Basics of Organizational Writing

This book is a study of social interaction in organizational writing, looking at how and why members of specific groups use language in the ways they do. It shows how the discursive practices of writing shape and influence behavior of an organization’s members and their perceptions and judgments of what they consider in reality as criteria for the practices. It investigates the products of organizational communication, including the situatedness of language and its consequences, and particular language features seen as signaling contextual presuppositions, or shared meanings, providing an interpretive framework for understanding written organizational discourse. This book bases on data-driven approach rather than practice-driven or theory-driven approach, as it centers on a variety of situations that commonly take place in business and institutional organizations. Pragmatic processes such as speech acts and face theory are adopted to analyze how writers seek to encode their messages for a particular audience, and how readers make inferences when seeking to locate a writer’s intended meaning.