Persuasive Discourse Strategies Used in Persian and English Business Letters

Understanding differences in communication styles is becoming much important in intercultural business communication. This study aims to report the result a contrastive study of rhetorical differences between Persian and English "For Your Information" (FYI) letters and investigate how information is presented in business correspondence and what rhetorical strategies are used to illicit compliance by a given readership in a given culture. (FYI letter is a kind of business letter informing the addressee about something (change of address, management, prices, etc) that will affect the way of the future business interaction, Vergaro, 2005). A corpus of forty letters (20 in Persian and 20 in English) was examined at the macro-textual level and micro-textual level. At the macro-textual level, the analysis focused on rhetorical structure, mainly drawing on the notion of move. At the micro-textual level, the analysis concentrated on the pragmatic use of mood and modality. The results revealed that Persian letters share some similar persuasive discourse strategies with English letters. Moreover, differences in communication patterns between these letters were identified.