Abstract
In addition to reflecting the social and power relationships between the writer and the reader as well as the degree of imposition, politeness strategies in administrative writing also reflect the values of the organization. Operating in the egalitarian climate perpetuated in a university setting, administrators obscured their legitimate power when they wrote nonroutine memos to faculty. Hiding and de-emphasizing their empowerment by using indirectness, tentativeness, indebtedness, and personalization, academic administrators achieved a high level of politeness. This intensified politeness contrasts with the moderated politeness used in a corporation that openly accepts hierarchy and promotes efficiency. This study, therefore, offers a context-based approach to analyzing administrative writing, an approach that can be used to uncover discourse strategies in other organizational sites.