UMUC WRTG394 Week 7 Discussion Latest 2019 MAY Question # 00601650 Subject: Education Due on: 05/25/2019 Posted On: 05/25/2019 08:28 AM Tutorials: 1 Rating: 5.0/5

WRTG394 Advanced Business Writing

Week 7 Discussion

DQ1 Primary
audience and secondary audience

You will
share your understanding of primary and secondary audiences with your
classmates and how this understanding impacts your business report. Provide
feedback for two classmates’ answers.

The purpose
of this discussion topic is to allow you to reflect on your audience for your
final research-based report and to see how your fellow students’ concept of
audience may have impacted their reports.

Please respond
to the following items:

Please conduct
a search on the terms primary audience and secondary audience. List two sources you found and how they
defined these two terms.

For your
research-based report, who is the primary audience? Who is the secondary audience?

Does the
secondary audience impact how you write the report? Please explain why or why not.

DQ2 Plagiarism
and business/professional Writing

Contemplate
the assigned reading, which complicates our understanding of plagiarism and its
meaning. Then answer two assigned question about how this relates to your
understanding of business writing practices. Provide feedback for two
classmates’ answers.

Here is an
excerpt from an article called “Plagiarism Doesn’t Bother Me” by
Professor Gerald Nelms:

2. In some
“real-world” contexts, plagiarism is not only acceptable but is expected. Brian
Martin calls this “institutionalized plagiarism.”

Plagiarism
is as tied to context as every other aspect of language use. In our everyday
conversations—and lectures and classroom discussions—we frequently give
information without citing its source(s). Moreover, there exist contexts where
plagiarism is not only acceptable but is expected and encouraged. Audience
expectations and intellectual property conventions of the community in which
the language use occurs determines whether adopting source material and
expression without citation is acceptable or not. “Institutional plagiarism”
frequently occurs and is accepted without even the lifting of an eyebrow in
most daily business communications and in other bureaucratic contexts. For
example, if a company employee were to try to compose a quarterly report with
original language and organization, her supervisor would probably take her
aside and explain that to be more efficient, she should simply adopt the
organization and language of past quarterly reports.

Some might
argue that “institutionalized plagiarism” is acceptable because the language
and forms being plagiarized are “common knowledge.” That may be the case in
some instances of institutionalized plagiarism but not in every case. Too
often, we decontextualize common knowledge, thinking of it as facts every child
learns in school or as information that exists in at least five (or whatever
number of) credible sources, as some textbooks have defined it. In fact,
content alone does not define knowledge as “common.” Common knowledge is that
which is presumed to be ubiquitous or, at least, widespread within a specific
community—that is, in context. Not all institutionalized plagiarism fits that
bill.

Consider,
for example, the annual reports that a company will publish and distribute to
its investors and creditors and auditors and public officials and anyone else
who might be interested. Annual reports are notoriously templated. They follow
the same organizational structure every year. They almost invariably use a
similar vocabulary, the same phrases, the same sentences in many instances.
Yet, no one accuses the authors, often anonymous or named in the fine print, of
plagiarism. No investors divest themselves of holdings in a company because its
annual report is institutionally plagiarized.

This
excerpt uses two common examples of business writing in discussing ways in
which information is plagiarized – or not – depending, perhaps upon the view of
those in a particular business setting.

There are
two worthwhile questions to consider concerning what Nelms tells us about these
seemingly plagiarizing practices of business/professional writing. In a short
paragraph, respond to the following:

1) Based on
your experience, have you seen such practices in your work? Give an example.
Why do you think this practice is rather common in business/professional
writing?

2) Where do
you think the practice of using the same format, even the same language, for
business documents might have come from? Can you think of any examples of when
you have noticed the use of what is sometimes called “boilerplate”
documents and language?

Please note
that you will not be able to see other students’ responses to this discussion
topic until you post your response.