Journal of Technical Writing and Communication Jul 1990

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
Topics
discourse analysis professional writing
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Citation Context

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No articles in this index cite this work.

References (10)

  1. Brown P. (1978)
    Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction
  2. Riley K. (1988)
    The Technical Writing Teacher
  3. 10.1163/9789004368811_003
     ↗
  4. Fillmore C. J. (1975)
    Indiana University Linguistics Club Papers
  5. Parker F. (1986)
    Linguists for Non-Linguists
Show all 10 →
  1. Traugott E. C. and Pratt M. L., Linguistics for Students of Literature, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., New …
  2. Ross J. R. (1972)
    Papers from the Eighth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society
  3. Kuno S. (1987)
    Functional Syntax
  4. 10.2307/454819
     ↗
  5. Zhang Z. (1989)
    JWTC
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