In reviewing the results of the study, we came across several issues that needed to be discussed in further detail. These include: first, the importance of relating the content of the talk to the audience’s reality; second, Edward’s distinction between a business presentation and a motivational seminar and his deliberate avoidance of financial topics;
third, the frequent use of narratives like personal stories and fables. All of these issues are related to the Intentionality Model of presentations and will be discussed separately here.
We saw that the first problem of relating the content to the audience was the major reason for the failure of one of Edward’s presentations and is therefore of crucial importance. In keeping with the Intentionality Model, the individual speech acts used by
the speaker should be in line with the overall communicative purpose of the event. This is stipulated by the hierarchy of intentionality. The communicative purpose, on the other hand, is dependent on the speaker’s aims and the audience’s needs and this is the crux of the matter. In the analysis of the rationale of presentations, the discourse community and the roles of the participants, the presenter and the audience, have a central position. The status of the participants, their mutual relationship, their group affiliation, age, gender and background are just some of the factors that need to be researched before the communicative purpose can be precisely pinned down and the content appropriately tailored to accomplish this aim. In Edward’s case, he had failed to take into account that the earnings of the members in the Hungarian network, might not sound impressive or be proportionate to the possible earnings of the Dutch members of the audience. What he should have done in preparing the numbers was to link the earnings in Hungary to the standard of living in this area, and then compare that to the standard on the Netherlands in order to calculate what the proportionate earnings would be there. This is just one example of a possible misreading of an audience and consequential mismatch of the content.
However, with careful use of the framework, and a detailed analysis of all the aspects concerning the participants, it is possible to clearly define the aim of a particular presentation and select the information and speech acts that are most likely to accomplish that plan. Therefore, when the Intentionality Model is turned into an empirical Event Analysis, it can not only assist researchers in uncovering what is happening during a presentation, but it can also be used by presenters in preparation for their talks. This way the speaker can take advantage of the heightened awareness of the details of the audience’s and his/her own background to better select the appropriate content.
The second issue concerns Edward’s conscious avoidance of financial details and his distinction between a motivational seminar and a business presentation. The former, he claims, is used for recruiting new agents into the network, whereas the latter is used for explaining the financial workings of the multi-level marketing system. In the seminars, he frequently resorts to personal stories, parables and metaphors, while in the business talks, he is required to use economic data, though he usually tries to keep that to a minimum, preferring instead to provide detailed financial figures in handouts. The question arises whether both these types of talks are business presentations and whether they fit the definition of a business presentation drawn up in the current framework. Fore ease of reference the definition is repeated here:
A business presentation is an extended talk given formally 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.).
According to this definition, both types of talk would be termed business presentations as both are aimed at achieving a commercial advantage. The motivational seminars are targeted at extending the speaker’s network of agents, while the other speeches give concrete details about how the network scheme operates financially. Both, however, would bring the presenter economic benefits if conducted successfully.
Earlier we saw that Swales (1990) proposes a distinction between speech community and discourse community and sociolinguistic versus sociorhetorical functions of genres. Speech communities use genres for socialisation and group solidarity, and their members are inherent. Discourse communities use genres for objectives that are prior to socialisation. The characteristics of their discourse are determined by the goals of their communication, and their members are recruited through persuasion and training. Along
the lines of this argument, the motivational seminar is somewhat harder to classify than the straightforward business presentations. It is clear that the motivational seminars are used for recruiting new members into the network, so they would be sociorhetorical and used among a discourse community. Yet, Edward never discusses business during these talks and usually prefers personal stories, allegories and inspirational tales to establish a relationship of trust and friendship with the audience. In this respect, the motivational speeches would be sociolinguistic forms of communication, engaged in to create and maintain a relationship. So it seems that these motivational presentations have a dual purpose: first, to establish a bond with the audience, which is later used to expand the multi-level marketing system and thereby bring commercial advantage to both the speaker and hopefully the audience. This duality of communicative purpose of building social bonds and simultaneously engaging in commercial activities is supported by Askehave’s (1999) claims that many genres have an official and a hidden communicative purpose. In the case of Edward, he prefers not to discuss the business directly, hinting only subtly at this oblique purpose, choosing instead to focus on making the audience feel good, making them like and trust him, so that they would want to meet with him in the future. So Swales’ distinction of speech and discourse communities and sociolinguistic and sociorhetorical functions of genres would need to make allowances for the duality of purpose evidenced in these motivational seminars and supported by Askehave. The purpose, in fact, might not only be dual, but quite possibly multiple since Edward not only establishes a friendly relationship and expands his network, but he also provides the members of the audience with the means of giving presentations themselves by serving as an example. He mentioned several times that he makes sure that his presentations are easy to copy and replicate by the listeners, so that they too can hold similar talks for their
agents. This multifaceted aspect of the notion of intentionality is also seen at the level of the speech act, with a single utterance performing several illocutions simultaneously. This efficient multitasking and multipurpose feature of communication needs to be more widely acknowledged.
The third and final point of the discussion pertains to Edward’s frequent use of personal stories, narratives with internal dialogues, parables and extended metaphors. This is what he termed to be the language of pictures, and again it has direct consequences for the Intentionality Model. We saw that the proportion of speech acts in Edward’s presentations is predominantly informative accounting for up to 75% of the talk, with a 20% count of organisational acts, 5% cooperative acts and no territorial illocutions at all.
This count, however, includes the stories in the informative category. This is questionable as the narratives may be viewed as macro speech acts designed to engage the audience and make them think. This cooperative tactic might then necessitate that all the subordinate acts in the stories be counted as cooperative acts. Thus, the count of cooperative acts in Edward’s presentations would probably change from 5% to over half the talk since the narratives abound. Edward also recounts personal stories to establish his credentials, which according to Bhatia (1993) is the first move of promotional genres. In the hierarchy of intentionality, these moves and macro speech acts are mid-level units, higher than the individual speech are but lower than the overall communicative purpose. The hierarchy is an important aspect to consider when analysing presentations, since it is not enough just to provide the tally of the individual speech acts, but in order to ascertain the full picture of intentionality, it is also essential to map out the hierarchy of goals. Thus, the higher up the ladder an act is found, the more weight it should carry in determining the overall function of the talk. So in Edward’s case, although there are many informative acts at the lowest
level, due to the high count of cooperative acts at the higher level the talks would have to be seen as cooperative instead of informative. This finding from Edward’s case study is of great importance to the design of the model.