Genre Analysis of Persuasive Texts: Sales Correspondence, Invitations and Charity Appeals, and Pedagogical Implications (Abstract)

Writing persuasive messages is one of the difficulties and challenges encountered by working adults. In order to address the gap between research and pedagogy in writing pesuasive messages, this study adopted a genre-based approach to analyze the move structures and linguistic features of three different types of persuasive messages, namely sales correspondence, invitations, and charity appeals. A total of 256 workplace messages were selected, of which 102 were sales messages, 88 invitation messages, and 66 charity messages. Corpus software, W-Matrix, was used to examine the lexical choices and linguisic features involved. Results show that the three different persuasive texts had their own respective move structures, and different linguistic features were found in different specific moves. A discussion of the similarities and differences involved in doing persuasion for sales correspondence, invitations, and charity appeals generates a clearer picture of what persuasion is about and the different ways that can be used to realize persuasion. Implications are drawn as to how teachers can develop corresponding teaching materials and learning resources for business English courses and for improving students’ persuasive use of English in workplace communication.