Persuasion in business documents: strategies for reporting positively on negative phenomena
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Article in Periodical |
| Magazine / Source | Ostrava Journal of English Philology |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Keywords | annual report; attitude; business threats; credibility; explicit; image; implicit; persuasion; positive words; reputation; strategy |
| Attached files | |
| Description | The research focuses on the means and strategies of persuasion used in a particular type of specialised discourse, namely in the discourse of business. It looks into some sections of annual reports (chairman´s statement, CEO´s statement, review of the year, executive summary, letters to shareholders) as these can be considered persuasive. The paper largely deals with lexico-grammatical means utilised to persuade the target readers and communicate the intended proposition. It observes that implicit persuasion is more efficient in these genres than explicit, and that the credibility of the source must be carefully built by sticking to the facts, personalising the source and illustrating the data with specific examples and stories. The main focus of the paper is on strategies used to report business threats and other negative phenomena. Ten specific strategies have been identified, belonging to two large groups (namely facing vs. relativising problems), and illustrated through extracts from a subcorpus of ten texts. Apart from the selection of appropriate lexis (such as semantically positive, vivid, concrete words) and grammatical structures, the research notes how arguments are structured syntactically. |
| Related projects: |