A Comparative Analysis Of The Executive Summary Text Of Business Plan Based On Genre

Business plan is an effective way for entrepreneurs or existed enterprises to obtain financial support from investors for their new business ideas. The executive summary is the essence of the whole business plan, from which investors can know whether this plan is of great investment value or not. However, current research of executive summary is rare and there are no specific rules for it, which leads to the problem that students who are learning to write this genre have no standard to refer to find their own problems. The author collected 30 authentic executive summaries written by native English speakers and 30 executive summaries written by students who take part in the Business Plan Writing Contest. By using genre theory and systemic functional grammar,the author makes a contrastive analysis from the perspectives of move structure and language features. The result reveals that business plan executive summary mainly consists of 6 to 10 moves and its preference of mid-value modal verbs. The executive summaries that students write are of little difference in move structures compared with the native written ones. However, there still exist some problems with the steps in each move, the length of executive summary and the high percentage of using low-value modal verbs. Hope these findings could provide some reference value for the people concerned.