Language and Technology in Professional Communication: Analyzing the role of language in various professional fields, including the impact of technological tools on communication practices
Abstract
This paper explores the importance of language in professional communication in five areas, namely business/corporate, healthcare, law, engineering/IT and education, and the influence of technological tools in transforming the communication practice at the workplace. The study is based on a convergent design and a mixed-methods approach (integrating a survey of professionals with semi-structured interviews and discourse/genre analysis of de-identified workplace texts (emails, chat logs, reports/briefs, and meeting notes). Findings have shown that field-specific communicative objectives (e.g., persuasion, clarity and empathy, legal precision, quick-time coordination, and instructional feedback) are very strong determinants of professional language. A
ffordance of tools is also a determinant of tone, formality and interpretive risk. Email was most related to clarity, trust as it is structured and archival, whereas instant messaging was more effective in terms of time efficiency but more overloaded and misunderstood due to brevity and collapse of context. Video calls added more subtlety to calls through the use of audiovisual cues, but were associated with fatigue, and collaborative documents with shared understanding through transparency and co-editing. AI writing tools enhanced upper-level preciseness and velocity but brought up the issues of confidentiality, professional voice, and accountability. This research suggests a comparative model between professional objectives, the use of language, affordances of tools, and their results to train communication and using technologies responsibly.
Keywords: professional communication; workplace discourse; genre; pragmatics; technology-mediated communication; AI writing tools; multimodality
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