirical research into the use of stok issues is needed.

From general advertising tasks and strategies three hypotheses about connectivity in advertisement texts were derived:1. In advertisements the number of connectors will be comparatively high.2. The number of subordinating connectors, however, will be low.3. Connectors which semantically possess an argumentative or rhetoric quality will play a dominant role.These hypotheses were tested in a comparative study of written advertising language and other kinds of written texts. Hypothesis 1 and 2 were supported. In testing the third hypothesis it was found that the connectors of addition and of causation are more frequent in advertising than in other written language, but that adversatives are not.In a qualitative analysis the role of causal relationships was worked out. It was found that their functions fitted the tasks of advertising texts from which the hypotheses originated very well. At least five functions have been found:1. Causal connectors often relate two different product qualities to each other.2. They do this by putting these qualities in an argumentative structure of the following form:Product quality (P) conclusion> General positive quality (C)or: Ρ explanation3. When the generalizing difference between (P) and (C) is not very strong, the structure becomes one of tautological repetition. In this way a product quality may be accentuated.

Various fields of research are valuable for the writer of user manuals: readability (formulas), ergonomics, cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, instructional research and typography. Elements of these fields appear in 'How to write manuals books'. Yet these books do not answer the writer's main question: 'What should the manual look like?'In this paper it is argued that the manual does not exist and a list of criteria for the classification of user manuals is presented.According to the list some manual variations were written'and tested: continuous prose versus step-by-step for a compact disc player, and step-by-step versus flowchart and versus pictural for a multi-function telephone.The list of criteria seems to be a useful starting point for considering the possibilities for a certain product and for testing variations of manuals. The step-by-step version for the compact disc player seemed to be useful for non-experts who strictly followed the instructions but unpractical for the experts who used the manual only as a kind of trouble shooting list. For the telephone the text version appeared to be best; from the flowchart version users did not learn anything.

Research in the field of written procedures (in an industrial context) has moved along two lines: regulating the performance of operators, especially in nuclear power plants, and creating effective technical manuals. The quality of such texts has remained a problem, perhaps because research has generally concentrated on superficial text features and task analysis, thereby neglecting the actual use (or non-use) of documents in working situations and the wider interests the organisation has in writing down procedures.A more promising strategy, along the lines of a distinction made by Rasmussen, is to concentrate on the relation between written procedures and the appropriate levels of human performance: skill based, rule based or knowledge based.In a case study (procedures for railway-track maintenance with uninterrupted train service), users described their problems with the written procedures as "lack of clarity", alluding to deficiencies in content and presentation. Further analysis revealed the following more specific problems:- unclear presentation: not designed as a job performance aid, awkward phraseology, unfit for easy reference;- too many detailed procedures;- unclear working situation: users often felt compelled to choose between following the procedures to the letter and accomplishing the jobs on schedule;- resistance to the predominating "control directing" function of the procedures, to the detriment of their "action directing" function;- lack of motivation, as a result of not having been involved in the drawing up of the procedures.The procedures had been conceived by the organisation on a rule based level. Due to the modus operandi of the human cognitive system, however, actual application of the procedures often takes place on a skill based level. Accordingly, it was decided to rewrite the procedures to a skill based level, i.e. to write very explicit instructions, specifying the actions to be taken by workers at every level in the organisation.From the present study it can be concluded that the usability of safety-related written instructions is not determined predominantly by their contents and their presentation, but also by at least the following factors: organisational context (working conditions, administrative control, safety policies); task involved; risk perception; feasible level of human functioning; frequency of error types; ergonomic possibilities; motivation of the users; knowledge and experience of the users.

Scientific information vanishes in the transfer process. Input losses point out as a success model: English articles published in American journals with keywords in the titles, with an English author abstract, tables, graphs, and a bibliography. Output losses demonstrate as a succes model: controlled descriptors properly handled from a thesaurus. These output losses require language knowledge, especially of English. Information was linguistically defined as lexical unit types. A well-structured and an ill-structured text were each presented to 25 subjects to be abstracted. Each original text had 864 tokens and 178 lexical unit types. The abstracts from the well-structured text retained 28% of the lexical unit types; those from the ill-structured text 17%. The former kind contained 40% more lexical unit types than the latter kind. The former kind contained every lexical unit type with a frequency of 6 and more; the latter kind those with with a frequency of 9 and more. The lexical unit types in both kinds of abstracts correlated to those in the original text 0.98. Correlation of the lexical unit types in the abstracts to each other was 0.995. Hypotheses: a structure is a peremptory requirement for retention of information; the frequency needed is dependent on the structure; standardized keywords make retention easier.

The traditional way of creating and typesetting a manuscript hampers the necessary modernization of the production process and particularly the dissemination and accessibility of information. This is caused by the use of wordprocessing packages and the nature of typesetting instructions. Both wordprocessing codes and typesetting codes contain insufficient information, because they only aim at a single presentation of the text.Scientific publications, however, can be distributed in many different forms: on paper, in all possible layouts; in whole or in part via electronic means such as floppy disks, compact disks, datacommunication, etc. In addition information should be accessible from many points of view. New electronic tools (i.e. micro-computers) and databases with advanced search software have the technical possibilities for this. The Standard Generalized Markup Language, the new ISO-standard, is a method of recording texts in such a way that the afore-mentioned can be achieved.This method has two basic principles:1. the descriptors of texts (called SGML-tags) must be based on content and not on form.2. the SGML-tags used for description of texts must be defined in a document description. This is based on the principle that texts are structured, i.e. independent of its purpose. It enables one to describe the elements of which a text consists, the order they have to be in the text, and whether they are optional or obligatory, and/or repetitive.The description of the content of texts makes it possible to create conversions (via software) to a diversity of printed and electronic forms (distribution). It is also possible to search databases for e.g. an article about a certain subject or written by an author of a special institute or a university (information retrieval).

This article describes the organisation and background of a vocational writing course for arts students. The course is part of the optional curriculum of the Department of Language and Literature of Tilburg University. It is the aim of this course to create a writing environment in which arts students can apply theoretical knowledge to practical writing tasks in business organisations.Every participant in the course chooses an existing brochure, which he revises along the lines of an agreed procedure, which consist of the following steps: analyzing, criticizing, first rewriting, second rewriting, testing, producing the new version. All steps are evaluated by all participants and by representatives of the organisation where the text was first written.The course links the expertise of arts students to real-life writing tasks in organisations and is at the same time an attempt to reinforce the social basis of the arts curriculum.

The Institute for Technology & Linguistics of the Technical University of Eindhoven has been giving courses in negotiating in French-speaking cultures. This course is intended for Dutch managers who have regular contacts with business concerns in France or in other French-speaking countries. The course is partly a result of a collaborative, extensive research carried out by the Universities of Eindhoven and of Tilburg into the role of language and culture in international negotiation.The research has shown that Dutch firms are apprehensive about making contacts with French firms. Not only the language but also the differences in culture and negotiation patterns seems to cause various problems. The aim of this course is to familiarize the trainees with French negotiation patterns and provide them with appropriate strategies for negotiation, extend their knowledge of French "technical-commercial culture" and increase their proficiency in the language.The article also discusses linguistic aspects which can help or hinder technical-commercial communication. Finally, it looks at global cultural approaches which are implied by this sort of course. For example, how far is it necessary to go along with: "When in Rome, do as the Romans do"?