The Construct

As far as organizational communication goes, this is one question that many a communicator should always take into account. Place oneself into the target audience’s shoes and ask, “What’s in it for me?”

Whenever I teach business communication, the part on which I give most emphasis always is communication planning and audience analysis. The problem with some writing manuals is that they prescribe the “best” formats and step-by-step processes failing to take into account the various communicative contexts.

For example, many writing manuals would prescribe the up-front format – a brief and concise format that begins with the summary of the message. While this does work effectively in most business organizations, I have observed that some more traditional organizations would prefer a more academic format – the one with the typical intro-body-conclusion structure. It’s always a choice on what format would probably better suit specific contexts.

Everyone in the organization has his or her own politics to consider. The simple existence of management and subordinates and yes-men and rebels in organizations are a testament to that. It often hard to identify these from an outsider’s perspective. However, for internal communication, one can have a fairly easy time through continuous observation.

(more…)

Recently, in between the sex scandal issue and the ConAss, the Inquirer ran a series of articles focusing on the poor quality of English textbooks made and published for the basic education level.

As one who has written textbooks (both in technology learning and English), I know that writing a textbook is one arduous task. It’s a combination of technical and creative writing all the while balancing method, accuracy, and style. The quality of textbooks does rely heavily on the writer’s competency. However, it is also important to note that extraneous (e.g. economic) aspects in textbook publishing eventually become defining factors to the quality.

The textbook publishing business is a cutthroat one. In my opinion, the only two profitable activities of any English language professional here in the Philippines is to 1) be a consultant and 2) write textbooks. There is simply much money to be made from royalties and textbooks are perhaps the only books that could sell by the thousands in our non-reading culture.

(more…)

As of today, I am embarking on the second longest writing work of my life – my graduate thesis.

My undergraduate thesis was a critical discourse analysis of the Inquirer’s representations of Fernando Poe Jr. in its editorials. It was a fun topic to write about. Nearly got me the best thesis award for the year but not quite. I was just thankful I was able to graduate.

Now, I’m on to the final stretch of my MA program. I conveniently passed the language proficiency exam in Spanish. Officially, I can only pursue thesis writing once I enroll in it this summer. I wanted to finish it as soon as possible but I don’t want to pressure myself in the midst of all the work I’m doing right now. Perhaps I’ll get things done and over with by 1st semester of the next academic year and graduate by October.

However, hacking away at a page at a time isn’t too shabby an idea. Starting today, I’m starting on a-page-a-day project. I’m projecting that my final output will be around 100 to 150 pages of manuscript so such a pace might help me finish earlier than expected. I just finished writing the Background of the Study section today (a couple of pages, at that).

Well, I still have to pass the initial proposal defense before I can officially run with the topic though I don’t see any reason why they should ask me to ditch it. I’m working on a critical discourse analysis of the representations of entities in blog posts on the de la Paz – Pangandaman issue.

So people who wrote about it, I look forward to contacting you for my research. I hope you’d help out a struggling academic.

I hope this works.

Thanks to J. Angelo for extending my discussion on blogging and generalizations. And on the Blog Herald no less!

I’m seeing great inputs from the comments. I love his take on the differences of perspectives used by bloggers. This diversity, I guess, gives the much needed color to the blogosphere that reflects our own diversity as people too. This diversity also drives the blogosphere to be dynamic. And, if ever the blogosphere loses this dynamism, I believe that it’s the failure of the social experiment known as Web 2.0.

Read J. Angelo’s take on the Blog Herald here.