Conceptualizing the writer-reader relationship in business prose.

Writers achieve an appropriate writer-reader relationship in business prose not by merely switching from their own to the reader's viewpoint but by artfully interweaving multiple rhetorical and linguistic elements. The writer-reader relationship is expressed through the many possible combinations of vision and voice, which originate in the textual identities of the implied writer, the implied reader, and, sometimes, other characters. By combining multiple visions and voices, writers create what Bakhtin called intentionally hybrid, internally dialogic language that fulfills a social purpose by reflecting human relationships even when the subject matter is impersonal and technical. You-attitude is but one instance of such language and is not always the best choice. Texts written by Sherron Watkins, former vice president of Enron, illustrate how a writer's decisions about textual identities, vision, and voice may affect the course of corporate events in dramatic, unexpected ways.

Keywords: narrative theory; implied reader; implied writer; you-attitude; dialogism; voice; tone; point of view; perspective; Enron

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"I am incredibly nervous that we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals," Enron Vice President Sherron Watkins wrote in an anonymous letter to Kenneth Lay, chairman of the corporation. "My eight years of Enron work history will be worth nothing on my resume, the business world will consider the past successes as nothing but an elaborate accounting hoax" (see Appendix A). (1) These words began a chain of events that revealed a dramatic corporate scandal and ultimately led to the demise of not only Enron but also Arthur Andersen, its auditor. Investors lost money, employees lost jobs, and the business world lost public respect. Watkins's prophetic words became famous as Enron collapsed. But what makes these words interesting to those who study business language and its impact is the extent to which they violate a central principle of business communication: you-attitude, the expression of a relationship in which writers or speakers intentionally subordinate their priorities to those of readers or listeners. In trying to influence Lay to investigate further, Watkins focuses squarely on her own concerns, fears, and self-interest.

To explore the complexities of the writer-reader relationship, in this article I apply concepts from narratology and linguistics to business prose. I address three questions: How should we conceptualize the writer-reader relationship in business prose? What choices must writers make when they express this relationship in a text? Why are such choices important in business practice? I assert that a complete analysis of the writer-reader relationship in business prose must go beyond the traditional concept of you-attitude, which oversimplifies the writer's options. The conceptualization I propose juxtaposes the metaphors of vision and voice in written discourse. I argue that writers achieve an appropriate writer-reader relationship not by merely switching from the writer's to the reader's viewpoint but by artfully interweaving multiple rhetorical and linguistic elements. Writers must define the textual identities of the characters implied in the text: the I, the you, and, sometimes, the others. These identities then lead to choices about whose vision and whose voice the text will reflect. Vision includes not only point of view but also perspective, distance, and focus. Voice--the instantiation of vision in words--encompasses metaphoric parallels with each aspect of literal voice: pitch, inflection, intonation, articulation, pace, and volume. Juxtaposing the implied reader's vision and the implied writer's voice creates what Bakhtin (1981) called intentionally hybrid, internally dialogic language, one form of which constitutes you-attitude.

Whereas you-attitude is often considered the quintessential characteristic of good business writing, I assert in this article that this expression of a writer-reader relationship is not always desirable. Discourse that exemplifies you-attitude may rail to convey the writer's vision when it is, in fact, essential. The writer may lack sufficient knowledge of the reader's point of view and perspectives. The organizational context may make it presumptuous for a writer to express the reader's vision explicitly. Sometimes, a balance between the reader's and writer's visions is more appropriate. In yet other cases, the vision or voice of someone other than either the writer or reader should prevail. To make sound decisions about the rhetorical and linguistic elements through which a text expresses the writer-reader relationship, writers must consider the multiple possible combinations. You-attitude is but one type of hybridized, dialogic language, and others are often better choices.

After showing how past studies have laid important groundwork, this article first proposes a way to conceptualize the writer-reader relationship in terms of textual identity, vision, and voice; it then shows how these rhetorical and linguistic elements interact; finally, it explains how the possibility of multiple visions and voices complicates writers' choices. To illustrate the ideas and to demonstrate the importance of writer-reader relationships, I use three documents written by Enron Vice President Sherron Watkins (Appendices A-C), showing how her rhetorical and linguistic choices of identity, vision, and voice created dramatically different effects that perhaps influenced the course of events at Enron.

PAST EXPLORATIONS OF YOU-ATTITUDE

I use the term you-attitude to refer broadly to the primacy of the reader over the writer in business prose. This privileging of the reader is manifested not only in surface features of language, such as the choice of pronouns and verb forms, but also in underlying decisions a writer makes about what to include and what to exclude from a business document. When a writer gives priority to the concerns and questions readers may have, deemphasizes his or her own concerns, and acknowledges readers by using language that fits their level of expertise and conveys respect, then a business text achieves the quality of you-attitude.

Although sometimes extended to encompass the primacy of the audience over the communicator in both written and oral discourse, the concept of you-attitude has primarily been associated with writing. You-attitude stands out most clearly in persuasive documents, such as sales letters and advertising materials, in which it is appropriate to state explicitly how readers will benefit from taking recommended action. However, you-attitude can be used in most types of business writing, even the most routine, informative documents. Business writers almost always know more than readers about a topic and thus may be inclined to skip details, condense explanations, and use technical vocabulary that would confuse readers. The principle of you-attitude says that writers should put themselves in the place of readers and adapt the message to their needs.

The term you-attitude is problematic, for the concept encompasses more than you and more than attitude. Reducing you-attitude to either awareness of the intended reader (the you) or to the use of second-person pronouns has been criticized by Campbell, Riley, and Parker (1990); Rodman (2001); and others. The word attitude is too narrow, implying perhaps that personal opinion plays a bigger role than it does. Some scholars, therefore, have offered variant terms, such as you-viewpoint, reader orientation, and you-perspective. You-attitude remains the most commonly used term, despite its limitations.

You-attitude has long been an accepted principle of rhetoric in business contexts. Weeks (1985) and Carbone (1994) traced the history of the term to the early part of the 20th century when George Burton Hotchkiss applied principles of modern rhetoric explicitly to business contexts. Hagge (1989) argued, though, that the concept, if not the term, was developed much earlier and is in essence an extension of classical rhetoric principles. In previous studies of you-attitude, scholars have drawn most frequently on studies in linguistics and the philosophy of language. Rodman (2001), for instance, used theories of politeness, case grammar, and information structure to analyze how writers express you-attitude. She made two especially important points. First, you-attitude is gradable, not binary; it is a matter of degree, not an either-or condition. Second, "strategies for enhancing the you-attitude conveyed by a text appear to have a cumulative effect" (p. 22). Campbell et al. (1990), applying speech act theory, showed bow a writer's choice of pronouns and grammatical subjects interacts with rhetorical context to create you-attitude. Their contribution was to illustrate concretely how writers can use specific sentence patterns to achieve you-attitude. Ewald and Vann (2003) analyzed you-attitude in terms of syntactic contexts and semantic representations that ask the reader to adopt a particular identity. They explored the ethical dimensions of you-attitude by showing how a series of letters constructed an appealing identity for readers, which led some to self-deception.