“‘Intermediate-Level’ Communication: A Model of Communication for Multiple Cultures”

by Travis Daniel Griffin | Xchanges 9.2

Methods for Exploration

Overview

For the example in this paper, it was necessary to choose a webpage that had already been designed and written in order to explore the potential of the idea that incorporating an Intermediate-Level model of communication has a significant and measurable impact on the reading comprehension of readers from multiple audiences. That page would be rewritten using the Intermediate-Level model of communication. The overall design and format would not be changed. Once the page was chosen and rewritten, it was necessary to explore the effectiveness of both the newly rewritten research page, as well as the original page for control. Two study groups were selected, composed of either Western readers or Eastern Readers. The study groups were split as evenly as possible and viewed either the control or the research page. The time spent on each page was calculated and averaged, and each study participant would take part in a short survey to gauge the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of each page.

Webpage Selection

Because this paper focuses on webpages that could be viewed by audience members of mixed cultural backgrounds, it was necessary to find a page that would be equally relevant to a mixed audience. Each year, New Mexico Tech hosts a “Student Research Symposium” with the goal of attracting any student at New Mexico Tech to participate and highlight research being performed at the university by undergraduates and graduate students. The page chosen was titled “What is the SRS?” and was authored by a Technical Communication Student at New Mexico Tech. The page addressed the questions of “How,” “What,” “Why,” and “When” of the student research symposium. It was written in a straightforward way in order to provide students with all the necessary information about participating in the symposium. Permission to use the page in the research was received from Dr. Mary Dezember, Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs, as well as Elizabeth Barteau, the student responsible for authoring the webpages for the symposium.

Application of the Intermediate-Level Model

To rewrite the webpage by using the Intermediate-Level features being tested, it was necessary to carefully apply the model to the existing text. Four major criteria were chosen to focus on: Intermediate-Level Context, Sentence Shortening, Etymology, and Visualization.

Intermediate-Level context refers to the addition of respectful titles and adjectives into the text. “Professionals” was replaced with “Esteemed Professionals.” This element of High-Context communication comes directly from the works of Campbell and Andrews. Respectful overtones are generally considered a necessity when communicating with High-Context cultures (Niemeier et al., 1998). For example:

Original: Your extended abstract and presentation must be written for the multi-disciplinary technical audience of the Tech community and guests.

Modified: The audience is made up of a wide variety of esteemed professionals. The professionals come from a variety of different technical backgrounds. It is our honor to host professionals from New Mexico Tech and from many other successful backgrounds.

In the above example, the ESP concept of sentence shortening was used — the one original sentence was broken up into three sentences to simplify the concepts being communicated. Sentence shortening focuses on the concept that is being conveyed to the reader, not the overall context. Three different concepts are communicated in three different sentences as opposed to the original text which conveyed three concepts in one sentence.

To use etymology and visualization, it was necessary to identify words that could be difficult for readers to understand. If a word is potentially complex, foreign, or rooted in another language such as Latin, it becomes necessary to find a simplified definition of the word. For example, the word “symposium” may not be a recognizable word for all readers. In the original page, the word “symposium” is used without being defined. For the research page, the reader is given a frame of reference: “A symposium is a conference of peers and related professionals to discuss particular and shared subjects of interest.”

Incorporating the idea of visualization means using whitespace to establish a potential stopping place for readers to visualize the word and what it means to them. As can be seen in the above example, etymology is incorporated into the writing by defining “symposium” and visualization is used by treating the definition as a single sentence paragraph. Using the single sentence paragraph structure, the reader has a natural stopping place to decide what the word means before continuing to read the rest of the page.