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Reading and Writing Public Documents
Editors
Governments communicate with the public through all kinds of documents: forms, brochures, letters, policy papers, and so on. These public documents have an important role in any democracy and their design very much affects the efficiency with which governments can perform their tasks.
Document designers, linguists and other communication experts in the Netherlands have been studying public documents from a design point of view as well as empirically for decades. In this book, the most prominent of these researchers present the results of their work, collectively giving an overview of various recurring problems in government-to-public communication, and providing suggestions for problem solving.
Document designers, linguists and other communication experts in the Netherlands have been studying public documents from a design point of view as well as empirically for decades. In this book, the most prominent of these researchers present the results of their work, collectively giving an overview of various recurring problems in government-to-public communication, and providing suggestions for problem solving.
[Document Design Companion Series, 1] 2001. vi, 304 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Published online on 21 October 2008
Published online on 21 October 2008
© John Benjamins Publishing Company
Table of Contents
- 1. IntroductionDaniël Janssen and Rob Neutelings | pp. 1–9
- 2. How research can lead to better government formsCarel Jansen and Michaël F. Steehouder | pp. 11–36
- 3. Undercover research into text quality as a tool for communication management: The case of the Dutch tax departmentJan Renkema | pp. 37–57
- 4. Optimizing public information brochures: Formative evaluation in document design processesMenno de Jong and Peter Jan Schellens | pp. 59–83
- 5. Public documents in a multilingual contextJacqueline Hulst and Leo Lentz | pp. 85–103
- 6. Improving the quality of public documents: Or: Why training public writers often doesn’t workDaniël Janssen | pp. 105–124
- 7. The lack of clarity in a sentence: The style of official documents in DutchFrank Jansen | pp. 125–145
- 8. Convincing citizens: The role of argument qualityHans Hoeken | pp. 147–169
- 9. Collaborative writing for the governmentDaniël Janssen and Niels van der Mast | pp. 171–210
- 10. Strategic revision of public documents: How policy writers revise documents in order to reach consensusNiels van der Mast and Daniël Janssen | pp. 211–232
- 11. Trust but verify: Local suspensions of the cooperation principle in political communicationRob Neutelings and Henk Pander Maat | pp. 233–254
- 12. Reading to assess in professional life: Reading styles of Dutch parliamentariansRob Neutelings | pp. 255–274
- About the authors | pp. 297–300
- Index | pp. 301–304
Cited by (7)
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Passera, Stefania
Renkema, Jan & Christoph Schubert
Trueb, Bettina
Lagerwerf, Luuk, Louise Cornelis, Johannes de Geus & Phidias Jansen
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