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

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

Table of Contents

1. Introduction Daniël Janssen and Rob Neutelings	1–9
2. How research can lead to better government forms Carel Jansen and Michaël F. Steehouder	11–36
3. Undercover research into text quality as a tool for communication management: The case of the Dutch tax department Jan Renkema	37–57
4. Optimizing public information brochures: Formative evaluation in document design processes Menno de Jong and Peter Jan Schellens	59–83
5. Public documents in a multilingual context Jacqueline Hulst and Leo Lentz	85–103
6. Improving the quality of public documents: Or: Why training public writers often doesn’t work Daniël Janssen	105–124
7. The lack of clarity in a sentence: The style of official documents in Dutch Frank Jansen	125–145
8. Convincing citizens: The role of argument quality Hans Hoeken	147–169
9. Collaborative writing for the government Daniël Janssen and Niels van der Mast	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	211–232
11. Trust but verify: Local suspensions of the cooperation principle in political communication Rob Neutelings and Henk Pander Maat	233–254
12. Reading to assess in professional life: Reading styles of Dutch parliamentarians Rob Neutelings	255–274
References	275–296
About the authors	297–300
Index	301–304

Cited by

Cited by 6 other publications

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

Noël, Guillermina, Jorge Frascara & Clarence Wong

2019. Designing bowel preparation patient instructions to improve colon cancer detection. Information Design Journal 25:1 ► pp. 110 ff.

Pander Maat, Henk

2008. Editing and genre conflict. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) 18:1 ► 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. In Introduction to Discourse Studies,

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 11 may 2021. 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.

Subjects

Linguistics

Pragmatics

Writing and literacy

Discourse studies

Miscellaneous

Industrial & organizational studies

BIC Subject: KJM – Management & management techniques

BISAC Subject: BUS085000 – BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Organizational Behavior

U.S. Library of Congress Control Number: 00067451 | Marc record