Vague language (VL) is often seen as imprecision; however, in executive communication, it can function as a strategic resource. This study examines how senior executives combine VL with nonverbal cues in unscripted interviews, drawing on 10 recordings with C-suit leaders, primarily CEOs, from Stanford’s View from the Top Series. Unlike previous research focusing on written or monomodal data, the study introduces an integrative analytical framework that examines the interplay between linguistic vagueness and nonverbal cues to capture the strategies leaders use to communicate effectively while employing vague expressions. To this end, multimodal features, including speech, hand gestures, gaze, head movements, and prosody, are annotated and analyzed using a sequence of quantitative techniques. Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA) was applied to test whether different types of VL significantly influenced the use of multimodal features, followed by Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), hierarchical cluster analysis, and Latent Class Analysis (LCA) to identify recurrent multimodal configurations associated with VL use. Results show that in these high-stakes business interactions, VL is enacted not merely as a linguistic phenomenon: nonverbal cues are integral to conveying meaning. These modes interact with speech to modulate claims, stance, and social alignment, collectively supporting pragmatic functions such as politeness, persuasion, and self-protection. VL thus operates as part of systematic multimodal ensembles, functioning as a strategic communicative resource rather than a sign of weakness. The study advances our understanding of leadership discourse and offers practical implications for executive communication training, highlighting the importance of developing multimodal awareness in high-stakes professional contexts.
Listening is central to organizational life, yet many employees report persistent experiences of not being genuinely heard. This study conceptualizes such experiences as organizational unlistening and examines how they are socially coordinated and sustained despite rhetorical commitments to listening. Drawing on critical and sociocultural communication traditions and using Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) theory, the research analyzed 18 semi-structured interviews with employees. Thematic analysis identified a set of patterned communicative practices that normalize unlistening, including ritualized responsiveness, selective resonance, and symbolic legitimacy, showing how organizations structure what is heard and by whom. These findings reveal unlistening as an active, power-laden organizational practice that reinforces communicative closure and knowledge inequalities. They position unlistening as a distinct construct in business communication and emphasize the need for reflexive, system-level approaches to responsiveness that address communicative closure and sustain employee engagement.
This article presents a conceptual framework for enhancing business writing skills through social media integration in business communication education. By embedding platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter, the framework promotes essential competencies such as clarity, audience awareness, and professional tone. Five core principles—constructivist learning, digital literacy, ethical writing practices, real-time feedback, and collaborative writing—underpin this framework, emphasizing experiential learning that bridges informal and formal communication styles. This approach offers educators a structured method for developing students’ adaptability and writing proficiency, aligning pedagogical practices with the evolving needs of modern business communication.
Writing is a productive skill, which means that the emphasis is on the output. The fact that most students in South Africa learn English as a second language (L2) presents challenges concerning English writing proficiency, because writing is different from speaking since it utilises higher-order cognitive skills. The study analysed 184 students’ scripts showing different forms of students’ writing, such as, reports, creative writing assignments, language tests, business correspondence, research papers, answering open-ended questions on extracts and the like. A qualitative method was used to explore and describe challenges encountered by students in English writing by collecting students’ scripts to identify problem areas where interventions needed to be applied. Purposive sampling was employed for the study as the focus was specifically on first-year University students registered for different modules, but all taking Communication (English), which is a compulsory module. Various theories such as the writing process, error analysis and proficiency theory were explored in order to understand the processes that underpin academic writing. The hypothesis is that mother-tongue linguistic features will pose challenges as they are embedded in the students’ cognitive language skills, and they will therefore interfere in English writing since the students’ mother tongue and English have different linguistic rules. Possible solutions for the many and varied challenges are the application of different processes that include different pedagogical methodologies. Error analysis played a crucial role in the study since it has a bearing on students who speak English as a second language because it investigates errors which are systematic and which result from language interference (this can manifest in intralingual and/or interlingual interference). In order to address these challenges, facilitators must employ pedagogical strategies that will encompass different teaching methods and different assessment methods that will link language exercises to other forms of writing such that there is a correlation between different aspects of language skills. Keywords: English writing challenges, language interference, error analysis, teaching methods, assessment methods, language skills
This study aims to analyse the marketing communication strategy of Medan Tribun in the face of media business competition in the digital era. The theory used in this research is Kotler's 4P (Product, Price, Place, Promotion) marketing communication strategy combined with SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis. The research method used was a qualitative descriptive approach, with data collection techniques including interviews, observation and documentation. The subjects of this study were the team involved in the marketing communication strategy of Medan Tribune, which was eight informants. The results showed that the marketing strategy of Tribun Medan entering the digital era was carried out by producing news content made in print, online and social media-based multi-platforms as well as building an online news portal filled with fast, accurate, interesting and diverse written and video reports to gain public trust, then creating a digital activity program and developing a Tribune Event Organizer.
Cet article analyse les utilisations des mesures de l’organisation comme employeur par les communicateurs dans le contexte d’une communication de recrutement imprégnée de marque employeur. Les plateformes d’avis et de mesures souhaitent transformer l’employeur en bien singulier. Glassdoor est une pionnière de cette approche en proposant des indicateurs synthétiques. Des discours médiatiques soulignent l’intérêt de l’anonymat pour favoriser une forme de transparence de l’organisation. Une enquête auprès de jeunes diplômés a montré une autre vision de ces données en insistant sur leur manque de fiabilité lié, selon eux, à leur construction anonyme. Ainsi, articles de presse et interprétation des utilisateurs illustrent deux façons opposées d’approcher ces chiffres, soit comme indicateur de transparence qui suppose un employeur singulier, soit comme statistique sujette à caution qui renvoie à l’employeur comme bien différencié. Dans cette perspective complexe, les sites internet du secteur bancaire intègrent faiblement ces mesures, illustrant une approche de l’employeur comme bien standard. Les limites de notre étude (secteur particulier et observation externe des pratiques, notamment) ne permettent pas de conclure sur les motivations des communicateurs mais soulignent leur distance vis-à-vis des mesures malgré certains discours d’accompagnement enthousiastes.
Communication. Mass media, Business communication. Including business report writing, business correspondence
Bond and Hofstede (1989) have demonstrated that culture has a large impact on international business success. In Western cultures it would relate to individualism and in Oriental cultures to Confucian dynamism. Their conception of politeness as a leading principle in human relations and their use of time seems unlike that of Western cultures. Within the Western hemisphere, however, Anglo-Germanic and Latin cultures do not share the same concepts of politeness and time. Spanish business letters seem to be overpolite compared to American ones. Whereas Dutch people stick to one topic at the same time in their negotiations, Italians tend to interrupt to tackle as many issues as possible. Anglo-Germanic and Latin cultures seem to differ in their means of expression of politeness in negotiating and writing. The main source seems to be the striking difference in power distance between Anglo-Germanic and Latin management cultures, a phenonomenon which was observed in Hofstede’s first study with IBM (1980). Irrespective of its origin, politeness or the presumed lack of it could easily lead to intercultural misunderstanding. Hofstede’s work can be used as a framework to analyse some of the potential sources of misunderstanding caused by such differences. The purpose of this paper is to summarize some data to illustrate the importance of the above cultures on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, to evidence some politeness markers including the time concept, such as pausing and silencing in oral communication and courteous beginnings and endings of Latin business letters, and to retrace the perception of such behaviour by a person from the other culture. How can cultures respect each other and how can politeness be interpreted in a proper way without insulting the other party? How can cultures respect each other, learn from each other and cooperate effectively, for instance, in business and technology? What could be the consequences for the international practice of business management and communication in the Anglo-Germanic and Latin cultures of some EU and NAFTA countries? On the basis of those research findings we will present some guidelines for successful intercultural cooperation in the EU keeping an eye on new trade possibilities on the other side of the Atlantic.
A distinction is made between units and categories that are medium-independent (e.g. word class, noun phrase and clause) and those that are tied to the medium of realization. While the orthographic sentence is a typical highly conventionalised unit that is tied to the written medium, the tone unit is a typical unit of the spoken medium. There are, however, some problems related to this unit of realisation. Not only is the tone unit and its organisation into higher-level units subject to theoretical dispute, it also has a different status in speaking and reading respectively, which so far has been largely ignored in corpus linguistics.
Business communication. Including business report writing, business correspondence
The following is a progress report on COLT (A Corpus of London Teenager Language), the first large English corpus focussing on the language of teenagers. The paper consists of two parts: a description of the mark-up system that will be used for the prosodic transcription of the material is followed by a report on the most obvious linguistic and interactional trends that immediately struck us when we looked at the data.
Business communication. Including business report writing, business correspondence
The recent report by Besomi (2013) shows the huge number of Economics dictionaries available online, but also describes some of their shortcomings; on the contrary Fuertes-Olivera (2012) points out the potential of these resources in a learning context. However, in order to offer a quick reference guide to Economics dictionaries for web surfers, an evaluation system (Caruso 2011) has been designed to assess dictionary usability with respect to three kinds of prospective users (laymen, semi-experts, and experts), both in cognitive and communicative tasks, and with special reference to two types of situations in which the dictionaries might be consulted, namely translation and learning. This project, however, is not devoted to testing data quality, therefore it doesn’t necessarily give any guarantees to web surfers regarding the contents provided by unrestricted dictionaries found on the Internet.
The analysis of Economics dictionaries carried out using this tool, offers a quantitative survey of the overall lexicographical features they display, proving that, even if these resources are on average not particularly suited for communicative tasks, some of them include specific kinds of data that are considered crucial for supporting users in text production (Alonso et al. 2011).
Business communication. Including business report writing, business correspondence
To replicate the need for communication speed and effectiveness in the workplace, I have designed a successful business writing course based on a hybrid recursive model that combines prescriptive rhetorical patterns with a perceptive application of those patterns. The model draws inspiration from (a) current-traditional rhetoric, modified for a business context, to address the need to write quickly, which I label the “prescriptive phase,” and from (b) cognitive rhetoric, again modified for a business context, to address the need to write effectively, which I label the “perceptive phase.”