Publication details
Credibility in business reports
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | Corporate and institutional annual reports are supposed to enhance the image and credibility of an institution. Credibility is based on fulfilment of validity claims, specifically of truth, sincerity, appropriateness and understandability (Theory of Communicative Action, Habermas 1984). Expertise and trust are also qualities which boost credibility. The paper analyses a genre included in corporate annual reports, "letters from executives", which attempt to persuade readers about managerial competence, optimistic prospects, successful operations of the company and its ambitious goals. The classical rhetorical appeals of ethos, logos and pathos seem to correspond to various strategies of communicating trustworthiness, reliability, credentials, expertise and achievements. However, executive letters in annual reports strive to persuade readers rather implicitly than explicitly. The analysis is carried out on a subcorpus of English and Czech documents, mostly executive letters and reports from corporate ARs, which forms a part of the Corpus of English and Czech Specialised Discourses (CECSD 2017) compiled at Masaryk University. The quantitative study focuses on relative frequency and ranking of verbs, nouns and adjectives with a persuasive potential, obviously preferred by the authors with the aimn of supporting the companies´ credibility. |
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