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This tutorial on purpose is brought to you by one of the authors of Revising Professional
Writing -- now in its third edition.
My students call me Dr. Kim.
The publishers made this video available under a creative commons license.
For more information contact
ParlayPress(dot)com
And remember you can use the pause button anytime. If you see shadows or
a green bar on the screen, change playback quality settings.
The view here includes everything you might learn about professional writing
in my tutorials.
There are others that cover content development,
organization, style, and mechanics.
Before you can understand those specific aspects of successful messages,
you need to grasp some prerequisites.
That's because a message can only be judged
within its context.
I will build on Aristotle
and think about a message like a document as one of three aspects of
context represented by the rhetorical triangle.
The other corners consist of the readers or audience
and the writer's purpose.
This tutorial focuses on the writer and his or her purpose.
In particular, I'll teach you to analyze the purposes for which professionals
create messages in the workplace.
This content is probably new you. It's also foundational.
I don't believe you can understand what makes a message successful
without understanding
purpose.
We're going to think about purpose while examining some professional messages.
Eventually we'll analyze an email update written by a project manager
at a construction company.
The quality in the video makes it nearly impossible for you to read the email
here.
If you're a student using our book your instructor can provide you with a copy.
Or you can download it at ProsWrite
(dot)com
In this tutorial
I'll explain how to analyze purposes for communicating in the workplace.
Here we go.
A management researcher named Quinn and his colleagues developed a model
describing why managers create messages.
It's called the competing values model and describes four purposes.
Briefly
informing, directing, consulting, and valuing.
To help you understand the distinctions among them,
let's categorize the purpose of four brief emails.
All of them were written by a the same person --
a human resource professional. All of them have the same audience -- the managers
in the same company with responsibility for hiring.
When the HR professional writes to hiring managers in his company,
"Our most expensive ads cost two hundred fifty dollars per week."
he's informing them. His message is static
as it does not require any response or further action
and it's transactional as it focuses mostly on tasks.
Let's try another example:
When the HR person writes,
"If an unforeseen change occurs, keep us in the loop."
he's directing his audience.
His message is transactional because it focuses mostly on tasks.
That makes it similar to informing:
but it's dynamic because it does require further action from the audience.
Note that no matter what the audience does --
even if they ignore the message --
we still interpret it as a response to the message.
When the HR professional says,
"Do you have any ideas?"
he's consulting
with hiring managers.
His message is dynamic
like directing because it obviously requires audience response.
It's transformational
because it focuses more on people
than on tasks.
Quinn's model is called competing values because
when a manager
consults with an audience
that conveys values
that compete
with those when informing that same audience.
Consulting shows a focus on people
and on action,
while informing
shows a focus on tasks
and the status quo.
It may seem like
consulting would always be preferable.
Tthat's not the case.
If you've ever had a manager who always asked questions
but never provided information
you'll note that's not an effective manager.
Instead
the point of the competing values model is that managers are most effective
when they communicate messages with diverse values over time
with all members of the organization.
So what's actually preferable is that a professional not be stuck communicating
for any one or two purposes.
The final quadrant of the model is devoted to situations in which the HRR
professional is
valuing his audience.
For example, when he writes "thank you"
or makes them a promise.
Those messages convey a focus on the status quo rather than on action because
the audience is not required to respond. They are also transformational
and convey a focus on people.
So the competing values model helps us think about all purposes for workplace
messages.
By categorizing them into four classes:
informing, directing, consulting,
and valuing
it also reminds us that the most successful professionals communicate
messages for all four purposes.
Let's take a second and check your understanding of purpose
by analyzing a new passage.
It comes from a welcome letter to new clients of a real estate company.
The question specifically asks that you identify the primary purpose of the
passage's message
and then explain where it falls within the four quadrants of the competing
values model.
The writer's primary purpose appears to be
valuing.
That message is static
because thanking customers doesn't require any further response from them
and it's transformational because it focuses on people
more than on tasks.
Notice that the sentence "we strive to maintain the highest standards" could be
categorized as a promise
which would make it an additional valuing aspect of this passage.
I noted a few minutes ago that professionals are most successful
when they communicate for all four purposes overtime with all
organizational members.
This, however, is not the case for a single message or document.
While most documents
-- especially more complex or longer ones -- are likely to include
more than one purpose,
all successful workplace messages have one primary purpose.
Let's consider this more carefully
using the email I showed you at the beginning of this tutorial.
Here's the situation with this email:
the writer whose name is Kevin Russell
works as a senior manager for a general contracting company.
He supervises several jobsites.
The audience
that's Russell's boss, the owner of the company, his name is Jack Smith.
Today Russell learned there's a situation at one of the job sites
called Agate Beach.
Kelley, the job foreman at the site,
left keys in the front-end loader and last night two local kids got onto the
machine and ran it into the corner of the building the company is constructing.
The kids and the job crew feel bad about what happened. They are all working
on their own time to repair the damage. But damage means that repairs are
required and they push back the schedule three days and add a couple thousand
dollars to the cost of the project.
Russell's email was sent to update the owner on the work at this Agate
Beach jobsite.
In order to determine the purpose of his email we need to identify the bottom
line message.
You can think of the bottom line as what the writer must say
in this situation.
Don't worry about
how it should be said when determining what the bottom line is. Just
focus on the most important kernel of content or information Russell needs to
communicate
to his boss.
Let's think about some possible bottom lines for Russell's message.
One would be
"Agate Beach project"
But it tells the boss only the topic of the email.
So another possibility:
"Agate Beach project progress update"
That's more descriptive
but it's still not
the bottom line.
It's still a topic -- though a more detailed one.
Here's the third possibility:
"Agate Beach project is behind schedule and over budget"
Now THAT
is the complete claim or message Russell has to communicate to his boss.
I'll have more to say about where that bottom line should appear
within this email
in the tutorial on bottom line placement
and
more to say on how it should be stated in the tutorials on style.
Now that we're clear about the bottom line message of Russell's email
we can categorize its purpose within the competing values model.
Do you think it's informing, directing, consulting, or valuing?
It should be pretty easy to rule out consulting and valuing, right?
The difference between
informing and directing is whether some action is actually required by the
audience after reading this message. So in the bottom line "Agate Beach project is
behind schedule and over budget"
does Russell's message require a response by the boss?
It doesn't REQUIRE one.
That means the purpose of the bottom line and email itself
in this situation
is informing.
Before we leave this example
think about the final sentence of the email which directs the boss to call Russell.
The purpose of that individual sentence is directing. But even though that
sentence is directing, it's not reasonable to categorize the purpose of
the entire email as directing.
The thing you should remember is that all successful workplace messages
have ONE primary purpose
and it's based on their bottom line.
You now have the means to categorize the four purposes for
all professional messages.
Being clear about your own purpose when you write in the workplace
is absolutely critical
-- even if you decide not to state that purpose clearly for your audience.
This knowledge will also help you provide feedback
to other professional writers.
And providing such feedback is an important task for nearly all professionals.
Along with audience
purpose is one of the foundations for understanding the context of a message.
You must understand that entire context -- the writers purpose the audience --
as well as the bottom line message before you can determine the specific qualities
needed to create a successful document.
What that means is that I'm going to mention purpose
many times in other tutorials.