The Official Style: The Evil Mastermind?

The Official Style: The Evil Mastermind?

Contrary to popular belief, we do not live in a black and white world. The world is filled with so much grey and many different shades of it. This understanding of the world, while it makes everything more complex, adds value and meaning to our lives. When looking at articles written in the Official Style, I think the same grey approach must be taken. The Official Style in many ways has been used as a tool to trick or take advantage of the audience. This is often done by faking an authority and making the audience want to trust the writer without understanding what is being discussed or fact checking them. This, without a doubt, is very dangerous. 

So why is this the preferred style choice by academics and other professionals? 

Can we trust “experts” in a field to actually relay reliable information to us?

Or are people who use the Official Style just evil masterminds?

While you might already have your own answers to those questions, I argue that there is both a good and evil use of the Official Style. I make this claim after analyzing the research paper by Hee Sun Park and Guan Xiaowen titled “The Effects of National Culture and Face Concerns on Intention to Apologize: A Comparison of the USA and China”. The title of this research paper alone should already be setting off some red flags. “Face Concerns”, “Intention to Apologize” what does that even mean and how in the world would you be able to quantify something like that? 

Your intuition is not wrong.

This title alone foreshadows the rest of the paper which overall has a Gunning Fog index of 20.21 and the Flesch Reading Ease score of 15.69. This means that to even have a chance of reading this paper and being able to understand it, would require you to have already completed your PHD. Even if you had a PHD, it would most likely have to be in the field of Communications and Language Studies. While I think that field is pretty neat, that is not the field that most parents are hoping that their child would pursue as a career one day. So why would Park and Guan write a paper that would exclude so many people from being able to understand it? 

You guessed it, they are just pure evil. 

(Joking) 

To understand why they wrote this paper, you have to look at the sphere of human activity that this paper would fall into. To do so, we need to start by understanding who the authors are. Hee Sun Park is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University and has been since the fall of 2008. He got his PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara,  in Communications in 2003. His main fields of interests are: Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Communication, Organizational Communication, Social Influence and Health Communication, and Research Methods and Statistics. The other author is Xiaowen Guan who is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Saint Thomas and has been since 2008. She first got her B.A. at Beijing Foreign Studies University in China. She eventually got her PhD from Michigan State University after working with Hee Sun Park on this paper for her doctoral degree. Currently she teaches courses in Intercultural Communication, and also does research focused on “how different individual and social factors influence communicative messages in interpersonal, intercultural and organizational contexts”.

Based on both of these author’s educational backgrounds, we can assume that they are actually experts in this field and know what they are talking about. 

So who was their intended audience? 

Well given the precision of their field and the fact that this research paper was published in the Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, which claims to be an international academic publisher that works with “world-class authors” with the goal of helping others enhance their education and job efficiency, we can assume that the paper was intended for people working on their own research or to be used as reference in communication studies classrooms. 

So even if there were no evil intentions behind this research paper, surely academics who study communication would be able to relay the information more simply to the audience, right?

I mean I can’t argue that. That question left me stumped until I really started to question how they were able to conduct this research in the first place. As the title stated this was a comparative study between “China and the US”, therefore there is more that goes into this research than what initially meets the eye. 

Language barriers and mistranslations

For those of you who are unfamiliar with translations of foreign languages and specifically translations between English and Chinese, let me tell you there are many misunderstandings. If you try to translate a normal English sentence into Chinese via google translate for example, you will not succeed. A word that we as native English speakers might believe to be very straight forward could hold multiple different meanings when translated into Chinese. Therefore, if you want to accurately get your meaning across, you must use very precise language. 

And what is known to use extremely precise diction? You guessed it, the Official Style!

 With this in mind, I argue that it was necessary for Park and Guan to write in the Official Style in order to conduct this international study between the US and China. By using the Official Style, they could utilize precise language in order to ensure that their research was conducted the same in both countries. 

 Therefore, Park and Guan might not have had any evil intentions when writing this paper at all!

When taking into consideration everything at play when researchers use the Official Style, we can better see how the Official Style falls into the grey category like most other things in the world. When understanding the sphere of human activity along with international communication, we can see the more positive uses of the Official Style. While the argument can still be made that the final paper could have been written more simply in order to allow for more readers to understand it, we can at least see why the paper was written the way it was initially. 

The Official Style is not simply black or white.

Grace Oliver