Improving Discourse Quality in Organization: Evaluation and Redesign

The main objective of this course is to provide students with hands-on experience in designing a number of key genres of written communication in media and business as well as introducing them to selected methods for evaluating and redesigning their own writing. The course will set out from a team assignment where students develop their own ideas for a Web 2.0-based start-up company and write up a concise business plan, a job description and a press release within the theoretical frameworks of financial communication, human resources and crisis management respectively. The main focus is on exploring and applying a range of empirical methods for text-, reader- and expert-focused evaluation that will help the teams to redesign their original texts. The course calls for a re-appraisal of the complex discursive processes underlying text (both production and consumption) and shows a strong interest in ethnographic approaches drawing on field data (incl. interviewing and computer-based writing process analysis), where writing is directly linked up with (multiparty) oral and online interaction.