A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Recommendation Letters From Rhetorical Perspective

A recommendation letter can be seen as the "matchmaker" between applicant and the target reader.It provides an objective introduction of the reader about his background,ability and personality so that the reader can have a more comprehensive knowledge of the applicant.With more and more fierce competition in the society,an informative and persuasive recommendation letter is crucial to the applicant.Therefore,it is also vital for the recommendation letter writer to exhibit strengths of the applicant and persuade the reader to accept him pleasantly.Recommendation letters have been studied from the aspect of writing,communicative function as well as cooperative principle,while no research from rhetorical perspective has been carried out.Three rhetorical appeals by Aristotle,that is,ethical appeal,rational appeal and emotional appeal,mainly work for influencing and persuading the readers.Based upon this,the present research will be founded on three rhetorical appeals to explore how they are used in English and Chinese recommendation letters and the persuasive effect produced.By comparing the use of three rhetorical appeals in English and Chinese recommendation letters,this research is aimed to find out similarities and differences between two kinds of recommendation letters as well as potential factors that cause them.In this way,it is hoped to invigorate recommendation letter writing from rhetorical perspective.This study takes 30 Chinese recommendation letters and 30 English recommendation letters as research objective and establishes two corpora for them.Having identified the use of three rhetorical appeals in two corpora,the writer referred to previous studies and found that comparison between two corpora can be carried out from the following aspects:firstly,ethical appeal can be analyzed from authority of the writer and his attitude towards writing this letter;rational appeal can be probed into by comparison,specificity and un-favorability;lastly,the power of emotional appeal can be interpreted from the use of adjectives,lyric language and parallelism,You-orientation and quotation.After determining aspects for comparison,this study adopted both quantitative and qualitative research method in the following part.To begin with,the frequency of three rhetorical appeals and specific measures to realize them in two corpora were counted and compared,and then SPSS 19.0 was employed to find out significant differences in the use of three appeals between two corpora.As for qualitative analysis,discussion on these similarities and differences was carried out.Reasons for similarities and differences in the frequency of realization measures were further explained.The result of this study shows that in Chinese and English recommendation letters,similarities and differences do exist when three rhetorical appeals are employed to persuade readers.(1)As a whole,in English recommendation letters,rational appeal is employed most frequently,followed by emotional appeal and ethical appeal.While in Chinese recommendation letters,it is emotional appeal that is used most frequently,followed by rational appeal and ethical appeal.Therefore,ethical appeal is the one that is utilized least among three appeals both in English recommendation letters and Chinese recommendation letters.(2)Regarding specific measures to implement three rhetorical appeals,although Chinese recommendation letters are different from English ones in the frequency of authority and attitude to realize ethical appeal,no significant difference has been detected.Concerning rational appeal,both English and Chinese recommendation letters are prone to highlight the applicant's strengths by comparing him with others.Nevertheless,dramatic difference appears on specific examples about the applicant.In English recommendation letters,a good number of specific examples are involved.While Chinese recommendation letters focus on description of the applicant,lacking more specific examples as support.When it comes to emotional appeal,distinct differences have been found in the use of adjectives,You-orientation and quotation.Chinese recommendation letters tend to use a great number of adjectives to compliment the applicant and touch the reader.While English recommendation letters take You-orientation as the most important measure to realize emotional appeal,that is,they appeal to reader's emotion by placing the needs and interests of reader at the first place.However,this method has been used less in Chinese recommendation letters.Proverbs,idioms and allusions are quoted in Chinese recommendation letter while they are absent in English recommendation letters.On the basis of relevant theories and previous research works,the writer probes into reasons for different use of three rhetorical appeals in English and Chinese recommendation letters.It can be attributed to discourse in high-context and low-context,subjective and objective,different thinking modes and historical culture that cause these differences.This study enlarges the research scope of three rhetorical appeals and provides a new perspective for recommendation letter analysis.It is hoped that this study can supply some beneficial inspiration and help for practical writing of recommendation letters.