Business Communication

... rely on better and more frequent business communication, whether it is in terms of technology firing digitized data across the world in fractions of a second, or multifunctional - even multilingual - teams working together to resolve a common problem.

Taking a rhetorical approach to business communication is not without considerable historical precedent, as several historical examples of rhetoric's intersection with business might show. For the ancient Greeks, an understanding of rhetoric offered an opportunity to do well in life through one's acquired ability to argue well. One might employ rhetoric, for example, to improve the chances of success in litigation over property confiscated through the greater political power of another. Still others might use it in less formal channels, as people do today, to further their positions in business or social arenas.

Changes in the structure of the modern business organization, drastic and widespread downsizing, and increased competition have all reduced the time the manager was once able to devote to written messages. Readers in business communication can no longer afford to review material at relative leisure and those who once had information processed for them in summaries and abstracts find that they must now do it themselves. As a consequence, many are developing techniques for "scanning" information, a phenomenon that has only recently received the attention of those who study business communication. They are becoming more selective of the messages they read even as those messages compete more fully for their attention.

Keeping in mind the general qualities of ethos Aristotle described, and assuming they will also have appeal in the world of business communication, we might now look to specific and familiar expressions of ethos. One good source for this is a passage we have already seen and considered as part of our discussion of opposition. There we analyzed the persuasiveness of entertaining opposing points in one mail-order distributor's open-letter attempt to overcome the skepticism of consumers who are concerned about mail-order shopping.

Traditionally, preferred mode of business communication has been figures: a simple balance sheet, after all, requires no translation. Like any language in use for thousands of years, the use of figures in business has evolved to a high level of sophistication, as a glance at any set of accounting standards shows.

Euphemisms are usually described as the substitution of an inoffensive term for one that would otherwise be considered offensively explicit. Several that are commonly offered as examples are "perspire" for "sweat" and "seniors" for "old people." One consultant and writer on business communication offers the euphemisms below for the word "die." She claims that the "word die . . . is simple and dignified. It is far better than many of the substitutes for it."

Just admitting that the relationship between business communication and action is fraught with difficulties is academic if we cannot do anything about it. This is no longer an option which is available to us, because language and communication are becoming so fundamental to the way in which our organizations operate internally and compete externally. However much we distrust it, we are much more dependent on language in business than we used to be.

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