As environmental communicators partcipating in public meetings and interviews, engineers and scientists must sometimes walk a thin line between representing the best interests of their organizations and responding to the public's need to know. Unfortunately, published guidance designed to aid technical communicators in such situations is not clearly based on theory or actual behavior. This study analyzes actual responses to hostile questions by drawing upon speech act theory to demonstrate that spokespersons use five strategies for composing indirect answers to questions perceived as hostile.

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Harris argues that linguistic theory is useful for solving certain problems encountered in technical writing theory and pedagogy [1]. However, he undermines his purpose by introducing irrelevant distinctions between competing syntactic theories (Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar and Transformational Grammar) and by failing to exploit the full potential of the few applications he mentions. The passive rule is a case in point. It not only constitutes an operational test for identifying passive sentences, it also contributes to the flow of discourse by rearranging both thematic roles (e.g. agent and patient) and given/new information. The passive rule is only one of a class of noun phrase-moving operations that technical writing specialists may find useful.

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.

Current treatments of tone rely on a hit-list approach in which writers are presented with lists of words to avoid and a few do and don't examples. Such treatments, however, do not constitute a theory of why certain linguistic elements create problems in tone. The linguistic concept of presupposition can be used to construct such a theory. Presuppositions are unstated propositions conveyed by the use of certain linguistic expressions called presupposition triggers. These presupposition triggers may convey the writer's beliefs about the truth of a proposition or the writer's value judgments about a proposition. Many problems in tone can be traced to one of two types of conflict between reader and writer: different beliefs about the truth of an implied proposition, and different attitudes toward a proposition whose truth is agreed upon.