credibility

Remarks on the Style of Commercial Web Texts

De Beaugrande (1984) has argued that a purely (text) linguistic analysis of language artefacts cannot account for the rich communicative contexts that define style. In fact, there is no norm or grammar that characterises a given passage of text to be stylistically relevant. In other words, the manipulations that one could perform on a surface text’s linguistic or grammatical structure may barely affect the style of the text at all. Changes on a text may rather influence the style via the context and less via the linguistic structure. Consequently, a linguistic discussion on the style of writing should somewhat be hold in terms of text being an element of discourse than text being a structural unit of language. Other contributions to that discussion may then come from the fields of pragmatics and semantics.

2007-11-10 20:43 |

Text Meets Design

After a four weeks summer break I will continue with a topic that matters much to me and to the work of our design agency. This posting is all about the relevance of Web design issues for text production, for which I will present three reasons, leading to a Web designs credo that we follow day by day.

2007-09-05 09:32 |

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