These two levels, the micro and macro level, can also be seen in the definition of genre used by Swales (1990):
A genre comprises a class of communicative events, the members of which share some set of communicative purposes. These purposes are recognised by expert members of the parent discourse community, and thereby constitute the RATIONALE of the genre. The rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of CONTENT and style. (p. 58, capitals mine)
The two words highlighted in bold, rationale and content, respectively, represent the macro (top-down) and micro (bottom-up) levels of analysis. The macro, explanatory level of the model will deal with the rationale of the business presentation as a speech event, describing the business discourse community and the participants, the setting of the presentation, its communicative purpose and topic. The choice of pragmatic content, namely, the speech acts employed by the speaker will be part of the micro, interactional analysis.
Swales’ definition of genre also provides the basis for defining the genre of business presentations. As seen in Chapter 1, there is a great need for providing a detailed and concrete definition of the genre as most descriptions are either too unclear or too wide.
One definition for example can be found in Business: The Ultimate Resource. (2002) which defines a business presentation as “any talk to a group, whether formal or informal, from giving a team briefing to delivering a major speech” (p. 392). This definition seems to be too general to sufficiently delimit the scope of the genre. An even more vague example can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary (2003), which claims that to present is to “put (a show or exhibition) before the public; appear formally before others”.
Obviously, this definition is much too general to be used for any type of academic enquiry, and the first part might even be misleading when it comes to business presentations as it refers to a different meaning of the word “present”.
The three examples of defining presentations seen in literature review (sections 1.3 and 1.4) are somewhat more useful and concrete. McCarthy and Hatcher’s (2002) long list of situations in which presentations can occur at least points to some typical presentation contexts. J. Rotondo and M. Rotondo’s (2002) claim that a presentation is “a visual and aural event intended to communicate for the purposes of providing information, helping to understand, gaining agreement, and/or motivating to act” (p. 2) does indicate some general characteristics of presentations and points to the persuasive nature of their communicative purpose. Perhaps one of the better definitions was put forth by Ellis and Johnson (1994): “a pre-planned, prepared, and structured talk which may be given in formal or informal circumstances to a small or large group of people. Its objective may be to inform or to persuade” (p.222). Although this definition does capture the planned and structured nature of the content of a presentation, the rationale still remains rather general. Since, according to
Swales, it is the rationale that shapes and determines the content, it needs to feature prominently in any definition. The objective of informing or persuading, for example, could easily encompass academic presentations, political speeches or perhaps even religious sermons.
So, for the purposes of this study, a more comprehensive definition of business presentations is proposed, closely building upon Swales’ (1990) definition of genre (the key words, which can be directly related to Swales’ definition have been capitalised):
A business presentation is an EXTENDED TALK given FORMALLY, most often by an INDIVIDUAL before a group of people who constitute an AUDIENCE, with the AIM OF ACHIEVING A COMMERCIAL ADVANTAGE (e.g. sell products or services, inform about corporate changes or performance, raise company or brand awareness, etc.).
The previously mentioned corollaries of business presentations which are simply emailed in the form of slides or constitute a printed deck of slides, without a talk are considered to be separate genres. They are sufficiently different in nature and aim from oral business presentations to warrant a distinction and the definition makes provisions for the division. The further advantage of this definition over the ones we saw previously is that it makes it possible to distinguish business presentations from other types of talk by focusing on the communicative purpose of obtaining some sort of financial gain or advantage from the speech. This could be a direct financial profit resulting from the sale of a product. It could also entail an indirect commercial benefit to be gained from promoting one’s company externally or promoting one’s own ideas internally among colleagues.
Self-promotional talks during job interviews would also be included in the genre of business presentations according to this definition, which coincides with a similar claim made by Bhatia (1993), namely that there are a great deal of similarities between product and self-promotional genres such as sales promotion letters and job application letters.
Another advantage of the definition is that it makes a reference to the participants in the communicative event, the presenter (group presentations not being the norm) and the audience. This makes it possible to include the roles of the parties, their status and mutual relationship within the analysis of the rationale of business presentations. Issues such as the social standing, gender and age of the speaker in relation to the audience can also be accounted for. Whether the presenter and the audience belong to the same discourse community is also an important factor that can determine whether the presentation is an internal (audience and presenter belong to the same community) or external one (audience and presenter of different communities). In the case of the former situation, one might expect a greater use of jargon and more frequent inferences as a result of the shared knowledge of the community, while in the case of the latter, a greater deal of formality might be warranted.
The “extended talk” in the definition refers to the length of the presentation. It would be very difficult to claim that one made a presentation if one spoke for about 30 seconds in the course of a dialogue with some friends. A presentation entails the notion of a monologue which can last from a few minutes to over half an hour depending on the circumstances, but typically business presentations take between 8 to 12 minutes (McGee, 1999).
The presentation has two characteristic and easily identifiable parts. One of these is a monologue in which turn-taking is suspended and is usually uninterruptible, but it would not be at the extreme side of the monologue-dialogue scale according to McCarthy and Carter (1994), because it contains frequent strong dialogic elements such as projected, rhetorical questions and “discourse markers that presuppose the contribution of another participant” (McCarthy & Carter, 1994, p. 18). The second part is a question and answer
session (briefly referred to as Q&A session), which is maximally dialogic, crucially dependent on the presenter’s response and has a rather strict turn-exchange structure. The linearity of PowerPoint might have contributed even more to the Q&A session being placed distinctly at the end as the presenter has less flexibility in changing the display during the talk to tackle the audience’s questions (Yates & Orlikowski, 2007). In presentations with a large audience in a theatre or those broadcast on TV or the Internet, where the audience is not present at the same time and place as the presenter, the question and answer session is frequently omitted.
The level of formality is also an important factor to include in the definition.
Presentations are by nature at least semi-formal due to the fact that in a very informal situation the speaker is highly likely to be interrupted frequently by the audience, the result of which would be more of a dialogue than a monolog presentation. Also, presentations demand preparation precisely because one needs to structure one’s thoughts to be able to hold the floor for an extended period and cannot rely on the spontaneous exchange with the participants to negotiate meaning or determine the direction of the speech.