ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the principal findings of the questionnaire-based survey and discusses the through reference to selected interviews. Space does not permit a more detailed analysis of interviews or of the corpus of texts collected during interviews. The chapter provides an in-depth picture of the day-to-day context of organisational writing. The findings suggest that day-to-day context is complex and dynamic. The findings also provide evidence that managers are sensitive to the criteria for effective writing, but lack on the one hand operational definitions of such concepts as conciseness and structure, and on the other, organisational support for writing. In contrast to linguistic analysis and rhetoric, case studies with an ethnographic orientation do not rely on linguistic analysis and/or analysts' intuitions about context, but extend the notion of context through observation and/or participation in the organisational setting under study. The primary goals are to delineate the relationship between text and context and to discover what contributes to effective writing.
