Ranking of Indirectness in Professional Writing

John Z. Zhang Louisiana State University

Abstract

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.

Journal
Journal of Technical Writing and Communication
Published
1990-07-01
DOI
10.2190/8ur2-f7hm-52ck-u6f8
CompPile
Open Access
Closed
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References (10)

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