Students new to business communication often struggle to apply the principles of &dquo;you-attitude&dquo; and &dquo;positive emphasis&dquo; consistently. In their frustration, such students sometimes question whether applying these principles will really make a difference in their writing. To convince students that you-attitude and positive emphasis are, in fact, important for effective business communication, instructors often point to the following kinds of sentence pairs typically found in textbooks:This side-by-side comparison of paired sentences seems to favor the ones which apply the principles of you-attitude and positive emphasis, sentences which are designed to create goodwill by (1) sounding friendlier and (2) focusing upon the audience and the positive. Is there a difference, however, between hypothetical responses to side-by-side comparisons and &dquo;real world&dquo; responses? That is, to what extent do you-attitude and positive emphasis really matter outside of the classroom, where readers do not usually see both &dquo;good&dquo; and &dquo;bad&dquo; versions of a document? To begin answering this question, we conducted a nationwide research project in which 257 personnel recruiters for Big Six accounting firms received one of two versions of a cover letter requesting their participation in a r6sumd research project that we were conducting at the time. (These 257 recruiters represent about 45% of the total population of Big Six recruiters in the United States.) Whereas the content and general organization of the two letters sent to the recruiters are exactly the same, one letter consistently applies the principles of you-attitude and positive emphasis at the sentence level and one does not. Our purpose was to discover whether the two versions of the letter would elicit different response rates.While this study might well have targeted any number of different audiences, we chose Big Six accounting firms because they met the criteria necessary for conducting the r6sumd project, and that project provided us a legitimate, realistic purpose for sending the letters The project targeted seven different cities in which all six firms had offices in Alaska, Hawaii, and six geographical areas: the East Coast, Midwest, South, Southwest, West Coast, and Pacific Northwest.3 The recruiters received the letters in the summer rather than during their busy tax season, and we did not attempt follow-up contact with the recruiters who did not respond to the letter, since we wanted to discover how effective the letter alone would be.In all, we sent 129 letters with you-attitude and positive emphasis and 128 letters in which these principles 1 This study was funded by an Ohio State University Academic Challenge Grant.2 The Big Six firms—Arthur Andersen, KPMG Peat Marwick, Coopers and Lybrand, Ernst and Young, and Deloitte and Touche—suited the résumé study well because they are all relatively similar in terms of size, prestige, and in the minimum standards used for screening entry-level candidate...