Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing - Volume 32, Issue 3, 2010

In this study of the editorial interventions of local newspaper journalists reworking press releases of municipalities, we address three questions. First, we look at the content variables that affect the decision to use a release at all for a news report; this primarily concerns dimensions of the release’s news value. Second, we examine what transformations are applied to press release headings and leads. It is shown that they often undergo changes in perspective: whereas releases provide news from the municipality perspective, the report tries to look at the news event from the citizen’s point of view. In doing so, journalists try to increase the news value of the report. Third, we provide a sentence-bysentence analysis of the stylistic changes in the entire reports. Most editing operations enhance the readability of the release sentences and delete unnecessary details. Besides, the release copy is ‘neutralized’ in the sense that positive elements are toned down or deleted, negative elements are strengthened and evaluative statements are explicitly attributed to the municipality. These four editing orientations (news value, readability, conciseness, neutrality) yield important insights into the nature of the genre conflict between press releases and news reports. Besides the corpus analysis, this study uses excerpts from interviews with municipal press officers and local journalists to support the interpretation of the transformations in terms of the four orientations. These interviews also show that press officers are faced with the need to find a compromise between the wishes of their employers and the needs of the news media they provide with news material.

In this paper the choices for particular variants of pragmatic argumentation in advisory health brochures are explained by using the pragma-dialectical theory of argumentation. On the basis of the type of dispute that the brochure writer presupposes and the kind of advice that is at issue, four variants of pragmatic argumentation are distinguished. The choice for each of these variants is regarded as a strategic maneuver with which the writer attempts to reach his dialectical and rhetorical goals. It is argued that each of these variants has a strategic function in the resolution of the presupposed difference of opinion, because with each of them the writer anticipates on specific doubt or criticism with respect to the correctness conditions of the speech act of advising, which is the central speech act in health brochures.

A good reputation has become increasingly important for governmental organisations. These organisations can promote their reputation by means of their corporate communication. In this study, the effects of two textual characteristics of a District Water Board’s leaflet are measured: the presence of positively charged information and geographical vicinity. It was expected that both characteristics would have positive effects on the readers’ appreciation of the leaflet, on the organisation’s reputation and on the readers’ compliance (willingness to pay taxes). The presence of positively charged information did not have any effect, but geographical vicinity had positive effects on all three variables. Participants who read a leaflet with information about the Water Board’s activities in their home town appreciated the information more, were more positive about the organisation’s reputation and had higher compliance scores, compared to participants who read a leaflet with information about the Water Board’s entire control area.

Advertising firms and government agencies often face the challenge to make their written materials fit for young people. Lexical imitation has been shown to be an inadequate strategy: youths react negatively when outsiders borrow words from their registers. Communication professionals have little to add: they tend to stick to suggestions, such as ‘use simple and clear language’. This indeterminate situation makes it relevant to have a thorough evaluation whenever a new approach is tried. In 2006, when elections for parliament were being held, a Dutch municipality wrote a letter to all citizens that were going to vote for the first time. The letter urged them to use their right to vote in a style that can be characterized as relational. For example, the first sentence was: “Hey, a letter from the major? Yes, because I want to tell you something important”. To evaluate the adequacy of this communication style a formal version was made of the original letter that differed in style, but not in content. Both letters were evaluated by 258 secondary school pupils. Only respondents with little interest in politics showed positive reactions to the relational style: they found this version more attractive, more intelligible and better fit for a young audience than the formal one. All respondents showed the same negative reactions: with the relational version they considered the author less credible and the letter less appropriate. Effects on beliefs and intentions were absent because 94 percent of the respondents had already decided to vote. These findings suggest that agencies should consider in their correspondence a relational style only when it is directed at young addressees with little interest in the subject matter.

The historical backgrounds of the dialectical approach to argumentation are less well-known than those of the logical and the rhetorical approaches. This article discusses the views on argumentation of the philosopher Zeno of Elea, who is mentioned in ancient sources as the ‘inventor’ of dialectic. Zeno’s views on the aim, the organization, and the regulation of argumentation are reconstructed on the basis of a careful analysis of the reports on one of his paradoxes – the ‘first paradox of plurality’. Next, it will be examined in what way Zeno contributed to the development of dialectic.