As noted earlier in this chapter, although the writing practice of sales invitations is very close to textbook advice in regard to formulaic moves, there is a gap between these two sources in regard to communicative purposes. In order to further explore this finding, a questionnaire and interviews were administered among enterprise managers and business writing students (see Appendix 2). The purpose was to see if there were differences in the views of these two groups on the communicative purpose of sales invitations. If so, did these differences affect the opinions of these native speakers about the various levels of the text?
In order to answer the above two questions, the following three levels will be examined. First, the highest level of the text, the communicative purposes, will be examined to find whether the two groups have different understandings. Second, the formulaic moves
will be studied in a top-down manner. At the level of linguistic forms, only salutations are discussed as an example of use for ease of analysis.
5.1 Questionnaire results and interviews on communicative purposes
This section will examine the native speakers’ understanding of communicative purposes. Only three communicative purposes are examined in the questionnaire (see Appendix 2): establishing relationships with the reader, attracting the reader’s interest, and persuading the reader. These purposes can alternatively be called relationship building, attracting interest and persuasiveness. These are also the purposes that may be in conflict and this point will be discussed in the analysis of the interviews. However, they do not necessarily represent all the major purposes. For example, inviting the reader is very
important, but this purpose is not included in the questionnaire because it is such a clear-cut purpose for an invitation. In the questionnaire, both groups were asked to grade the three purposes as 1 (very important), 2 (quite important), 3 (not so important), and 4 (not important). The results for each group are shown in Figure 9 and Figure 10 below:
Figure 9. The students' preferences (%) relationship building attracting interest persuasiveness
m
1 ■ 2 □ 3 □ 4Figure 10. The managers' preferences (%)
HI 1
■ 2 □ 3 □ 4
NOTE: In the above two diagrams, the columns numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 stand for the four grades. The vertical axis shows the percentage o f each group who chose each grade o f the three communicative purposes.
Figure 9 and Figure 10 show that the only similarity is that both of the groups considered ‘relationship building’ and ‘attracting interest’ important. Very few respondents chose the ‘not so important’ or ‘not important’ degrees. However, they differed in their rating of importance of these two purposes. Over half of the students considered them very important, while only a quarter of the managers did. Most managers (71% and 64%
differed in grading ‘persuasiveness’ with only 17% of the students vs. 70% of the managers preferring the ‘very important’ degree. In fact, the students’ grading of ‘persuasiveness’ was quite spread out, and 29% of them rated it as ‘not so important’. The students’ preferences for ‘persuasiveness’ were quite similar to those in sales letters as discussed in the last chapter.
Follow-up interviews were undertaken and the results will be discussed here. As shown above, the two groups had different understandings of the communicative purposes. The following will analyse their views in order to determine why such a difference occurred.
The students seemed to place equal importance on both ‘relationship building’ and ‘attracting interest’. More than half of them rated ‘relationship building’ ‘very important’. They explained that sales invitations were a very important type of ‘liyixin’ (letters of etiquette), and so the letter should have ‘relationship building’ as a major purpose, as indicated in the textbooks. On the other hand, they further explained that the letter was related to advertising the exhibition and should place equal importance on attracting the reader’s interest. The students who made this choice thought that for a sales invitation, if the writer could make the reader interested, the letter had already achieved its major aim. This was also rated highly by students in the interviews on sales letters.
For ‘persuasiveness’, the students’ choices included all four degrees with ‘quite important’ much higher than ‘very important’ (50%: 17%), and 33% for ‘not very important’ and ‘not important’. Generally speaking they seemed to place less importance on this
purpose. As one student argued, “Although the purpose of a sales invitation is to invite the reader to the exhibition, the writer should place more importance on ‘attracting interest’ than on ‘persuasiveness’. If the reader was interested, s/he would respond to the letter and inquire about the exhibition”. According to the students, one of the most important reasons for attending the exhibition was interest in the exhibition.
In sum, it seems that the students have some difficulty balancing the three purposes examined. According to them, ‘establishing relationships’ and ‘attracting interest’ were the most important purposes. As discussed earlier, sales invitations belong to ‘gongwen’ (official letters) and should not be treated as a pure ‘liyixin’ (letters of etiquette), therefore ‘establishing relationship’ is not a decisive factor for the reader in accepting the invitation. If