Search results

This paper attempts to establish the existence of a professional language genre for public relations by evaluating the history of genre analysis and its application in professional contexts. Bhatia’s work, in 1993, demonstrates professional language genre analysis in similar contexts to public relations writing, which make the mapping of the process both relevant and workable for this discipline. The application of Bhatia’s and Swale’s work, in 1990, on modelling the rhetorical moves behind communicative purposes of a genre has been successfully applied within the paper to the news release genre. The paper therefore proposes a model of professional language genre analysis, which may provide a useful guide to writing effective news releases for practitioners and students working in the fields of public relations and corporate communications.

The authors’ goal is to investigate variations in the writing style of book reviews published on different social reading platforms and referring to books of different genres, which enables acquiring insights into communication strategies adopted by readers to share their reading experiences.

The authors propose a corpus-based study focused on the analysis of A Good Review, a novel corpus of online book reviews written in Italian, posted on Amazon and Goodreads, and covering six literary fiction genres. The authors rely on stylometric analysis to explore the linguistic properties and lexicon of reviews and the authors conducted automatic classification experiments using multiple approaches and feature configurations to predict either the review's platform or the literary genre.

The analysis of user-generated reviews demonstrates that language is a quite variable dimension across reading platforms, but not as much across book genres. The classification experiments revealed that features modelling the syntactic structure of the sentence are reliable proxies for discerning Amazon and Goodreads reviews, whereas lexical information showed a higher predictive role for automatically discriminating the genre.

The high availability of cultural products makes information services necessary to help users navigate these resources and acquire information from unstructured data. This study contributes to a better understanding of the linguistic characteristics of user-generated book reviews, which can support the development of linguistically-informed recommendation services. Additionally, the authors release a novel corpus of online book reviews meant to support the reproducibility and advancements of the research.

The purpose of this paper is to account for the genre characteristics of non‐linear, multi‐modal, web‐mediated documents. It involves a two‐dimensional view on genres that allows one to account for the fact that digital genres act not only as text but also as medium.

The theoretical framework of the article is the Swalesian genre theory used in academic settings all over the world to investigate the relationship between discourse and social practice and to teach genre conventions to students of language and communication. Up till now most genre research has focused on the characteristics of “printed” texts, whereas less has been done to apply the genre theory to digital genres.

The article discusses the characteristics of digital genres, notably the media constraints that have a significant effect on the production and reception of digital genres and suggests an extension of the Swalesian genre model that takes the digital characteristics into account.

The suggestion for a revised genre model is not based on an extensive empirical study of various types of web sites. The observation is restricted to a limited number of commercial web sites.

The article proposes new insights into the concept of genre adapting traditional models of genre theory to web‐mediated texts. A revised two‐dimensional genre model incorporating media elements into the concept of genre thus takes account of the particular characteristics of the navigation and reading elements of web‐mediated genres.

Aims to describe systematically the characteristics of weblogs (blogs) – frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence and which are the latest genre of internet communication to attain widespread popularity.

This paper presents the results of a quantitative content analysis of 203 randomly selected blogs, comparing the empirically observable features of the corpus with popular claims about the nature of blogs, and finding them to differ in a number of respects.

Notably, blog authors, journalists and scholars alike exaggerate the extent to which blogs are interlinked, interactive, and oriented towards external events, and underestimate the importance of blogs as individualistic, intimate forms of self‐expression.

Based on the profile generated by the empirical analysis, considers the likely antecedents of the blog genre, situates it with respect to the dominant forms of digital communication on the internet today, and suggests possible developments of the use of blogs over time in response to changes in user behavior, technology, and the broader ecology of internet genres.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the Chinese government generates authority during a crisis through discursive practices expressed in social media.

Using the theoretical framework of authority and the method of genre analysis, this study examined the top 100 forwarded posts on Weibo about a high-profile murder to determine the mechanisms involved in generating authority.

This study provides empirical support that building and maintaining authority distinguishes governments from other social actors during crisis communication. The genre analysis demonstrates that the strategic use of genre chain and genre mixing contributes to the construction of governments’ authority during a crisis. Furthermore, this study suggests the performative and social constructionist approach to understand governments’ authority in the digital age on two levels: a situationally-constructed concept that goes beyond the context of fixed institutions and a relationally-constructed concept that is promoted through discursive collaboration among various social actors.

This study does not directly assess the effectiveness of a government’s ability to construct its authority. Nor does it examine the construction of governments’ authority outside the context of an authoritarian regime. These issues should be addressed in future research.

This study offers governmental organizations some practical insights that can be used to infuse a constructive aspect of authority into their crisis communication plans, practices and processes.

Here, authority is seen as a social construction that foregrounds the discursive, performative, constructive and communicative dimensions of crisis communication. Moreover, this study points to the need for a more complex integrated perspective in crisis communication that includes and connects corporate and government crisis communication.

This paper aims to investigate the characteristics and differences in sentiment expression in movie review documents from four online opinion genres – blog postings, discussion board threads, user reviews, and critic reviews.

A collection of movie review documents was harvested from the four types of web sources, and a sample of 520 movie reviews were analysed to compare the content and textual characteristics across the four genres. The analysis focused on document and sentence length, part‐of‐speech distribution, vocabulary, aspects of movies discussed, star ratings used and multimedia content in the reviews. The study also identified frequently occurring positive and negative terms in the different genres, as well as the pattern of responses in discussion threads.

Critic reviews and blog postings are longer than user reviews and discussion threads, and contain longer sentences. Critic reviews and blogs contain more nouns and prepositions, whereas discussion board and user reviews have more verbs and adverbs. Critic reviews have the largest vocabulary and also the highest proportion of unique terms not found in the other genres. The most informative sentiment words in each genre are provided in the paper. With regard to content, critic reviews are more comprehensive in coverage, and discuss the movie director much more often than the other genres. User reviews discuss the scene aspects (including action and visual effects) more often than the other genres, while blogs tend to talk about the cast, and discuss the music and sound slightly more often.

The study only analysed movie review documents. Similar content and text analysis studies can be carried out in other domains, such as commercial product reviews, celebrity reviews, company reviews and political opinions to compare the results.

The main contribution of the study is the sentiment content analysis results across genres, which show the similarities and differences in content and textual characteristics in the four online opinion genres. The insights will be useful in designing automatic sentiment summarisation methods for multiple online genres.

This paper focuses on patterns of film consumption within cultural consumption more broadly to assess trends in consumerism such as eclectic consumption, individualised consumption and omnivorous/univorous consumption and whether economic background and status feature in shaping cultural consumption. We focus on film because it is widely consumed, online and offline, and has many genres that vary in terms of perceived artistic and entertainment value. In broad terms, film is differentiated between mainstream commercially driven film such as Hollywood blockbusters, middlebrow “feel good” movies and independent arthouse and foreign language film. Our empirical statistical analysis shows that film consumers watch a wide range of genres. However, films deemed to hold artistic value such as arthouse and foreign language feature as part of broad and wide-ranging pattern of consumption of film that attracts its own dedicated consumers. Though we found that social and economic factors remain predictors of cultural consumption the overall picture is more complex than a simple direct correspondence and perceptions of other cultural forms also play a role. Those likely to consume arthouse and foreign language film consume other film genres and other cultural forms genres and those who “prefer” arthouse and foreign language film have slightly more constrained socio-economic characteristics. Overall, we find that economic and cultural factors such income, education, and wider consumption of culture are significant in patterns of film consumption.

In this chapter, I bring a rhetorical genre theory lens to the study of two sets of information activities: information seeking and informing in a clinical setting, and personal information management in the household.

I begin by characterizing each candidate genre and show how it is constituted, created, repurposed, and used. I then show how that genre is embedded within a local genre set. This analysis maps the institutional, interactional, and intertextual connections, showing how generic forms interact with other oral and textual genres within the setting. Finally, I situate the single genre and genre set within the broader genre system to show how individual genres are both socially and intertextually connected with institutions and organizations beyond the local setting.

A genre analysis shows how “information” is accomplished out of the social and documentary practices of participants in particular settings and elucidates the shifting and complex nature of contexts in which information actors operate. Combining three levels of analysis shows how the actions of individuals are locally negotiated but also situated within broader structural constraints and discourse communities. A genre approach therefore offers a window on the elusive concept of “context” in information needs, seeking, and use research.

This paper aims to explain how companies in the region of Arab countries respond to the institutional diffusion of a new communication genre like corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports.

Analysis of the features, content and language of CSR reports published by listed companies in the region, to classify the genres of these reports and infer results about ways of companies’ interaction with newly institutionalized genre.

Three distinct genres are identified: “sustainability reports genre,” “professional CSR report genre” and “light CSR report genre.” When companies interact with institutionally diffused genres, they either adopt them and re-enforce their distinctiveness, mix them with elements from other genres so their distinctiveness will be diluted, or produce the old and established genres under the new name so the new genre will lose its distinctiveness.

The proposed classification of CSR report genres and ways of companies’ interaction with new genres are original and open new horizons for research in social and environmental accounting and corporate communication fields.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a linguistic perspective for corporate brochures. Corporate brochures are published to introduce an organization and to provide information about it but the brochures have been claimed to include promotional elements. By conducting a genre analysis the paper aims to confirm that genre-based writing is not formulaic but instead demonstrates versatility and creativity.

Corporate brochures from a specific industry, oil and gas were sourced from the websites and a total of 16 were available. The method of analysis was genre analysis to establish the generic structure of the brochures by examining the rhetorical moves and strategies, and to identify the textual features of the texts to explain why they are written the way they are.

The oil and gas brochures display a five-move generic structure with a number of strategies. The moves show high occurrence proving the industry as a specialized one. Although the moves are the same, the contents are varied. Versatility is also seen in the presentation style in terms of form, content and language.

Findings on generic structure and textual features of brochures can be used as a guide for corporate writers, as well as trainees and students of corporate communication.

The data for this research represent one industry which has not been explored before thus contributing to the body of knowledge in the field of genre analysis. Although generic in form, genre-based writing has proven to be versatile. The textual features show how companies project their corporate image via brochures.