Preferred ways of writing things in press releases. Boosting business communication teaching and learning material with DDL activities

De Cock, Sylvie
(2022) Teaching and Language Corpora Conference - TaLC 2022 — Location: University of Limerick and Mary Immaculate College (13.July.2022)

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Press releases represent a business genre that is widely used by organisations to communicate externally with a range of stakeholders including journalists, investors and the general public. The genre sets out to provide information about the company, persuade journalists that this information is worthy of media attention and coverage, and promote the company in a favourable light. The multipurpose nature of press releases (Bremner 2014) has led to their characterisation as a complex hybrid genre (Catenaccio 2008) with both informational and promotional communicative purposes and the use of promotional language elements in these texts has received some attention in the literature (Pander Maat 2007). Press releases are also marked by what Jacobs (2006: 201) calls “preformulation”, i.e. “a news style that requires little or no reworking on the part of the journalists who receive” them. Examples of preformulation in press releases are third person self-reference (the company refers to itself in the third person singular) and self-quotation (the CEO and other high-ranking individuals from the company are seemingly quoted verbatim in connection with the information included in the press releases). The focus of this paper is on the learning/teaching material that is and could be made available to business communication students and teachers and more specifically on the treatment of key linguistic features associated with press releases written in English. The aim of the paper is twofold. It first sets out to report on an examination of the treatment of press releases in a series of business communication textbooks (e.g. Bovee & Thill’s Business Communication Today, Byrne’s Business English Writing Skills, Chan’s English for Business Communication). The investigation reveals that, while most of the publications under scrutiny provide ample information and guidance about the move structure, format and layout of press releases, the actual language typically used in these texts tends to be largely neglected. In a second part, the paper explores the extent to which findings from corpus-driven research into the language of press releases could be used to inform learning/teaching business communication manuals. This exploration is based on an analysis of lexical bundles extracted from a one-million-word corpus of corporate press releases in English issued in by Fortune 500 companies (De Cock and Granger 2021). Lexical bundles provide a useful starting point to access and identify the preferred ways of saying or of writing things in specific genres and the paper presents and discusses concrete examples of DDL activities that could help business communication students develop and hone their press release writing skills with a specific focus on preferred sequences of words that perform the genre’s informational and promotional communicative purposes. References Bremner, Stephen. 2014. Genres and processes in the PR industry: Behind the scenes with an intern writer. International Journal of Business Communication 51(3), 259-278. Catenaccio, Paola. 2008. Press releases as a hybrid genre: Addressing the informational/promotional conundrum. Pragmatics, 18(1), 9-31. De Cock, Sylvie & Granger, Sylviane. 2021. Stance in press releases versus business news : a lexical bundle approach. Text & Talk 41(5-6), 691-713. Jacobs, Geert. 2006. The dos and don’ts of writing press releases (and how learners act upon them). In Paul Gillaerts & Philip Shaw (eds), The map and the landscape: Norms and practices in genre, 199-218. Bern: Peter Lang. Pander Maat, Henk. 2007. How promotional language in press releases is dealt with by journalists: Genre mixing or genre conflict. Journal of Business Communication 44(1), 59-95.
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De Cock, S. (2022). Preferred ways of writing things in press releases. Boosting business communication teaching and learning material with DDL activities. Teaching and Language Corpora Conference - TaLC 2022, University of Limerick and Mary Immaculate College. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/106884