摘要：“If you keep in mind that readers are content-driven, time-pressed, and decision-focused, you can write right-every time,” asserts Harvard Kennedy School lecturer in Public Policy, Holly Weeks (2005, p.3). She elaborates that because business audiences prefer their written messages to be clear, unembellished and to the point, business messages must not only convey the necessary information and ideas in plain English, but also make the right connections between the information and ideas for the reader. Granted, some schools of thought view the prospect of writers enabling their readers to make meaning of texts written by them as being reflective of a simplistic understanding of how individuals process information and make meaning of something that they have read, but if writing is about the “composing of texts intended to be read by people not present” (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1987), we have to make assumptions about the reader’s process of making meaning and compose the message accordingly (p.4). I maintain, however, that such assumptions should not be random but guided not only by the writer’s understanding of the purpose for writing, the knowledge of who might be the intended reader or readers, and of the particular context within which the particular written communication is taking place, but also by a set of writing rubrics.
