Researching Discourse in Business Genres. Cases and Corpora

Business communication has been the target of communicators for long. They emphasize the need to include writing classes across the business curricula (Russell, 2007). Almost two decades ago, Reinsch (1996: 27) spoke of business communication as being “old but immature. It is essential but insecure. It is a practical-science with a potentially bright future”. However, he foresaw this bright future of business communication by enhancing the teaching of business communication skills and by strengthening research. It has not changed so much since then, but the volume being reviewed is a very positive research product. By the title of the book, Researching Discourse in Business Genres, one may think that it addresses a rather restrictive audience, such as academics dealing with discourse genres, which is the object of today’s most business related publications. On the contrary, in this book it appears as if authors have taken heed of Amidon’s (2008: 452) call for further research in business communication, “particularly in one of the main areas that seems to define our discipline – genres of organizational writing”. The papers in this volume view this organizational writing from different angles, but most importantly from the fact that business genres are based on the interrelationship that exists among the variety of genres within a firm. Gillaerts, de Groot, Dieltjens, Heynderickx, and Jacobs provide an introductory overview and organize the collection of essays based on three types of discourse: internal, executive, and organizational. This selection of papers, in its first part (“Section 1: Internal Discourse”), opens with PAUL GILLAERTS ’ approach to email use in a Belgian firm along with a close look at the use of metadiscourse. His conclusion finds a strong interaction between sender and receiver which makes his corpus of emails comparable to oral communication, with an abundance of interactive devices, such as transitions and endophoric markers, which reflect the typica