CASE STUDY ON LANGUISTIC MEANS OF EDITING FOR VOICE AND TONE IN CORPORATE MARKETING COMMUNICATION

The research analyses a small corpus of in-house writing of a multinational SME by non-native speakers of English and the edits and revisions made by a marketing expert and a technical writer (native English speakers). The analysis focuses on identifying, classifying and analysing edits regarding the voice and tone guidelines, i.e. how pragmatics concepts (politeness and audience accommodation) are grammatically and semantically encoded. The research uses style guides to analyse the “comparable” monolingual corpus of drafts and final versions, while the annotation includes tags for pragmatically motivated changes whose purpose is establishing a friendly relationship with the target audience. The research employs norms for qualitative research in public relations and marketing communication (Daymon & Holloway, 2010). The research shows that a) non-native speakers of English tend to have a self-centred approach to workplace English writing and often fail to achieve the company voice and tone, and b) the company voice and tone require elimination of culturally specific concepts and use of relatively simple grammatical structures and lexicon.

Influence of diagram layout and scrolling on understandability of BPMN processes: an eye tracking experiment with BPMN diagrams

Business process modeling is an important activity for developing software systems—especially within digitization projects and when realizing digital business models. Specifying requirements and building executable workflows is often done by using BPMN 2.0 process models. Although there are several style guides available for BPMN, e.g., by Silver and Richard (BPMN method and style, vol 2, Cody-Cassidy Press, Aptos, 2009), there has not been much empirical research done into the consequences of the diagram layout. In particular, layouts that require scrolling have not been investigated yet. The aim of this research is to establish layout guidelines for business process modeling that help business process modelers to create more understandable business process diagrams. For establishing benefits and penalties of different layouts, a controlled eye tracking experiment was conducted, in which data of 21 professional software developers was used. Our results show that horizontal layouts are less demanding and that as many diagram elements as possible should be put on the initially visible screen area because such diagram elements are viewed more often and longer. Additionally, diagram elements related to the reader’s task are read more often than those not relevant to the task. BPMN modelers should favor a horizontal layout and use a more complex snake or multi-line layout whenever the diagrams are too large to fit on one page in order to support BPMN model comprehension.

Using Online Writing Communities to Teach Writing MOOCs

The immense enrollment capacity of massive open online courses (MOOCs) radically decenters student and teacher authority in the writing classroom. However, online writing communities teach each other how to write effectively within that community, a type of writing instruction which could be leveraged in a MOOC. The author qualitatively coded the types of writing questions and feedback posted on a technical writing forum, Technical Writing World and discovered that writing questions focused on technical writing genres, style guides, documentation practices, lower order concerns, and revision or outsourcing of work. Responses often directed the original poster to research the rhetorical situation within a specific company. The author then outlined three pedagogical approaches for writing MOOCs: students could ask writing questions from professionals on similar writing websites, conduct qualitative studies of similar online writing communities to learn their underlying writing values, and participate in MOOCs that were organized to be communities of practice.

CONTINUING PHANTOM INFLUX OF ENGLISH LEXIS VIA LOCALIZATION: AN ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH COMPUTER TERMINOLOGY LOCALIZED IN SERBIAN

The paper analyzes the English computer terminology localized into Serbian between 2010 to 2020 both from the purely lexical stand-point (type and status of borrowings, as per Prćić (2005)), and from the viewpoint of pragmatic borrowings (Andersen 2014), but in a narrower set of pragmatic borrowings limited to written modes of communication: direct and indirect borrowing of interjections, discourse markers, expletives, vocatives, and paralinguistic phenomena. The chosen period saw a rapid expansion of instant communication applications with rich sets of emoticons, proliferation of cloud services and replace- ment of traditional software with software as a service. The research aims to shed light on how much the new lexis from computer-mediated forms of communication, as well as pragmatic notions stemming from the emerging trend of IT companies crafting their content to adhere to strict stylistic and audience accommodation guidelines, have been taken over into Serbian. Preliminary findings indicate that there is a huge number of both lexical and pragmatic borrowings, including interjections and paralinguistic phenomena such as names of emoticons and short codes used to insert emoticons. This influx of new, raw and, due to style guides, conditionally justified English borrowings provides a new form of evidence of English having become a nativized foreign language (Prćić 2014) of online communication, which, as a knock-on effect, leads translators and localization teams to consider raw and normally unjustified borrowings as acceptable and appropriate for the target audience that consists of more and more digital natives. The research applies a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods by means of annotating the 2020 version of Microsoft English-Serbian Bilingual Terminology Database.

Murder in our Midst

Crime stories attract audiences and social buzz, but they also serve as prisms for perceived threats. As immigration, technological change, and globalization reshape our world, anxiety spreads. Because journalism plays a role in how the public adjusts to moral and material upheaval, this unease raises the ethical stakes. Reporters can spread panic or encourage reconciliation by how they tell these stories. Murder in Our Midst uses crime coverage in select North American and Western European countries as a key to examine culturally constructed concepts like privacy, public, public right to know, and justice. Working from close readings of news coverage, codes of ethics and style guides, and personal interviews with almost 200 news professionals, this book offers fertile material for a provocative conversation. The findings divide the ten countries studied into three media models. The book explores what the differing coverage decisions suggest about underlying attitudes to criminals and crime and how justice in a democracy is best served. Today, journalists’ work can be disseminated around the world without any consideration of whether what’s being told (or how) might dissolve cultural differences or undermine each community’s right to set its own standards to best reflect its citizens’ values. At present, unique reporting practices persist among the three models, but the Internet and social media threaten to dissolve distinctions and the cultural values they reflect. There is a need for a journalism that both opens local conversations and bridges differences among nations. This book is a first step in that direction.

Body As Architecture: Designing the Stout Body in the Age of Standardization

This article explores the curious intersections of stoutwear design, Gestalt Psychology, and architectural discourse in early twentieth-century American fashion media. In doing so, it focuses principally on trade media, style guides and advertisements that grappled with the perceived flaws of the stout woman’s physique and how sophisticated design principles, if properly handled, could create the appearance of bodily slenderness. By moving beyond the biological determinism of contemporary obesity discourse, this article argues that ideas about stoutness and, more specifically, what constituted a stout body, were produced through attempts to contain, control, and correct the fat, female body in fashion design discourse. By further embedding this research within a broader consideration of the relationship between bodies, dress, architecture, and modernist design thinking, this article argues that the mediums and discourses of fashion can open up pathways for thinking about the body itself as “designed.”

E-Marketplace as a Tool for the Revitalization of Portuguese Craft Industry: The Design Process in the Development of an Online Platform

The craft trade in Portugal faces challenges that compromise its productive and economic sustainability and may result in the disappearance of millenary techniques, traditions, and industrial practices of high symbolic and historical value. The growing incompatibility of these traditional activities with digital technologies, the lack of resources, and a growing age gap are among the main problems identified. This situation made worse by various restrictions pertaining to the COVID-19 pandemic points towards the possibility of extinction of this type of manual arts. The goal of this research is to demonstrate how the design process of an e-marketplace platform, throughout its different phases, may contribute to the revitalization of traditional industries. The methodologies adopted in the framework consisted in the study of UX and UI best design practices, including wireframe design, user flows, definition of personas, development of prototypes, and style guides. The results of the conducted usability tests to the prototype allowed a gradual improvement of the solution, culminating in the confirmation of its effectiveness. The study concluded that digital technology, namely a designed e-marketplace solution, could potentially bring buyers and sellers closer together, thus being a tool with high potential for the dissemination and sustainability of the craft industry.