Annals of the University of Oradea: Economic Science (Jul 2016)
STYLISTIC FEATURES OF BUSINESS WRITING
Abstract
Style is a crucial element of business communication, since the writer has to manage to obtain a balance between being pleasant and being polite. People use business writing to ask for a job, to inquire about different opportunities, to ask for price quotations, to get into business with partners etc. It is to the writer’s advantage to learn how to write in a business style because it is an important part of most people’s everyday life. Nowadays, due to the development of international business partnerships, business people in Romanian and not only are faced with the necessity of writing and translating official business papers from English into Romanian because English is considered the language of world business relationships. In comparison with literary texts, the texts of official documents are highly standardized. This refers to both the structure of the whole text and the arrangement of special paragraphs. The language of business documents is characterized by specific terms and expressions and also by certain grammatical and syntactical patterns. The literature in the field has showed vastly subjective approaches, yet these approaches are not all the time in accordance with existing rules of formal English. Also, there are no accepted criteria for changes that should be taken into consideration. Therefore, the main problems of people who write business documents are: how should they write it to sound correctly? How formal should they be in the content of documents, if even English-speaking people have difficulties drawing a line between formal and informal English? The aim of this paper is to investigate the stylistic peculiarities of official business documents. It starts with introductory notions regarding style and stylistic and it continues with the relation between language and its function in social settings. The second part of the paper provides a stylistic analysis of the most common features seen in business documents.
