Reading and Writing Public Documents

Editors

Daniël Janssen | University of Utrecht

Rob Neutelings | Technical University of Delft

Paperback – Available

ISBN 9789027232014 (Eur) | EUR 68.00

ISBN 9781588110091 (USA) | USD 102.00

e-Book –

ISBN 9789027299475 | EUR 68.00 | USD 102.00

Governments communicate with the public through all kinds of documents: forms, brochures, letters, policy papers, and so on. These public documents have an important role in any democracy and their design very much affects the efficiency with which governments can perform their tasks.
Document designers, linguists and other communication experts in the Netherlands have been studying public documents from a design point of view as well as empirically for decades. In this book, the most prominent of these researchers present the results of their work, collectively giving an overview of various recurring problems in government-to-public communication, and providing suggestions for problem solving.

[Document Design Companion Series, 1] 2001. vi, 304 pp.

Publishing status: Available
Published online on 21 October 2008

https://doi.org/10.1075/ddcs.1

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

Daniël Janssen and Rob Neutelings | pp. 1–9

2. How research can lead to better government forms

Carel Jansen and Michaël F. Steehouder | pp. 11–36

3. Undercover research into text quality as a tool for communication management: The case of the Dutch tax department

Jan Renkema | pp. 37–57

4. Optimizing public information brochures: Formative evaluation in document design processes

Menno de Jong and Peter Jan Schellens | pp. 59–83

5. Public documents in a multilingual context

Jacqueline Hulst and Leo Lentz | pp. 85–103

6. Improving the quality of public documents: Or: Why training public writers often doesn’t work

Daniël Janssen | pp. 105–124

7. The lack of clarity in a sentence: The style of official documents in Dutch

Frank Jansen | pp. 125–145

8. Convincing citizens: The role of argument quality

Hans Hoeken | pp. 147–169

9. Collaborative writing for the government

Daniël Janssen and Niels van der Mast | pp. 171–210

10. Strategic revision of public documents: How policy writers revise documents in order to reach consensus

Niels van der Mast and Daniël Janssen | pp. 211–232

11. Trust but verify: Local suspensions of the cooperation principle in political communication

Rob Neutelings and Henk Pander Maat | pp. 233–254

12. Reading to assess in professional life: Reading styles of Dutch parliamentarians

Rob Neutelings | pp. 255–274

About the authors | pp. 297–300

Index | pp. 301–304

Cited by (6)

Cited by six other publications

Order by:

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2022. Editing and genre conflict. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 87 ff.

Passera, Stefania

2018. Flowcharts, Swimlanes, and Timelines. Journal of Business and Technical Communication 32:2 ► pp. 229 ff.

Renkema, Jan & Christoph Schubert

2018. Introduction to Discourse Studies,

Lagerwerf, Luuk, Louise Cornelis, Johannes de Geus & Phidias Jansen

2008. Advance Organizers in Advisory Reports. Written Communication 25:1 ► pp. 53 ff.

[no author supplied]

2012. How People Read. In Human-Information Interaction and Technical Communication, ► pp. 367 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 18 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

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