CASE STUDY ON LANGUISTIC MEANS OF EDITING FOR VOICE AND TONE IN CORPORATE MARKETING COMMUNICATION

Abstract

The research analyses a small corpus of in-house writing of a multinational SME by non-native speakers of English and the edits and revisions made by a marketing expert and a technical writer (native English speakers). The analysis focuses on identifying, classifying and analysing edits regarding the voice and tone guidelines, i.e. how pragmatics concepts (politeness and audience accommodation) are grammatically and semantically encoded. The research uses style guides to analyse the “comparable” monolingual corpus of drafts and final versions, while the annotation includes tags for pragmatically motivated changes whose purpose is establishing a friendly relationship with the target audience. The research employs norms for qualitative research in public relations and marketing communication (Daymon & Holloway, 2010). The research shows that a) non-native speakers of English tend to have a self-centred approach to workplace English writing and often fail to achieve the company voice and tone, and b) the company voice and tone require elimination of culturally specific concepts and use of relatively simple grammatical structures and lexicon.