商务英语写作的文体特色

The Stylistic Features of Business English WritingAbstract: In this paper, it describes the stylistic feature of business English writing and points out that it owns five characters:plainness, clearness, conciseness, formalness, courtesy.Key words: business writing；stylistic；featureIt is generally accepted that: “ Business circle is like battlefield”. In the business circle, time and efficiency are both the struggling aims for both sides. Therefore, business English writing needs conciseness and pursuit of efficiency. Turning over business English writing, we can see obviously that most of them is coming straight to the point, frankly to the subject matter. It has no polite or seasonal greeting or salutation, nor does unnecessary pleonasm. And the body of it also keeps to the principle of plainness, clearness, conciseness, formalness and courtesy.1 The Stylistic Feature of Business English Writing1.1 PlainnessGenerally speaking, business English writing is not like literatural English or advertisement English. It does not pursue shining words, especially avoiding the use of flaring ,deserted or obscure words; It does not aim at the artial beauty of language so it employs seldom the rethoric methods, Such as trope, exaggeration, personification and so on. The language is unadorned even if it is a sale letter for commodity. Please look at the following sale letter for men’s suits: Gentlemen:Last year we achieved 30% increase in the sales of our businessmen’s suits. We believed that this happy state of affairs can be attributed to two causes. First, we managed to avoid passing on any part of our increased manufacturing costs. Second, we believe our designs and colors are the most attractive that we have ever produced. And so we are happy to be able to tell you that our new season’s suits are, if anything, more attractive than last year’s and our prices will compare very favourably with those of any of our competitors. We believe that you will agree that our samples prove the truth of our claims. We look forward to an even larger order than the one you favoured us with last year.Yours trulyIn this sale letter, it only uses 1 number ( 30%) to show the improvement of the rate of sale; it just makes use of 2 facts to account for the reason of this situation. In the letter, it totally employs 4 adjectives and 1 adverb, in which it only has 1 adjective’s superlative degree ( the most attractive) and 2 comparative degrees.( more attractive, larger). It is no flowery, flaring words or exaggeration words. Indeed, the language is unadorned and simple.1.2 ClearnessTo meet the needs of improving the communicative efficiency in the both trade sides, the sentences are natural and straight, the attitudes are clear and explicit. And to reach the accuracy, the meaning will never cut both ways, let alone be obscure and difficult to understand through which it avoids causing the misleading and error of information. Business English writing has the following characteristics in the organization of sentence pattern, verb tense, paragraph so that could make the meaning clear:(1) Use more imperative sentence. For example,there are plenty of imperative sentences in the sale letter. Its aim is to advise or urge to the customer to act immediately, and place an order tothe goods hurrily.(2) Use fewer exclamation sentence and tag question sentence, instead of more use of statement sentences to make the narration much clearer.(3) Use more complete sentences, less omit sentence so as not to lead to misunderstanding because of the other side’s guess the content of omitting (4) In the letter for introducing the product’s capability,the present tense’s using frequency is very high which give people a kind of the sense of reality and urgency.(5) The paragraph in the business English writing is very short, strong in epitome, and usually at the one or two sentences in the first paragraph it will summarize the reason for writing it and the main content, and then directly enter the subject matter after the other side gaining the main threads of an affair.1.3 ConcisenessIn order to pursue time and efficiency, and not to pull out trade partner’s energy in analyzing the difficult structure, guessing or pondering the lett er’s meaning which will waste time, lower efficiency even lose precious opportunities, the sentence structures in the business English writing are all comparatively easy and simple and seldom use overlapped clauses. Basically it will not appear that too complicated sentences like in the literary English, news English and science English. Furthermore, it is clear in the logic and accurate, strict in thought. Take that sale letter for men’s suit for example again, it mentions “First”, “Second” two adverbs in the explanation of contributing the rise of rate of sale, which is concise in word usage , almost no superfluous words and precise in the narration.1.4 FormalnessIn the business English writing it usually uses more formal words, for example, “购买”use “Purchase”, not “buy”; “开始”use “commence”, not “begin”; “告知”use “inform”, not“tell”; “要求”use “require”, not “want or need”; “叙述”use “state”, not “say”; “足够的”use “sufficient”, not “enough”, these examples has many more. It chooses these formal words to make the business writing full of the stylistic color of formalness and to keep the serious, grand style. Another embodiment of word usage in the business English writing is: it uses few adverb in forming the“adverbial of manner” , but uses more the prepositional phrase which is made up of preposition and the root word of the adverb. Such as: We thank you for your order of Sep, 25, which we accept with pleasure.(谢谢贵公司九月二十五日寄来的订单.我们很乐意接受。