Environmental Impact Statements in The Netherlands  

Composing an Environmental Impact Statement is a complex task, not only in the USA but also in The Netherlands. Responsible for this difficulty are the comprehensive technical nature of the EIS, the diversity of the audience, and the political character of the outcome: the final text is a compromise between all those involved in the environmental debate. These factors may easily lead to voluminous statements. Communication specialists can help in this process: by writing the obliged summary, by editing the final copy, and (for those with management skills) by coordinating the environmental debate.

Bulter, Willem J. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Documentation>Environmental>Netherlands

Text Models in the USA and The Netherlands  

Text models are handy tools for planning or recognizing the global structure of a text. In this paper we compare a few modern communication handbooks in the USA and The Netherlands as to their treatment of text models. The Dutch “vaste structure” may contribute to the tool kit of American technical writers. After that we present a short discussion of the characteristics of ideal text models and their ideal users. The first text model in history, the classical 'partes orationis,' and the first text models for Environmental Impact Statements from the 1970’s prove to possess a series of deficiencies. We conclude our paper with a proposed procedure for pretesting new text models for new documents.

Bulter, Willem J. STC Proceedings (1996). Articles>Language>Theory>Rhetoric