Publication details
Conveying expertise and competence in business reviews and strategic reports: a survey of persuasive linguistic means
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Conference abstract |
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| Description | One of the prime purposes of corporate and institutional annual reports is to persuade different classes of stakeholders of the organisation´s credibility, competence, efficiency and good management. Since credibility is boosted by the organisation´s ability to prove expertise and trust as its major components, annual reports focus in their text sections on appropriate interpretation of facts so that a positive image of the reporting company is enhanced. This paper analyses reviews of the previous year and outlooks for the future period, found typically in sections called Strategic report, Business review, Strategy and outlook, Management review etc. They aim at persuading readers of a company´s competent and efficient management, positive current economic situation and optimistic future. They focus rather on achievements and successful events, but the principle of objectivity and evidentiality (cf. Habermas 1984, who lists truth, sincerity, appropriateness and understandability as validity claims of credibility) makes them to mention also the failures and losses. However, appropriate selection of linguistic means and presentation strategies minimise the potential harm done to the image of a company and maximise its credibility. As Sperber (2010) claims, to achieve trustworthiness both the speaker and content must be assessed as competent. Linguistic means of (implicit rather than explicit) persuasion were analysed in a subcorpus of English and Czech business documents, included in the Corpus of English and Czech Specialised Discourses (CECSD 2017), with the main focus on choices of semantically positive verbs, nouns and adjectives. |
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