Annotation Government documents--forms, brochures, letters, and policy papers--that are difficult to understand create problems both for the public they're intended to help and for government agencies. In this collection, researchers from five universities in the Netherlands survey recurring problems in government documents and offer possible solutions. The contributors are linguists, document designers, and other communication experts who have studied public documents both empirically and from a design point of view. Though the subject is Dutch documents, the text is in English, and the work may be of interest to those investigating government communication in other nations as well as those who produce similar documents in the private sector. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).

Governments communicate with the public through all kinds of documents: forms, brochures, letters, policy papers, and so on. These public documents have an important role in any democracy and their design very much affects the efficiency with which governments can perform their tasks. Document designers, linguists and other communication experts in the Netherlands have been studying public documents from a design point of view as well as empirically for decades. In this book, the most prominent of these researchers present the results of their work, collectively giving an overview of various recurring problems in government-to-public communication, and providing suggestions for problem solving.

This book offers something quite new - an advanced textbook that considers professional writing as a negotiated process between writer and reader. Arguing that ethics, imagination and rhetoric are integral to professional writing praxis, the book encourages students to look critically at various writing practices in a range of contexts. A textbook for advanced undergraduates and postgraduates in Linguistics, Communication, Journalism and Media Studies.

Presenting new approaches and results previously inaccessible in English, the Routledge Handbook of Japanese Sociolinguistics provides an insight into the language and society of contemporary Japan from a fresh perspective. While it was once believed that Japan was a linguistically homogenous country, research over the past two decades has shown Japan to be a multilingual and sociolinguistically diversifying country. Building on this approach, the contributors to this handbook take this further, combining Japanese and western approaches alike and producing research which is relevant to twenty-first century societies. Organised into five parts, the sections covered include: The languages and language varieties of Japan. The multilingual ecology. Variation, style and interaction. Language problems and language planning. Research overviews. With contributions from across the field of Japanese sociolinguistics, this handbook will prove very useful for students and scholars of Japanese Studies, as well as sociolinguists more generally.