Tijdschrift voor Taalbeheersing. Jaargang 30

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Abstracts Volume 30 no.3 2008

Jaap de Jong and Bas Andeweg
Leiden University, The Netherlands Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Professionalising the speech production. Changes in 15 years of departmental speeches

ABSTRACT: Every minister and deputy minister gives many speeches every year. Fifteen years ago most of the speeches were written by the departmental civil servants, but since ten years all departments have their own office with specialized speechwriters. What are the most important textual differences between the speeches written in the earlier days and those written in the earlier days and those written in the new century? An analysis of 66 speeches (half of them from 1988/9, the other half from 2003/4) renders the following results. The 2003/4 speeches are shorter en stylistically richer (more humor, metaphors, anecdotes, examples and more oriented to the communicative situation (more we-style and you-style). Also, speech introductions have become longer and the speech closings fulfill more rhetorical functions. These differences indicate more rhetorical care and a growing craftsmanship.

KEYWORDS: speeches, departmental communication, retoric

Paul van den Hoven and H. José Plug
Utrecht University, The Netherlands University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
The advancement of the justification of criminal sentences. Research into the effectiveness of the PROMIS model

ABSTRACT: In response to both laymen and professionals criticizing the obscurity of criminal sentences, the Dutch judiciary, in 2004, started a large-scale project called Promis. The aim of the project was to improve the justification of judicial decisions and thus advance communication between the criminal judge, the people concerned and, finally, the general public. To achieve this goal, the initiators of Promis developed a model. The positive evaluations of the project did, however, provide no clear indications whether the justifications of criminal sentences that were presented after the introduction of the model, provided more insight in the argumentation for the type of punishment and the length of the punishment that were imposed than the ones preceding Promis. This uncertainty induced us to try and ascertain, by means of a comparison of corpora, whether the argumentation in criminal sentences has indeed been improved. The results of the research are presented in this contribution.

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KEYWORDS: argumentation, criminal sentences, justification, judicial decision, Promis

Hans van der Meij, Joyce Karreman and Michaël Steehouder
University of Twente, The Netherlands
Thirty years of computer manuals for novices

ABSTRACT: The earliest computer manuals for novices (tutorials) were written in the 1980’s in a continuous prose style. However, influenced by the studies of Carroll at al. into the behaviour of novice computer users, procedural instructions were used to make the manual more suitable for ‘hand-on’ use. This approach was widely accepted during the 1990’s, when more research yielded a more sophisticated practice, including a balanced use of declarative information and error information; other studies shed light on the effects of exercises and invitations to explore the program. Around the turn of the century, attention for the user experience of manuals increased, with a focus on the presence of personalities as tutors and agents, for instance in the form of fictitious co-users of the program. The history of the tutorial is characterised as a goof example of the way practice, theory and research go together in the development of a genre.

KEYWORDS: computer manuals, minimalism

Forms in the Netherlands
Leo Lentz and Carel Jansen
Utrecht University, The Netherlands Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Researchers in the field of Language and Communication have been studying the intelligibility of forms for several decades now. People who must fill in government-issued forms prove to be experiencing problems over and over again: they do not properly understand questions and explanations or, mistakenly, skip them. A model for tasks in form completion, developed in 1989, helped to analyse those problems, and three optimization starting-points helped to revise the forms.

In a case study, the 1983 Rent Rebate Form was compared with the 2008 Rent Rebate Form. It was concluded that the new form looked more attractive but that the intelligibility of key notions continued to be problematic. This appeared to be the consequence of the general attempt to use everyday language, which in a number of cases proved to require legal specifications that posed new problems in completion tasks. Recent government policies have aimed to develop improved forms. The influence of research in Lang age and Communication on the new government policy is evident.

KEYWORDS: cognitive load theory, government-issued forms

Frank Jansen and Daniël Janssen
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
New message. On the rise of e-mail and the fall of the letter

ABSTRACT: In little more than a decade e-mail has established itself as an important and omnipresent medium for written personal messages. In this study we explore the question whether e-mail has become equivalent to its paper predecessor: the letter. After a short historical sketch of email and letters we report the results empirical research. First, we did a survey to assess the

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aptness of e-mail messages for several communicative acts in comparison to letters on paper. The results indicate that e-mails are considered equivalent or superior to letters. Second, we conducted a survey in which the satisfaction with e-mail and other media in a business context was evaluated. The results indicate once again that e-mail gets the highest evaluation of all new media. It has to give way only to an unmediated type of communication, the face-to-face conversation. The third type of empirical data stem from two evaluation experiments with ‘medium’ as the independent variable. Medium did not turn out to be a significant factor. We conclude that e-mail has replaced the letter for many communication tasks and that the use of traditional letters on paper will be limited in the future.

KEYWORDS: e-mail, letter, remediation