Scant research exists about explanation in negative messages. An important cause of this is the lack in extant literature of theory or conceptualization of explanation. This commentary provides two conceptual frameworks for thinking about explanation in negative messages: opportunity cost, from economic theory, and attribution, from marketing theory. Both frameworks help define the situations in which explanations for rejection should be provided to the targets of bad news. When applications are solicited, for instance, opportunity costs incurred by targets of bad news should be offset by senders with an offer to provide explanation. The construct of attribution is adapted here to suggest that senders of negative messages can benefit by supplying reasons for their denial of requests because, in the absence of the reasons, the rejectees will attribute motives and create reasons, thus depriving the senders of their control over the explanation portion of the messages.

Research in business disciplines about work-force diversity has been inadequate in terms of precise conceptualization and theoretical grounding. Two psychological paradigms from training literature (cognitive and affective) are examined here, but, because of their inability to explain the sources and significance of organization-level change, sociological paradigms about dominance and intergroup dynamics are presented as viable theoretical supplements. Substantive sharing of power with diverse or nontraditional employees hitherto marginalized in U.S. organizations is proposed as one potentially effective response to managing work-force diversity. Systemwide structural changes in U.S. organizations of today are recommended for optimizing diversity.

Roman Jakobson's six-factored model of verbal communication provides the schema to generate formal definitions of business writing and technical writing. It also enables us to apply these definitions to communication in the world of work. The six factors—addresser, addressee, context, message, contact, and code—have six parallel functions—emotive, conative, referential, poetic, phatic, and metalingual. Each of these factor/function pairs is present to some degree in all types of writing, from technical writing to poetry. However, in certain types of written communication a few functions dominate the others. For instance, the referential or informational function is primary in technical and scientific writing. An examination of different binary functional relationships yields distinctions among various types of writing. For example, the inspection of the you versus it relationship yields the most substantive theoretical distinction between persuasive business writing and technical writing. From this single theoretical distinction emerge various practical aspects of communication, such as good will, the “you-attitude,” and the techniques of behavior modification applicable in business writing; and objectivity, clarity, and precision of meaning aimed for in technical writing.

This article emphasizes four syntactic-rhetorical imperatives which make written messages easier to read. 1. Keep subjects and their verbs close together. Since native speakers of English expect verbs to follow subjects closely, any intervening element makes the processing of information difficult. The longer the intervening element, the more difficult the comprehension of the message. 2. Use appropriate prepositions between nouns to explicitly indicate their semantic relationships. Long nominal phrases are hard to understand because these implicit relationships create ambiguity. What compounds the difficulty of the message is that all the nouns in the phrase, except the last one, assume the function normal to adjectives namely, modification. 3. Help readers to segment syntactic units correctly. The obstacles to readability in this area are the omission of commas and of the signals of subordination, and the misplacement of modifiers. 4. Match textual sequence with chronological sequence. If the sequence of the events does not match the sequence of their reporting in a piece of technical writing, that piece of expository prose is bound to communicate poorly.