Over the last 2 decades, the nations that once comprised the Soviet Union have begun to play an increasingly important role in the global economy. As a result, today's technical and professional communicators could find themselves interacting with co-workers, colleagues, and clients in these nations. Being successful in such contexts, however, requires an understanding of the cultural, historic, educational, and economic factors that have affected and continue to shape technical and professional communication practices in these countries. This article provides an overview of the literature that has been published on technical and professional communication practices in the former USSR as well as reviews educational factors that have contributed to such practices. Through such an examination, the article provides readers with a foundation they can use to engage in future research relating to technical and professional communication practices in post-Soviet states.

Community-based projects immerse technical writing students in intercultural communication, addressing local needs and shaping documents in human terms. Students at a South Texas university work to establish communication with clients in a city-county health department to create effective documents and disseminate family health legislation. To prepare students for interactions in multicultural settings, the teacher provides an instructional framework that highlights the concepts and values of intercultural communication and the principles for effective problem-solving. Students engaged in the Baby Moses ( el niño Moisés) project encounter misunderstandings, rhetorical challenges within the process of document creation, and cultural tensions that thwart their goal to disseminate information to the community. Students and the teacher learn that the classroom, like the city-county health department, is a fertile site for cultural disequilibrium, tensions, and potential cultural awareness. To insure a viable Technical and Professional Writing Program in a culturally diverse university and surrounding community, the teacher identifies opportunities that help students develop and enhance their identities as culturally-sensitive communicators and effective problem solvers.

This article explores the uses of coaching and mentoring as they apply to organizational communication professors. The authors contend that these professors already are proficient at coaching and mentoring and the coaching and mentoring processes are routinely undertaken as part of their standard university teaching responsibilities. As coaches, these faculty members assist their students in improving student communication abilities through observation, discussion, and follow-up. As mentors, these faculty members enter into a developmental relationship with students that extend beyond the classroom. A greater knowledge of coaching and mentoring will enhance instructional efforts and benefit students in multiple ways.

We evaluate 45 jobs professional communicators might occupy. Specifically, we examine the impact of creativity on careers that may become more or less easily outsourced domestically or offshore in the future. We are unable to find any particular relationship between creativity, per se, and job security. Instead, we find that people with knowledge of the processes required for innovation are more valued by industry than those recognized as creative. We suggest that to be prepared for the evolution of the global economy, technical communicators and their educators should understand “innovation” in its formal context and be able to apply that knowledge in their workplaces and classrooms.

2008 marked the 10-year Anniversary of the Open Source movement, which has had a substantial impact on not only software production and adoption, but also on the sharing and distribution of information. Technical communication as a discipline has taken some advantage of the movement or its derivative software, but this article argues not as much as it could or should. We have adopted Open Source Software (OSS) to manage courses or websites; we have, following the principles of Open Source, made some intellectual resources available; but we have not developed a truly open—open to access, open to use, and open to edit—pedagogical resource that teachers of technical and professional communication courses at every level can rely on to craft free offerings to their students. Now is the ideal time to consider developing OpenTechComm. This article makes the case for why and how it could be implemented.

Cross-cultural blunders caused by inappropriate use of language are a common problem in international professional communication. They cause misunderstanding, lead to business failures, and tend to be offensive at times. Such blunders may occur in business ads, slogans, products names, and instructions. Understanding their causes and finding solutions to them are of importance in international professional communication. By examining specific cases, the article analyzes the causes that lead to such blunders from a semantic perspective and concludes that indiscriminate use of the semantic meaning of a word, a lexical form, lexical sound, numbers, color words, and animal names of the target language is the major cause of causing cultural blunders in international professional communication. Along the way, the article also offers solutions to the problems identified.

This article questions how professional communication genres already well established in print form have been changing as they are transplanted into digital media like the Web. Whereas some technology-oriented genre research has sought how a new medium provides genres with new technological features, this article argues that a more insightful approach would seek how a new medium, together with its users, provides genres with new rhetorical situations. To operationally define rhetorical situations, I adapt Lloyd Bitzer's three situational dimensions of exigence, audience, and constraints. Then, to illustrate how the new rhetorical situations of the Web can influence a genre, I explore the genre of the résumé. Drawing on a survey of 100 Web résumé authors and an analysis of their sites, I show that as each of the three dimensions of the résumé's traditional rhetorical situation has opened itself to greater diversity on the Web, the Web version of the résumé genre has correspondingly reoriented itself. Hence, genres change in response not just to the new medium's technology per se but to the new rhetorical situations that the medium hosts.

This article builds upon the work of Richard Haswell's “NCTE/CCCC's Recent War on Scholarship” by providing an alternative framework for empirical inquiry based on principles of skepticism. It examines the literature relating to empirical research and argues that one of the issues at hand is the perceived link of empirical research to positivism, which clashes with the dominant social constructivist paradigm. It draws upon classical rhetoric and the work of radial empiricist William James to formulate an alternative framework for empirical research based on skeptical principles.

Current scholarship tells us that skills in teaming are essential for students and practitioners of professional communication. Writers must be able to cooperate with subject-matter experts and team members to make effective decisions and complete projects. Scholarship also suggests that rapid changes in technology and changes in teaming processes challenge workplace communication and cooperation. Professional writers must be able to use complex software for projects that are often completed by multidisciplinary teams working remotely. Moreover, as technical writers shift from content developers to project managers, our responsibilities now include user-advocacy and supervision, further invigorating the need for successful communication. This article offers a different vision of an ancient heuristic—stasis theory—as a solution for the teaming challenges facing today's professional writers. Stasis theory, used as a generative heuristic rather than an eristic weapon, can help foster teaming and effective decision making in contemporary pedagogical and workplace contexts.

In 1992, the American Bar Association released the MacCrate Report, which listed the ten skills and four professional values that all attorneys need and critiqued law schools and state bars for not doing enough to teach and encourage the development of these skills and values. In response, law schools have significantly increased the skills-based components in their curricula, and most state bar exams now include a performance test. Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) programs already provide substantial instruction in all of the skills and values described in the MacCrate Report; further, an education in TPC prepares graduates to excel in law school and on the bar exam. This knowledge offers opportunities for growth if educators, administrators, and scholars take steps to encourage students to consider not only writing for but also joining in the legal profession.

To teach students how to write for the workplace and other professional contexts, technical writing teachers often assign writing tasks that reflect real-life communication contexts, a teaching approach that is grounded in the field's contextualized understanding of genre. This article argues to fully embrace contextualized literacy and better teach workplace writing, technical writing teachers also need to contextualize how they assess student writing. To this end, this article examines some of workplaces' best assessment practices and critically integrates them into an introductory technical writing classroom through a method called student-centered assessment instruments. This method engages students, as workplaces engage employees, in the assessment process to identify local requirements for writing tasks. Aligned with theory and practice, this method is not only an effective classroom assessment method, but becomes an integrated part of students' genre-learning process within and beyond the classroom.

In this article, the author uses the critical vocabulary developed by Bruno Latour in his recent work Politics of Nature to offer an alternative way for technical and professional communicators to approach and articulate their work. Using the Discovery Channel's Mythbusters to explore Latour's vocabulary, the author argues that positioning technical and professional communication as more than transmitting and translating, but instead as the collecting of articulated propositions about the common world in service of the common good, thoroughly grounds its practice in rhetorical theory. Such a positioning also ascribes value to technical and professional communication without reinscribing the false dichotomy between science and politics.

The purpose of this article is to evaluate value-add methods and activities applied to organizational communication college-level course work. Graduate organizational communication faculty are aware that their classes serve as direct preparation for students entering business and professional careers. The knowledge learned and the skills acquired in these communication classes are abilities that students take with them to the career marketplace. As such, instructors look for ways to extend the boundaries of the classroom beyond the text and traditional instruction. Faculty believe that each method selected adds value to the educational experiences of students. However, do these methods and activities truly add value to the educational experience as the instructors hope they will? Furthermore, are specific programs more valuable than others?

This article presents a qualitative text analysis of persuasive documents written by a major U.S. airline in a 2004 counter-campaign against the Teamsters union. The methodology for this study is based on Stephen Toulmin's argument model, including his “double triad” and his interpretation of artistic proofs, which parallel the three classical rhetorical appeals. Actual corporate documents are featured in this article, supported by content from management conference calls that were attended by the researchers. The article concludes with implications for teaching and research in the field of technical and professional communication.

Much of America was stunned into mourning on February 1, 2003 as the space shuttle Columbia was reported to have broken up over Texas. The ensuing investigation revealed that debris at liftoff was the cause of the crash, but the official report suggested that NASA's organizational communication was just as much to blame. This article uses transactive memory theory to argue that there were significant gaps in the knowledge network of NASA organizational members, and those gaps impeded information flow regarding potential disaster. E-mails to and from NASA employees were examined (the “To” and “From” fields) to map a network of communication related to Columbia's damage and risk. Although NASA personnel were connected with each other in this incident-based network, the right information did not get to the people who needed it. The article concludes with extensions of theory and practical implications for organizations, including NASA.

One goal of college technical writing courses is to prepare students for real-world writing situations. Business writing textbooks function similarly, using guidelines, sample assignments, and model documents to help students develop rhetorical strategies to use in the workplace. Students attend class, or read and perform exercises in a textbook, with the faith that these skills will apply to workplace writing. In an attempt to better understand the similarities and differences between industry and academe's expectations of one genre of workplace writing, the memo, we compared the perceptions of memo quality by engineering faculty, students, and practitioners. All three groups responded to three sample memos taken from textbooks used by engineering professors in their undergraduate classrooms. The results indicate that students' and engineers' opinions of memo quality were more closely related to one another than to professors' comments, focusing on content, while professors were the most critical of style issues.

This article argues that the small school context has been a relatively unexamined or under-examined context for technical and professional communication program development. While graduate program development holds a large share of the field's attention in recent national forums, growth in graduate programs is a consequence of demand in the job market among mostly “teaching” schools. Thus, the field must consider how well we are socializing new Ph.D.s into the values and the real work of institutions where they will find employment. Toward this end, this article articulates three mediating forces of program development in the liberal arts and humanities settings of small schools: 1) interdisciplinarity and flexibility are lived dynamics of small schools; 2) the campus-wide privileging of writing and communication skills presents ongoing opportunities for curricular initiatives and program development; and 3) compression of decision-making structures leads to more involvement of/with administrators and units across campus.

Since the collapse of Enron Corporation in November 2001, annual reports and corporate financial disclosures have been the focus of government, corporate, and public attention. This article examines the literature written about annual reports between 1989 and 2001 to identify trends in research and determine areas of future study. Articles were categorized as related to SEC regulations and guidelines, summary annual reports, online annual reports, rhetorical analysis of annual reports, readability and accessibility of annual reports, methods of conveying negative information in annual reports, effective annual report writing, use and importance of annual reports, or use of annual reports in business writing classes. Post-Enron, it is likely that the number of articles in this area will dramatically increase over the next five to ten years.

Although studies of actual communication practices in the workplace are now commonplace, few historical studies in this area have been completed. Such historical studies are necessary to help researchers understand the often complicated origins of genre conventions in professional discourse. Historical research that draws on contemporary genre theory helps address this void. A genre perspective is particularly valuable for helping researchers trace a given type of document's emergence and evolution. This perspective also provides a way of accounting for the connections between communicative practices and the other activities that occupy the attention of workplace organizations. To illustrate what this perspective brings to historical research in professional communication, I examine the development of communicative practices at a national production company that relied on texts to mediate its organizational activities across geographically dispersed locations.

This conceptual article presents a critical review of gender-difference and gender-sameness theory and research. The focus is upon gender workplace communication, a topic often debated in the popular and organizational literature. A contextually-based integrated paradigm is proposed which represents a shift from a gender-difference foundation to a more integrated approach that includes the interaction of gender with Standpoint Theory, culture, organizational climate, and structure and task context. The network of shared meanings concept is introduced as having a major impact on gender communication orientation. Research using an example of communication to create a contextual meaning for social support is highlighted. Implications and conclusions for organizations, researchers, and educators are discussed.

While some models of computer writing environments have emerged in the literature on writing, most of them are done with the purpose of helping writers in an academic context and very few, if any, with the aim of facilitating the work of professional writers or students in professional writing. We think, however, that we can learn from the previous models to build a multi-purpose computer writing environment that will take into account the needs of the professional writers as well as those of the students learning to write. We will begin by looking at some models of writing proposed by Hayes and Flower in 1980 and also at the model of White and Arndt. Afterwards, we will review the model of professional writers developed by Clerc and link it with the previous models. We will then have to look at some computer writing environments described in the literature and see how these environments take into account the process and tasks identified in writing. Finally, we will suggest our model.

In partial answer to the many questions that have been raised about the definition and location of technical writing programs, a random sample of full-time teachers of professional writing was conducted. The results indicate that those located in English departments do not receive the respect and support they need. Those located in other departments are significantly more satisfied. Some strategies for improving the situation are suggested.

Daniel Defoe, one of the pioneers of the English novel, primarily earned his living as a journalist, pamphleteer, proposal writer, and freelance business consultant. A born entrepreneur, Defoe's many projects included promoting and marketing the first practical diving bell, designing commercial fisheries and improving London's sewer system, producing a series of popular self-help manuals, and founding and editing the first English technical writing journal, The Projector. These were the products of Defoe's indefatigable pen, and the utilitarian simplicity of his business and technical writing has strongly influenced English prose ever since. This article will examine two major pieces of Defoe's professional writing: An Essay of Projects, (1698) a portfolio of his best proposals, and the landmark The Complete English Tradesman (1725), the first English business writing manual. These and similar texts would form the loam of Defoe's great novels, Robinson Crusoe (1719), Moll Flanders (1721), and A Journal of a Plague Year (1722). While Defoe's professional writing shaped his creative writing, his gifts as a novelist—his plain, demotic style, his knack for concise narrative and analytical summary, his ability to create convincing personas through textual documentation—shaped his business writing. Both forms of writing made him the premier spokesperson of a new social and economic order.

Administrators and teachers for professional communication programs often are anxious to develop curricula that will teach “real world” practices of workplace practitioners. Many connections can and have been established in response to that concern. However, both practitioners and educators may mistakenly see such connections as a one-way exchange: practitioners with privileged knowledge sharing as a professional courtesy and with hopes of hiring graduates who may need less training on the job. However, the growth and sophistication of scholarship in professional communication, along with changes in the workplace that have led to more professional development needs among practitioners, have created new opportunities for two-way exchanges of expertise. Academics from professional communication programs now can and should use their programs' connections with the workplace to influence practices in the field. This article suggests ways to create more bi-directional educational exchanges.

This article argues that examining leaders and leadership techniques is a valid subject for technical and professional writing and communication classes. The article describes an assignment for studying leadership and provides related instructional materials.

Noting that recent research in workplace writing tends toward description of contexts for writing, this study turns its attention to text itself, focusing on the nominal expressions in the discourse on management. Analysis shows that these nominals recursively delete not only agent roles but also those of experiencer, object, and goal, and at the same time conflate the interests of researchers and managers. Calling on pragmatic theories of politeness, Giddens' characterization of bureaucracy as reflexive system, and Foucault's concept of “governmentality,” this study suggests that management nominals are a particularly intense expression of modernity itself.

Service learning, an expanding pedagogical movement, educates students to volunteer their expertise for the benefit of society. Teachers of business and technical writing can apply this pedagogy by assigning students to write for nonprofits. Such assignments prepare students for both workplace writing and responsible citizenship. To help our profession consider the appropriateness of this pedagogy, this article describes the origins of the movement and proposes a rationale for it in our field. This article then explains sequential projects and teaching methods intended to reduce problems related to collaborative writing for nonprofits. Last, resources are identified to help prepare grant proposals, perhaps the most beneficial kind of document for nonprofits.

Several global factors suggest the necessity of internationalizing the business and technical writing curriculum: increases in international business, in the number of workers employed by overseas businesses, in U.S. companies exporting products abroad, and in ethnically and culturally diverse population within our own borders. Despite these factors, however, many teachers in the business and technical writing classrooms are unsure of why they should internationalize their curriculum, or what methods to use to ensure that students benefit from such a curriculum. This critical bibliography provides a practical resource for teachers of business and technical writing who wish to internationalize their curriculum. The bibliography is divided into sections to provide practitioners with resources discussing the rationale for internationalization to specific assignments they may consider using in their classroom.

A large number of technical writing textbooks, many of them revised editions, is entering the college education marketplace. This review of five recent textbooks not only thoroughly analyses the content of the texts, but also raises two serious concerns. The survey finds that the textbooks provide inadequate guidance on paragraph structure. The survey also reveals that this textbook genre appears to rely upon a scanty, and sometimes dated, theory base. The authors ask whether this could lead to the production of manuals based upon “received wisdom,” rather than professional writing guides based upon sound communication theory.

Group class exercises have the potential to provide important lessons for students. However, in completing these exercises, business students may not be getting all of the benefits from group work that a team experience could provide. The challenge to business educators is to provide a meaningful team experience within the limitations presented by the class environment. This article describes organizational communication and marketing classes that applied team formation and team-building exercises to enrich the team experience and differentiate it from typical group work.

Cola Rienzi, the 14th century notary and usurper who briefly resurrected the Roman Republic during the Avignon Papacy, is an important figure in the history of professional writing. The son of an unlettered country innkeeper, Cola combined a passion for classical rhetoric and literature with extensive training in legal documentation to create and sustain a messianic regime. By imitating Ancient Roman memos and reports in his written edicts, Cola convinced the people that he was their tribune and savior. The aristocrats and clerics chafing under Cola's authority, however, considered these documents sortilegio, sheer witchcraft. When Rienzi's edicts became increasingly self-serving and grandiloquent, the mob, sickened by his megalomania, tore him to pieces. Although he was posthumously declared anathema by the Church—partly for having invented the fountain pen—Cola's legislative reforms, and his revolutionary use of the classics to reshape administrative writing, helped pave the way for Renaissance Humanism.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to describe the use of the Black communication style by African Americans in an organized environment. The research method which was used involved a multimethod approach of data collection in the field using direct observation, and obtrusive observations, as well as semi-structured interviews. This investigation has shown that although the Black employees in this organization felt, in general, as if they were changing their communication style to fit the organizational norms, they continued to rely on the cultural norms underlying the Black communication style. U.S. demographics are foretelling a future that will require innovative organizational communication strategies. According to Fine, two facts about the U.S. corporate environment which are uncovered by demographic trends are that the workforce will be comprised of a “greater diversity of gender, race, age, culture, and language” and that the demand for qualified workers will exceed the supply thereby “creating intense competition among organizations for workers” [1]. These changing demographics are not going unnoticed by the U.S. corporate leaders. Specifically, the issues of most concern to organizational executives, according to Workforce 2000, center around linguistic and cultural differences. Most organizations have no innovative strategies for meeting the demands of a diverse workforce. Traditional programs, such as day-care provisions, flexible work times, and hiring and recruiting more people of color are being implemented by corporate America in an effort to meet the demand for diversity. However, organizations are often lacking in creative programs which will provide for this emerging diverse workforce an environment that will accept and nurture their diversity. Certainly these corporate executives are receiving little in the way of guidance from organizational researchers.

Recent studies identify gendered differences in communication and collaboration styles which suggest consequences for professional writing classrooms. If, indeed, men tend to stereotype women as clerks, prefer hierarchical collaboration, and value product over process, and, too, if gendered differences tend to increase counterproductive dissent, then the gender balance of writing groups might affect their dominant styles in those respects. However, when I analyzed the behaviors of over sixty student groups in my professional writing classes, I did not find gender balancing to have such effects. Instead, however, I observed other gender-related effects on collaboration: tendencies to stereotype men as technical experts and to self-segregate into gendered working teams. These findings suggest new perspectives on the role of gender for collaborative groups in professional writing classrooms.

Although there is much literature that describes collaborative writing projects in undergraduate courses, little is reported about such projects for graduate students. This article reports the results of a collaborative writing project in a graduate course in usability testing. Because the graduate students were sophisticated practitioners in career positions in technical and professional communication, the instructor made the assumption that the normal requirements of journal checks, conferences, and self- and group-assessment tools would not be needed. The results proved otherwise. An analysis of the two teams' efforts—both product and process—establishes the need for structure and guidance for graduate collaborative writing projects, regardless of the audience's professional experience.

This article is a case study of a small controversy involving a 1983 government research report on gender biases in naval officer fitness reports. The research at issue indicated that male commanding officers customarily wrote differently in naval fitness reports about women than in fitness reports they wrote about men, and the researchers concluded that the commanding officers needed to change their writing habits. But the objectivity of the researchers was soon challenged. In this survey of the controversy, the writing of several groups—male commanding officers, female naval officers, male newspaper editors, and female personnel researchers—is both illustrated and critiqued. The main focus here is rhetorical credibility in professional communications when gender is the issue at hand.

Designing a good quick reference guide is a complex rhetorical act. To motivate software users to read a quick reference guide, writers must “prove” to readers that it is not just an abbreviated user's manual in disguise, but a different rhetorical form entirely, one visually structured to allow readers to move about the text easily and effectively. Such a structure provides readers with a sense of progress: as they need fewer visual cues to find pertinent information, they demonstrate an “advance” in their skill and knowledge as users. Professional writers from Bell Northern Research, enrolled in the University of Waterloo's Language and Professional Writing Program, successfully attempted to meet this rhetorical challenge. They designed a quick reference guide for in-house use, and then provided a theoretical framework to ground and explain their visual design choices. This article is a teaching case: it offers a summary of the students' quick reference project, as well as the instructor's theoretical reflections on how visual design can motivate readers to read and use documentation.

The results of our recent survey of the membership of the Association of Teachers of Technical Writing, Associated Writing Programs, and the Council of Writing Program Administration indicate the relative health of undergraduate writing programs (major, concentration, or certificate programs, not service courses) in American four-year universities and colleges. During the past five years there has been a significant increase in the number of undergraduate writing programs, including technical and professional writing. But responses to our survey also suggest that while undergraduate technical and professional writing programs comprise the second largest group of programs (behind creative writing) they are not increasing as rapidly as a new kind of undergraduate writing program—a broad-based program that students can complete by taking a wide range of creative writing, composition, journalism, and technical and professional writing courses. The future seems unclear for traditional undergraduate technical and professional writing programs, and faculties need to examine their options in designing or redesigning their programs.

Studies assessing the readability of business writing typically use either readability formulas or, less often, the cloze procedure. This study argues that the cloze procedure, rather than a formula, is the appropriate method of assessing the readability of business writing and uses the cloze procedure to determine the readability of a statement issued by the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB). The GASB provides authoritative statements on the accounting required for local and state governments and agencies. The results indicate that one important GASB statement is unreadable by college-level readers. If this and other GASB statements are unreadable by the users of GASB pronouncements, the GASB may not be fulfilling its role of communicating governmental accounting principles.

Public relations writing has been neglected as a research topic in professional communication. This article uses rhetorical theory from a number of fields to examine a topic of recent concern—shared, or negotiated, meaning—in relation to two very different samples of public relations writing: the public relations texts produced by political-advocacy organizations involved in the midwestern farm crisis of the 1980s and an entry from an organizational newsletter. More specifically, the article studies the role of four rhetorical elements—exophoric and intertextual references, metaphors, and narratives—in generating a shared meaning. In doing so, the article develops the thesis that narratives were particularly important to this public relations writing because they provided a comprehensive, compelling framework for belief and thus contributed greatly to the shared meaning created by writers and readers.

Desktop publishing is a meta-technology that allows professional writing students access to the production phase of publishing—which is crucial to readers' perception of the writer's text, yet is almost never controlled by the writer. Desktop publishing offers the most convenient means of giving students hands-on practice in preparing text for printing and in learning how that preparation affects the visual meaning of documents.

Riley has recently applied some speech act strategies of indirectness to textbook instructions on being both clear and polite in professional letter writing. Based on results from two experiments with college senior students, the present project aims to account for those strategies and to discuss four principles generated from the experimental data about each strategy: 1) its value index, 2) its writer/addressee orientation, 3) its linguistic characterization, and 4) its location in a sentence. The professional writer can achieve the desired degree of indirectness by consulting those four features about any strategy used in any context.

The results of a 1987 survey of seventy Canadian four-year colleges and universities indicate that approximately half of the thirty-five responding institutions offer some form of technical writing. While courses are well-received by students and have stable or growing enrollments, faculty attitudes toward professional writing courses are mixed, varying from enthusiastic to disapproving. The other half of the responding institutions do not offer professional writing courses and have no plans to do so. Faculties at these institutions are generally against establishing such courses because they do not see technical writing as a legitimate subject.

Advice about how and when to implement the you-perspective is sometimes vague or contradictory. Many authorities simply advise writers to use the second person pronoun as often as possible, in either subject or object position; others suggest that the first person pronoun may be preferable for certain types of messages such as negative ones. Concepts from speech act theory can be used to clarify the most effective use of first and second person pronouns in two types of structures frequently found in professional communication: commissives and directives.