Engagement in Professional Genres

Book excerpt: Engagement has turned essential in today’s communication, as professional communities are becoming more specialised and transient, and their audiences more diverse. Promotionalism and competitiveness, in addition, increasingly pervade human activity, and thus engaging readers, listeners and viewers to attract and persuade them is part of the know-how of almost every profession. The eighteen chapters in this book, written by well-known discourse analysts from different nationalities and research backgrounds, and with various interests and understandings of communicative engagement, guide us through a discovery of perspectives and strategies across work settings and practices, genres, semiotic modes, discourses, disciplines, and theoretical frameworks and methods. They build a mosaic that leads to a broad picture of (meta)discursive engagement as (di)stance and raises current issues, challenges, and future research directions.