Managing Organisational Writing to Enhance Corporate Credibility

Many employees neither trained as career writers nor defining themselves as writers spend a major part of their time writing because, undeniably, writing is a central activity in organizations. To produce the high quality required to create and maintain credibility, organizations need to have professionals who can efficiently produce documents with substance, structure and style. This paper discusses issues relating to the management of corporate writing and editing, and presents practices and processes that managers can implement in their organizations to produce flawless documents, thereby avoiding the credibility crises that occur when writing is not taken seriously.

The Relative Frequency of the Synthetic End Composite Futures in the Newspaper Quest-France and some Observations on Distribution

Figures on the relative frequency of synthetic and composite future forms in Ouest-France are presented and compared with those of earlier studies on the passé simple and passé composé. The synthetic future is found to be dominant. Possible formal explanations for distribution are found to be inconclusive. Distribution across different text-types is found to be more promising, since contrastive functions of the two forms can be identified in texts where they co-occur. The composite future typically reports new proposals or plans as current news, while the synthetic future outlines details that will be realised at the time of implementation. Both functions are important in dailies, but current news is more often expressed in the present tense at the expense of the composite future.

Is Feminism Finished?

Discusses the meaning of the term feminism through the twentieth century. Background on the book "Three Guineas," by Virginia Woolf, which dismissed feminism; Role of the Second Wave feminism in education; Problems posed in writing the history of feminism.

The role of gender in the construction and evaluation of feedback effectiveness

This study investigated factors that influence managers’ conceptions and subordinates’ perceptions of effective feedback. A social rules perspective was used to operationalize male and female managers’ conceptions of effective negative feedback. In the first study, 68 male and female managers identified their optimal strategies for providing feedback to subordinates. Male and female managers endorsed different goals and tactics for giving negative feedback, particularly in terms of levels of participation and directness. In the second study, 116 male and female subordinates evaluated the comparative effectiveness and difficulty of these and other standard approaches to feedback. The female manager strategy was evaluated by both men and women as generally more task and relationship effective but not more difficult to enact.

Critical discourse studies: Where to from here?

This paper surveys critical discourse studies to the present and claims that, to avoid lapsing into comfortable orthodoxy in its mature phase, CDS needs to reassert its transformative radical teleology. The initial part of the paper reasserts the need for a strong social theory given the materialist and context-bound nature of discourse in daily activity. From this basis, the paper then characterizes the “new times” in which contemporary discourse occurs, and briefly surveys those issues typically analyzed, namely political economy, race and gender, and critical literacy. By considering people's ordinary lives, the paper then suggests that subject and agency, and calculative technologies of management deserve, and new modalities need, more research. Transdisciplinarity is encouraged, particularly with social psychology and critical management studies.

Abstand, Ausbau, creativity and ludicity in Australian English

The social history of a language or variety, and its emergence, consolidation and stabiliza tion, allow us to combine the formal data of the language (principally its sound structure, grammar and lexis) with the external conditions in which they have evolved. The advance of Australian English in terms of its differentiation (Kloss's abstand) and elaboration of roles (Kloss's ausbau) pose problems of chronology, periodization, description and expla nation. This paper extends the conventional scope of abstand and ausbau to the analysis of the social history of Australian English. It argues that two factors are central to the emerging identification of Australian English: creativity, in the sense of morphological innovation, especially here in diminutives like reffo ('refugee') and pollie ('politician'); and in ludicity, defined as a deep-rooted playfulness with language. While these character istics are only part of the overall dynamics of the social history of Australian English, the evidence is sufficiently extensive to warrant further investigation. An earlier version of this paper was given at the Mitchell Symposium at Macquarie University on 26 April 2002 under the title ‘E pluribus plures? Diversity and integrity in Australian English’. I am grateful to members of the Symposium, and to two anonymous reviewers, for valuable comments and criticism

Propaganda - who us? The Australian government terror kit

This study tests allegations that the Australian government’s 2003 ‘terror kit’ was propaganda. Because propaganda’s definition and function are contested, content analysis was trialled as a method of clarifying propaganda detection. A propaganda index was developed using both manual and computerised coding, and while each method had limits, together they produced reliable and valid results. Measured against the index, Howard’s letter scored a 62 per cent propaganda rating.