Journal of Communication Management

Managing organisational writing to enhance corporate credibility

Roslyn Petelin
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Roslyn Petelin, (2003),"Managing organisational writing to enhance corporate credibility", Journal of Communication
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 Managing organisational writing to
enhance corporate credibility
Received (in revised form): 26th September, 2002

Roslyn Petelin
convenes the postgraduate programmes in writing, editing, and publishing and science communication in the School of
English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland, Australia. She has also taught professional writing in
the School of Communication at the Queensland University of Technology and at Cornell University.
She is editor of the Australian Journal of Communication and has co-authored two books, ‘The Professional Writing Guide:
Writing Well and Knowing Why’ (1992, Allen & Unwin, with Marsha Durham) and ‘Professional Communication: Principles and
Applications’ (1999, Prentice-Hall, with Peter Putnis). She has consulted extensively and run workshops on writing and
information design to government and public and private sector organisations in Australia, the UK and Southeast Asia.

Abstract Many employees neither trained as ‘career writers’ nor defining themselves as
writers spend a major part of their time writing because, undeniably, writing is a central
activity in organisations. To produce the high quality required to create and maintain
credibility, organisations need to have professionals who can efficiently produce
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documents with substance, structure and style. This paper discusses issues relating to
the management of corporate writing and editing, and presents practices and processes
that managers can implement in their organisations to produce flawless documents,
thereby avoiding the credibility crises that occur when writing is not taken seriously.

KEYWORDS: managing writing processes, enhancing writing quality, training, hiring,

briefing writers

A RATIONALE FOR These practices are not universally

Dr Roslyn Petelin
The University of
Queensland, School of
English, Media Studies and
Art History, St Lucia,
Queensland, 4072, Australia;
Tel: +61 7 3365 3212;
Fax: +61 7 3365 2799;
E-Mail:
r.petelin@mailbox.uq.edu.av
QUALITY WRITING
In an increasingly competitive global
knowledge economy where the
‘knowledge worker is a citizen of a
‘‘verbal environment’’ ’1 organisations that
consistently generate high-quality
documents enjoy a credibility that
enhances their public profile. How can
corporate managers with a commitment to
the excellence of an organisation’s
publications ensure that their employees
generate consistently excellent products
that create the desired credibility? By
implementing the practices advocated in
this paper, whereby employees are hired
according to their writing ability and
documents are subject to quality control
measures from their conception and
design, through their writing and editing,
to their publishing and dissemination
stages.
followed for a number of reasons related to
economics and education. One key reason
is that, because the difference between the
reception of flawless and flawed
documentation is difficult, if not
impossible, to quantify, many organisations
neglect to consider the consequences of
poor writing and fail to implement
excellent writing because it is expensive.
Another key reason is that many managers
do not appreciate the rhetorical and
linguistic sophistication required to write
well. Nor do they find writing to be
intrinsically interesting or intellectually
stimulating. As Paradis, Dobrin and Miller
state in a seminal text on workplace
writing: ‘Writing, in general, is not a
highly visible activity’.2 Writing is thus
often regarded as a peripheral rather than a
mainstream activity, until there is a
document-related crisis.

172 Journal of Communication Management Vol. 7, 2 172–180 # Henry Stewart Publications 1363–254X (2002)
 Managing organisational writing to enhance corporate credibility
On the same day that a large Australian
bank posted an Aus$200m loss, they
posted the author a letter that was riddled
with problems of fact, detail, logic,
structure, punctuation, spelling, grammar
and tone. They were not amused when she
suggested to them that the two events
could be linked. In their letter of apology
to her, which, unsurprisingly, was also
embarrassingly flawed, they maintained
that the letter she had received was not
representative of their usual high-quality
correspondence. They assured her that
quality control measures were in place and
were puzzled about how correspondence
from an untrained, unsupervised, new
employee had escaped the notice of their
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‘editorial eye.’ The author remained
unconvinced, as she was now in possession
of two flawed documents from them. On
another occasion, she received a letter
from an international airline based in
Australia apologising for a flight that had
taken 60 hours instead of six to get her to
her destination. Their seeming sincerity
was somewhat undercut by the yellow
post-it note accidentally attached to the
letter: ‘Send letter number three to this
turkey’.
Australian organisations are not alone
when it comes to losing credibility as a
result of poor corporate correspondence.
An article in the New York Times,
‘Defending English from assault on the
job’, 3 lamented the deterioration of
writing standards in many workplaces,
citing examples from the Oval Office right
down through the corporate sector. The
UK magazine PR Week captured the
dilemma neatly as follows: ‘It is a question
of whether [organisations] want [their]
staff to be ambassadors or assassins’.4
How can organisations overcome
perceived deficiencies in corporate writing,
improve writing quality and thereby
enhance their credibility? Informed by
research on workplace writing, both in the
literature and out of her consulting
# Henry Stewart Publications 1363–254X (2002) Vol. 7, 2 172–180
experience, the author suggests that
organisations concerned about their
credibility should consider adopting:
— savvy hiring practices
— enlightened training practices
— insightful and responsible briefing
processes
— collaborative designing processes
— transparent composing processes
— accessible archiving practices
— supervised collaborative writing processes
— empathic mentoring practices.
Couture and Rymer distinguish between
‘the professional who writes primarily to
demonstrate technical or administrative
competence and the career writer who
writes primarily to demonstrate rhetorical
expertise’.5 It is the former category of
corporate writer the author is referring to
in this paper: the professional who has
received no specialised training in writing,
not the career technical writers or
journalists who see themselves primarily as
writers and who typically write specialised
documents based on or reporting on ‘the
activities of others’.6
The author’s observations arise out of her
experiences as a long-term corporate
consultant to public and private sector
organisations; as a university teacher of
corporate writing in both Australia and
the USA; as a reviewer for Business
Communication Quarterly; as an author of
two books in which she deals with
corporate writing; and as a researcher in
the workplace writing of professionals
such as engineers, lawyers, information
technologists and public relations
practitioners.
HIRING
Very few Australian organisations
administer writing tests to their shortlisted
applicants. There is a widespread absence
of savvy hiring practices in the Australian
corporate sector, whereby potential
appointments are given writing-editing
Journal of Communication Management 173
 Petelin
tests that determine whether they have the
potential to handle the kind of writing that
they will be doing if they are hired. It is
very difficult to train someone to write
once they have entered the organisation. It
is far smarter to avoid hiring incompetent
writers in the first place. In organisations
that have a testing policy in place, there
needs to be a staff member designing and
administering the tests who have
themselves been trained to write, and have
a theoretical understanding of how
reading, writing and editing work. It is,
however, uncommon to find ‘writing
experts’ in Australian organisations because
there is no mandatory first-year university
composition requirement, as there is in the
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USA, and many students graduate from
university with no ‘college-level’ writing
experience. Students enrolling in the
elective courses that the author runs in
academic and professional writing at the
University of Queensland substantially
increase their employability and
subsequent promotability, but courses such
as these are not widely available in
Australian higher education.
Very few Australian organisations hire
experienced resident writer-editors, what
the author would call ‘career writer-
editors’, to help their employees. Two of
the author’s graduates work as corporate
writer-editors, but, in both cases, they
relied on their own initiative to create and
recruit themselves into these positions. The
situation in the USA is different. There is a
long tradition of hiring ‘technical writers’
in some industries, and there are strong
professional bodies such as the Society for
Technical Communication and the
International Association of Business
Communicators. In the UK, the Institute
of Public Relations contributes to
professional development, as does the
Institute of Scientific and Technical
Communicators, which has been
functioning for more than 50 years, and is
the largest UK body representing
174 Journal of Communication Management Vol. 7, 2 172–180
professional communicators and
information designers.
TRAINING
It is very difficult for new employees
denied the benefit of professional training
to decipher the rules of organisational
writing. The differences between school
and workplace writing are vast. In the
academy, students write in a literary style
for the one reader who will grade them; in
the workplace, employees often write in a
truncated or dot-point style for many
different readers. Some organisations
expect their new employees to acquire
their organisational style by osmosis. Some
give their employees models to copy,
expecting them to scan the documents and
internalise the style. In the absence of on-
the-job editorial expertise and training,
many writers new to an organisation are
pointed to that old standby, the filing
cabinet. As Lee Clark Johns illustrates so
vividly in her article ‘The file cabinet has a
sex life’,7 replicas of documents are
generated, generation after generation,
replete with outdated layouts and archaic
and/or bureaucratic language.
Some managers scrutinise and critique
the writing of their new employees, but
base their feedback on their own preferred
style rather than on knowledge informed
by scholarly theories of reading and
writing. One senior partner in an
international legal firm that hired the
author as a consultant sent back an
insurance report 17 times to the young
lawyer desperately trying to produce the
desired document. New writers are often
faced with the task of preparing a
rhetorically complex document of
indeterminate genre with a dazzling
spectrum of generic choices. Common
corporate genres include routine
documents such as memos, reports and
letters, but also proposals, submissions,
specifications, speeches, press releases,
advertisements, policies, handbooks,
# Henry Stewart Publications 1363–254X (2002)
 Managing organisational writing to enhance corporate credibility
manuals, brochures, instructions,
procedures, video scripts, websites,
environmental impact statements, event/
conference plans, marketing campaigns,
business/communication plans, signage,
articles, minutes, etc. New employees can
hardly be expected to have the
metaknowledge to defend their writing-
editing choices without long-term
familiarity with the corporate context.
Some organisations refer their
employees to the organisation’s style
manual or to a publicly available style
manual to overcome some of the training
challenges. A comprehensive, modifiable
and maintainable style guide is valuable to
an organisation’s document management
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process for the following reasons:
— It can orient new writers by providing, in
one accessible document, information such
as the characteristics and expectations of a
niche audience
— It can ensure consistency of documents by
addressing issues of corporate stance,
policy, format, terminology and other
conventions. Plain language, active voice
and structured or limited vocabularies are
now elements of corporate policy in many
companies8
— It can specify critical quality control points
in the document production process such
as editing, proofreading, technical accuracy
review, etc.
— It can settle arguments that arise out of
individual writers’ idiosyncratic prefer-
ences that relate to style rather than to
correctness
— It can save an organisation time and
money by making the document design
process more efficient and the documents
more effective in projecting an image of
quality and professionalism.
An alternative to a style guide is a
template or format guide, which is not as
comprehensive. Some organisations make
do with format guides, because style
guides can take years to produce.
Employees ‘know it is their last chance to
make a claim for company style’.9 Good
# Henry Stewart Publications 1363–254X (2002) Vol. 7, 2 172–180
style guides are, however, very valuable
when they exist, as they serve as a
productivity, as well as a writing-quality,
tool. Employees in one utilities
organisation that the author consulted to
created their own informal manual that
they called ‘The good guts book’ as a
service to new employees.
In some organisations, on-the-job
training is often conducted by ‘kwik-fix’
consultants, who are hired in for a short
workshop, but who lack a background in
communication theory and have only a
minimal understanding of the structural,
linguistic and document-design principles
that are the basis of flawless documents.
Consultants who lack knowledge of
writing-editing as a series of incremental,
recursive steps short-change workshop
participants — not a practice endorsed by
those who take writing seriously.
MacKinnon’s essay on developing
writing ability in a specific organisation
contains much guidance that is useful for
training corporate writers.10 MacKinnon, a
writing instructor at the Bank of Canada,
conducted a research project that consisted
of a naturalistic, longitudinal investigation
of writing-related change in ten newly
employed, highly educated adult
‘knowledge workers’. He aimed to
discover what writing-related knowledge
university graduates acquire in their first
one or two years on the job in a writing-
intensive mature organisation, and how
they learn what they learn. MacKinnon
interviewed his participants and their
manager-supervisors (who acted as
reviewers in the document cycling process)
about three months after they began
working at the bank, and then again ten to
20 months later. MacKinnon’s first set of
interviews took place immediately
following the production of a large
document and focused mainly on the
concrete and discrete experience of writing
the single document at hand. He
researched four topics: attitudes and beliefs
Journal of Communication Management 175
 Petelin
regarding writing; knowledge of the social
and organisational context of writing; the
writing process; and the written product.
His second lot of interviews asked
participants to describe any global changes
of significance in their writing related to
the four topics and concluded by asking
participants about differences between
writing at university and writing for the
bank, advice they would give an employee
about writing, and whether they thought
their writing would continue to develop in
the following year. MacKinnon’s findings
reveal that all participants appeared to
acquire a wealth of writing-related
knowledge over the timeframe of the
research: knowledge about the social and
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organisational context in which they wrote
(the business functions performed by their
departments, the jobs performed by their
readers, and the values and beliefs implicit
in the organisation’s activities — the ‘bank
view of the world’).
They reported being more able to
initiate ad hoc documents, being clearer
before drafting a document, discussing
writing with colleagues while drafting,
keeping their readers in mind as they
wrote, and reacting to feedback effectively.
Managers reported that participants’
documents tended to be more focused,
more visibly and hierarchically structured,
and more analytic and less descriptive.
The participants’ attitudes and beliefs
about writing also changed. Most of the
participants believed that they had
developed significantly as writers, an
aspect that they had not predicted. Some
participants developed a deeper
understanding of the ways in which
writing constructs knowledge. The
developments reported by the participants
appeared to be triggered by the new
demands placed on them as writers, and
the feedback they received on their
writing.
MacKinnon contends that the most
important knowledge gained by the
176 Journal of Communication Management Vol. 7, 2 172–180
participants, because of its catalytic nature,
appeared to be contextualising knowledge
that included:
— aspects of the Bank as a discourse commu-
nity that accomplishes specific (and at
times unique) business functions through
the specific discourse practices of a specific
culture with its own distinct point of view
— the information needs of senior, often
remote, readers
— the business functions enabled through
writing and the relationship of written
texts to various larger institutional ‘value-
adding’ processes
— the forms of argument and informal
reasoning conventional to, and found
persuasive in, the bank
— The participant’s role as an employee and
writer in the larger, ambient, business-
function processes
— The rationale for and the mechanics of the
document cycling process
— The participant’s growing, job-specific
professional knowledge
These valuable findings indicate that these
employees received very high-quality
briefing and training from knowledgeable
managers.11
BRIEFING
Employees can sometimes be given a
cryptic brief to ‘see what you can come up
with’, because management do not
necessarily know what they want a specific
document to achieve. At other times,
management do know exactly what they
want a document to achieve, but the data/
research conflict, so the hapless writer is
faced with cognitive dissonance. When
superiors brief their employees, it is crucial
that employees have good listening and
interpersonal skills to enable them to
clarify the task, elicit more information,
liaise with others if necessary and negotiate
a realistic deadline.
It is crucial that managers brief writers
from the outset of the document
production process about the intended
# Henry Stewart Publications 1363–254X (2002)
 Managing organisational writing to enhance corporate credibility
readership, purpose, scope and
dissemination of the document. If the
document is to be desktop published, this
step should not happen prematurely. The
author was recently asked to edit a four-
page brochure for a government agency.
The brochure had already been graphically
designed at great expense and was within
minutes of going to the printer, when
someone remembered that the original
request had been for the document to be
couched in lay language. Because the
document was heavily larded with internal
jargon, it was clear that a translation was
in order. No one in the department had
the ability to translate their jargon: they
were ‘too close to it’. To free the
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document of specialised jargon, the author
needed to translate practically every word
that was not ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘and’ or ‘but’. The
brochure had to be re-designed at
additional expense, which leads into the
next heading, ‘designing’.
DESIGNING
Even when editorial expertise is present in
the organisation, maintaining high
standards is possible only when documents
undergo quality control measures
throughout their conception, research,
design, planning, writing, editing, and
dissemination. It is important that writers
understand how the look of the page will
affect the text to allow them to make
informed decisions about design. Thinking
about design is thinking about structure,
function and aesthetics. Making decisions
about layout and text structure is one
powerful way a writer brings organisation
to a text. Writers should think of a page as
a design space. Good document design
helps readers read efficiently, emphasises
the most important contents and
encourages readers to feel good about a
communication.
When the author edited the catalogue
for the Brisbane International Film
Festival, she was delighted that the
# Henry Stewart Publications 1363–254X (2002) Vol. 7, 2 172–180
designer had been engaged before she, as
editor, had been hired. The designer was
there to be consulted from the conception
to completion.
COMPOSING
All levels within the corporation need to
understand the nature of writing as a
process. There needs to be collective
concern, awareness and motivation. Many
managers regard writing as a product, one
that can be formally described and
prescribed. While it is important to
understand the generic differences between
documents, the view of writing as
‘product’ undercuts the importance of the
writing process, because it holds that the
components and structure of a document
can be foreseen in advance by the writer.
Thus, the process of effective arranging
and styling, of drafting and revising in
response to the particular situation and
reader is ignored in favour of producing
an ‘acceptable’ document.
When management lacks understanding
of how writing works as a way of
thinking, as a way of structuring
knowledge, they risk perpetuating
attitudes, structures and policies that
militate against the possibility of excellent
writing.12 All writers within the
organisation should view writing as a
problem-solving process.13 When writers
regard writing as a process of solving
rhetorical problems as they arise —
clarifying purpose, analysing the reader,
collecting and selecting appropriate
information, hierarchically organising
complex material, revising and editing for
accessibility and effectiveness — they
augment innate or already internalised
competencies such as linguistic fluency and
the ability to reason. The heuristic strength
and flexibility of problem-solving
strategies is important to emphasise, and
unwise to ignore. Strategies can be used in
all contexts, and are not easily forgotten,
the way rules are. They provide writers
Journal of Communication Management 177
 Petelin
with an ongoing way to make efficient use
of knowledge that they already have.
They give writers power over their
writing process and power over their
readers. Writing is a dynamic process that
depends on knowledge, fluency and
reasoning far more than on prescription.
In analysing their writing processes,
corporate writers have reported to the
author that their problems are caused by
inadequate planning, lack of motivation
and lack of confidence in their composing
processes.
Organisations are now well into the
second decade since executives doing their
own wordprocessing have replaced those
who worked in the typing pool. The
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power of keyboarding has been
acknowledged and embraced. Voice
recognition software has been touted as an
imminent reality for many years, but has
not yet performed convincingly.
Technologically literate employees are
using the track-change facility when
editing each other’s work, using outlining
facilities on their computers to help them
structure documents, and are wary of
grammar checkers beyond helping to flag
checkable problems. Carlson reminds of
the ‘delicate balance between computers
and humans’.14 E-mail, while having
undeniable benefits, has caused many
problems for employees unable to balance
their priorities with their readers’
expectations.
ARCHIVING
Who is responsible for retrievable,
accessible archiving? There seems to be a
pervasive archiving problem in many
organisations. ‘Re-inventing the wheel’ is
a common occurrence, as writers are
unaware that documents similar to the one
they are about to compose repose in the
files. Or they are aware, but cannot find
them. The exponential increase in
documentation that has accompanied the
rise of computerisation has exacerbated the
178 Journal of Communication Management Vol. 7, 2 172–180
problem of cataloguing and retrieving
text, in both soft and hard copy. Two
increasingly vital considerations for
organisational writers and managers are
the opportunities presented by metadata
and single-sourcing.
COLLABORATING
Research has found that collaborative
writing is playing an increasingly
important role in the writing workplace.15
Lunsford and Ede’s US research revealed
that nine out of ten business professionals
sometimes write as part of a team.16
Benefits of successful collaborative
writing include:
— higher-quality documents, because of the
range of perspectives, knowledge and skills
contributed by participants
— higher levels of motivation, because parti-
cipants encourage each other to do their
best
— the provision of valuable feedback as co-
writers operate as readers in the first
instance, while the document is still in the
draft stage
— opportunities for less experienced writers
to improve their skills and become accul-
turated to organisational norms, values,
and standards by working with more
experienced colleagues
— enhanced work relationships, because
colleagues work together to produce a
high-quality result
— higher levels of acceptance of the final
document, because a range of people has
been involved.
A US study revealed enormous problems
in a real-life collaborative writing process.
Cross reports that it took 77 days for the
eight members of a corporate writing
team to produce a two-page executive
letter for inclusion in an annual report.17
He says the process became inordinately
protracted for a number of reasons: key
among them were the low status of the
writer (the most junior member of the
team), the failure of senior staff to properly
# Henry Stewart Publications 1363–254X (2002)
 Managing organisational writing to enhance corporate credibility
brief the writer about what they wanted,
the physical separation of participants (on
different floors of a large building), the
large number of people who edited the
letter (five members of middle
management and then the Chief Executive
Officer and the President), and the
idiosyncratic changes made to the letter by
the executive secretaries who were asked
to type it. Situations such as this can be
avoided by using strategies that include:
— granting the writer/s the respect and
support they deserve
— briefing all participants thoroughly on
purpose, audience, content, style, process,
deadlines, etc. in the preliminary stages
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— working in close physical proximity to
other participants, if possible
— dividing tasks according to participants’
varying competencies and experience (for
example, the best editors should edit the
document, not everyone on the team)
— verifying regularly, as a group, elements
such as accuracy, completeness and appro-
priateness of style and presentation.
Collaborative writing is very complex,
with widely differing practices. It is
growing even more pervasive with
multisite companies and intercontinental
teams, so organisations need to urgently
put collaborative writing practices in place.
MENTORING
It can be difficult for untrained new
employees to decipher the politics of the
workplace writing culture. New
employees need to work out who writes
what, who has the content knowledge,
who examines drafts, who edits whom,
whether the editing is substantive or
superficial, the dynamics of collaborative
writing, the role of the resident specialist
editor, if there is one. If there is one, who
has editorial authority? Are editorial
standards imposed that are based on an
understanding of how readers read or on
pedantry and idiosyncratic whim? Are
# Henry Stewart Publications 1363–254X (2002) Vol. 7, 2 172–180
documents judged by their effects on
readers rather than on their status as
artifacts? Who exemplifies high-quality
writing and uses composing models that
new employees can emulate? Is there a
style manual for the organisation?
These are all questions that the manager as
mentor should deal with. The manager as
writing mentor should:
— fully and clearly brief the writers of docu-
ments
— provide optimum conditions for on-the-
job writing
— create documents that serve as exemplars
— examine draft documents and work-in-
progress and give constructive and usable
feedback, guiding and collaborating, rather
than critiquing the extant product
— ensure that filed documents are easy to
retrieve
— work to put in place a style guide for
writers and guide them through it, if
necessary.
The accelerating interest in, and attention
to, workplace writing18 generated by the
imperatives of the knowledge economy
surely make it advisable for organisations
to implement the advice discussed in this
paper.
References
1. Carlson, P. (2001) ‘Information technology and
organisational change’, Journal of Technical Writing and
Communication, Vol. 31, No. 1, pp. 77–95.
2. Paradis, J., Dobrin, D. and Miller, M. (1985) ‘Writing
at Exxon ITD: Notes on the writing environment of
an R&D organisation’ in Odell, L. and Goswami, D.
(1985) ‘Writing in nonacademic settings’, The
Guilford Press, New York, pp. 281–307.
3. http://nytimes.com/2001/02/04/business/
04GRAM.html
4. PR Week, 28th June, 2002.
5. Couture, B. and Rymer, J. (1993) ‘Situational
exigence: Composing processes on the job by writer’s
role and task value’, in Spilka, R. (1993) ‘Writing in
the workplace: New research perspectives’, Southern
Illinois University Press, Carbondale, pp. 4–20.
6. Harrison, T. and Debs, M. (1988) ‘Conceptualising the
organisational role of technical communicators: A
systems approach’, Journal of Business and Technical
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