Parker’s post on genres is great. It nicely captures the fact that, when aspects of rhetorical context like speech act (or purpose) are repeated often, they give rise to genres. One common workplace genre is the directive. You may notice that these speech acts fall within the four purposes identified in my tutorial: representatives = informing, directives = directing, questions = consulting, and commissives + expressives = valuing. Declaratives, however, are something “special.”
Enjoy!
Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz summarize the implications of some recent psychological research on format this way: Any variable that facilitates or impairs fluent information processing can profoundly affect people’s judgements and decisions. [Writers] are therefore well advised to present information in a form that facilitates easy processing: if it’s easy to read, it seems easy to do,…
If you need evidence that people feel passionately about language, check out a plain language summary of research published by Kate Burridge, Professor of Linguistics at Monash University in Australia. The summary appeared today in the Linguistics Research Digest, a terrific resource for locating more than platitudes about communication. Their goal is “to provide up-to-date reports on the…
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I’m working on a post about taboo words (that means swearing or profanity) that’s not ready for prime time — and recovering from the flu. In the meantime, I highly recommend today’s post over at Motivated Grammar. Gabe’s point is that, when people don’t actually understand how language works, they see decline and deterioration in language different…
And then there’s one of my favorite genres, the proposal. Going by the speech acts outlined, it’s is a hybrid of representative (identifying a state of affairs–a problem or opportunity), directive (trying to persuade a reader/gatekeeper to accept/believe in your solution), and commissive (outlining commitments in regard to time and $$$).
I think this is it exactly! I would argue that the primary or ULTIMATE purpose in a proposal is directive (directing the reader to accept what’s proposed) and that the representative (informing) and commissive (valuing) purposes are subordinate. To me, the whole document fails if the reader doesn’t accept it.