A Corpus-based Stylistic Study On Students' Business Correspondence Writing

With the development of China's foreign trade and the constant increase of other international economic activities, China has become more and more important in international business field. And China is now even more urgent to communicate with foreign business partners. One of the most effective ways of international business communication is by business correspondence. The good relationship between the two parties and successful result of the deals greatly depends on business correspondence, which contributes to the belief that the exploration of its language features and writing principles is helpful in improving the quality and success of business communication.This study aims to analyze the linguistic features of the author's students'writings on the basis of English business correspondence from a stylistic perspective. The theories on stylistics are employed to investigate English business correspondence, and the linguistic features and its writing principles are summarized in order to facilitate a deep and profound understanding of English business correspondence. And on the basis of the analysis, the author gives both the readers and students some suggestions in writing business correspondence.The research subjects are the author's students, coming from College of Textile Engineering and Art in Taiyuan University of Technology. They are second-year junior college students, whose majors are applied English on business English. The author has chosen some of their assignment writings as research corpus. The research tool of this study will make use of AntConc, multi-platform corpus analysis toolkit. This tool can be used to analyze the vocabulary, phrases and collocations, syntactic structures and so on.There are both successes and failures, namely, advantages and disadvantages in students'writings. The findings of this research include: 1. On the lexical aspect, the students have small vocabularies. They generally use simple words without many technical terms and complex vocabulary. And they seldom use neutral and literary words. 2. On the syntactic aspect, the students do a good job in using declaratives and pronouns. But they write few long and complicated sentences. 3. On the discourse aspect, the students write a single piece of writing tend to be quite the same with no change, grammatical mistakes, and many redundant sentences.From the above discussions, the author wants to propose some suggestions for the future teaching and students'writing. We can find that students'failure of a good correspondence is due to their poor understanding of business purpose and the important functions of business letters; furthermore, the poor skill of their composition is partly because of their poor command of the English language. It is well known that a good business correspondence needs two types of knowledge: the knowledge about business issues and a good command of language. Therefore, the students should stick to the widely accepted"five Cs"principles and principle of economy. Moreover, these principles should be combined when they are used in an appropriate way.