The Pragmatic Approach to Effective Business Correspondence Writing

The Pragmatic Approach to Effective Business Correspondence Writing Abstract International Business English (IBE), which is called Business English in general in the West, is a variety of ESP (English for Specific Purposes). With China becoming the world’s largest market and manufacturing center, and especially after China’s entry into WTO, IBE is playing an increasingly important role. Business correspondence, as one of the key forms of business communication, especially with the advent and development of fax and email, has become indispensable for business operation. Both corporations and people in the business circle have realized that effective communication, to a certain degree, depends on the efficiency of correspondence. Therefore, in the past years, many scholars of linguistics have focused on studying how to better apply the English language so as to improve business communication. Pragmatics is an indispensable branch of linguistics. It is the study of specific discourse in specific contexts, analyzing how to understand and command a language in different lingual contexts. Business letters are written against a certain background; therefore, it is essential to study how to enhance communication by applying principles of pragmatics. This paper aims at exploring methods of improving writing skills for business correspondence by analyzing the related pragmatic principles. The whole thesis is divided into five Chapters: IntroductionChapter One: Communication Process. This chapter introduces the inherent relations of language to communication, as well as the importance of language in a macroscopic perspective.Chapter Two: An Introduction of Business Correspondence. In this chapter, the definition of “register”...