corporate annual reports

The scholarly literature on the rhetoric of annual reports is limited. Besides a few scholarly studies, almost everything written on the annual report is prescriptive advice by communication and accounting professionals. (There is a large body of this prescriptive literature; the annual report is, in many ways, a troubled genre whose users are often unsatisfied with the value—and sometimes even the aesthetics—of these publications.) The reason for this may be that the annual report is, in terms of content, mostly financial data. In other words, to the extent that an annual report is an argument, it appears to rely on what Aristotle called nonartistic proofs, verifiable evidence external to the invention of the rhetor. And this may make it less attractive to scholars of rhetoric. After all, if the only thing one can do with an annual report is look at arrangement (ordering of facts) and delivery (design), the genre really belongs more in the realm of graphic design or accounting than rhetoric. Some scholarship exists on the ability of annual reports to effectively and accurately convey information to investors (e.g. Nilsson, 1997; Scott & Smith, 1992; Beattie & Jones, 1997) and the visual epistemology of the genre (Graves, Flesher, & Jordan, 1996). Other scholarly examinations of the genre are clearly suspiciou