Universitat Jaume I de Castellón

Abridging Information in Marketing Articles and Business Reports:
Executive Summaries

 

 

Nowadays, and thanks to all the new technologies that have been implemented all over the world, the need to select and abridge information has become a must for both academics and professionals. Needless to say, summarising is not a simple activity. To abridge a written or an oral message is to reduce the complexity and length of an original piece of discourse, while retaining its essential qualities. However, the more we study how to summarise a text, the more we observe a number of fine nuances that may jeopardise the overall success of our task. Abridging discourse is a difficult activity, as many authors have pointed out (van Dijk and Kintsch, 1978; Garner, 1982; Brown et al., 1983; Stotesbury, 1990; Palmer, 1996; Kupiec et al., 1999; Friend, 2001; Fung et al., 2003, Yang and Shi, 2003). Different studies have proved that not many people are able to abridge a text successfully, even in their own native language. This may be due to the fact that summarising is based on a learning process, as Brown and Day (1983) pointed out. In fact, a young learner is able to select important information in his/her own language as a child, though the following processes of deletion, combination and generalisation are often acquired some years later.

This activity is especially important when dealing with academic contexts, as we are often asked to summarise information from our research activities in brief abstracts, where we should condense the gist of our work. Nevertheless, other daily activities are also based on the need of extracting the most important concepts, disregarding other pieces of information which can be defined as not so relevant. For example, when delivering lectures we are often forced to stick to the key facts and figures, omitting all those concepts which could be less important for our audience.

Something similar can be said when analysing the importance of abridging information in business settings. The simple layouts of business letters, reports or memos show the importance of sticking to the most important facts and figures, obviating other information. In fact, those professionals who are better prepared to condense ideas and facts are often required to climb the corporate ladder, being promoted to executive positions.

Among the different genres of academic and professional English, we have observed a type of summary, the executive summary, that seems common to two of them, the research article and the business report. Traditionally, one of the pre-defined sections of research articles is the ‘abstract'. Bhatia (1993) defines this section as a summary of the research article that includes brief information about the other sections found in the article: introduction, method, results and conclusion. Abstracts accompany the articles published in most journals. On the other hand, during our studies about research articles (Fortanet, 2002, Blesa & Fortanet, 2003, Ripollés & Palmer, 2003), an additional section entitled “Executive summary” was found in some journals in the fields of marketing and business organisation. The aim of these summaries, as stated in journals such as Journal of Sciences Marketing or Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing , is “to allow managers and executives a rapid appreciation of the content of this article”. As most of the journals that include executive summaries are addressed not only to academics but also to “corporate practitioners” or “managers”, to whom they offer “expert analysis and practical recommendations to aid decision making” ( Journal of Product and Brand Management ), we understand executive summaries as an attempt to bring academic research nearer the business world.

The term “executive summary” seems to have been taken from professional discourse. It is common to find executive summaries linked to business reports. There are many definitions of these summaries when found in this genre. Some experts in business communication define them as “a fully developed ‘mini' version of the report itself” (Bovée & Thill, 2000). However, others provide definitions that come nearer to the ones given for executive summaries in research articles, such as that of Kuiper & Kohut (1999) who consider “an executive summary should include only the most relevant information that its readers [managers and executives] need to make informed decisions and to act wisely”. Not all reports contain an executive summary in this line. We have found it is a common trait of analytical or problem-solving reports. Executive summaries in these reports usually include a section on recommendations for the readers.

The aim of our research is to analyse and compare the executive summaries found in 10 marketing and business research articles with those found in 10 analytical business reports in order to find out whether they have common characteristics.

References

Bhatia,V. (1993). Analysing Genre. Language Use in Professional Settings . London: Longman.
Blesa, A. & Fortanet, I. (2003) “Orientaciones para la publicación de trabajos científicos en revistas internacionales: un estudio exploratorio en el área de Comercialización e Investigación de Mercados”. In Camisón, C., Oltra, M.J.; Flor, M.L. (eds.), Enfoques, problemas y métodos de investigación en Economía y Dirección de Empresas (tomo II). Castellón: Universitat Jaume I, pp. 407- 419.
Bovée, C.L. & Thill, J.V. (2000). Business communication today . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Brown, A.L. & Day, J.D. (1983). "Macrorules for summarizing texts: the development of expertise." Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour , 22, 1-14.
Brown, A.L., Day, J.D., & Jones, R.S. (1983). "The Development of Plans for Summarizing Texts." Child Development , 54, 968-979.
Fortanet, I. (coord.) (2002). Cómo escribir un artículo de investigación en inglés . Madrid: Alianza.
van Dijk, T.A. & Kintsch, W. (1978). "Cognitive Psychology and Discourse: Recalling and Summarizing Stories," in W. U. Dressler (ed.) Current Trends in Text Linguistics (pp. 61-80). Berlin: De Gruyter.
Friend, R. (2001). "Effects of Strategy Instruction on Summary Writing of College Students." Contemporary Educational Psychology , 26, 3-24.
Fung, I.I.Y., Wilkinson, I.A.G. & Moore, D.W. (2003). "L1-Assisted Reciprocal Teaching to Improve ESL Students' Comprehension of English Expository Texts." Learning and Instruction , 13, 1-31.
Garner, R. (1982). "Efficient Text Summarization: Costs and Benefits." Journal of Educational Research, 75, 275-279.
Kuiper, S. & Kohut, G. F. (1999). Contemporary Business Report Writing , St. Paul, South Western College Publishing.
Kupiec, J., Pedersen, J. & Chen, F. (1999). "A Trainable Document Summarizer," in I. Mani & M.T. Maybury (Eds.) Advances in Automatic Text Summarization (pp. 55-60).Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Palmer, J.C. (1996). The Use of Summarisation Strategies in the Development of the Linguistic Competence of Business English Students . Castelló: Universitat Jaume I.
Ripollés, M. & Palmer, J. C. (2003). “La publicación de artículos científicos en revistas internacionales del área de Organización de Empresas”. In Camisón, C., Oltra, M.J.; Flor, M.L. (eds.), Enfoques, problemas y métodos de investigación en Economía y Dirección de Empresas (tomo II). Castellón: Universitat Jaume I, pp. 389- 405.
Stotesbury, H. (1990). Finnish History Students as 'Liminal' Summarisers on the Threshold of Academia . Reports from the Language Centre for Finnish Universities, No. 38. Jyvaskyla, Finland: University of Jyvaskyla.
Yang, L. & Shi, L. (2003). "Exploring Six MBA Students' Summary Writing by Introspection." Journal of English for Academic Purposes , 2, 165-192.
Definition of Executive Summary when presenting this section in each article.
To be found in the section “About the Journal” in the information provided on the web site for Journal of Product and Brand Management.