You-Attitude and Positive Emphasis: Testing Received Wisdom in Business Communication 1

Abstract

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...

Positive Emphasis and You-Attitude: An Empirical Study

“…The current results are not consistent, however, with the results of Brockman and Belanger (1993), who found no support for positive emphasis. The differing results between this study and that of Brockman and Belanger could be due to differing dependent variablesBrockman and Belanger relied on response rate as the dependent variable, whereas this study examined affective reader reactions that should precede response rates.…”

“…But we suspect that the differing results of this study should be attributed to differing experimental manipulations. Brockman and Belanger (1993) used two high-quality versions of a single persuasive letter which had been designed to solicit a high level of cooperation -in other words, while the two letters differed in degree of positive emphasis, both were relatively positive. In the current study we used 99 different memoranda written by persons who varied widely in their training, experience, and writing skill.…”

“…In an attempt to test the effects of positive emphasis and of youattitude, Brockman and Belanger (1993) developed a letter encouraging persons to participate in a study of applicant resumes. They developed two versions of the letter, one with positive emphasis and you-attitude, and one without, and used the two versions of the letter to solicit participation.…”

Leading by Tweeting

“…Brown & Gilman, 1960). Subsequently, a number of studies began to call into question the unbridled advocacy of “second” person pronouns (Brockman & Belanger, 1993; Campbell, Riley, & Parker, 1990; Shelby & Reinsch, 2003), which eventually led to reframing the discussion into writer-reader relationships in business prose (Ewald & Vann, 2003; Jameson, 2004a, 2004b) along with aforementioned power relationships measured by position (Shelby & Reinsch, 2003; Rogers & Lee-Wong, 2003; Rogers, Ho, Thomas, Wong, & Cheng, 2004).…”

You-attitude: A Linguistic Perspective

“…This lack of explicitness may result in part from there being relatively little in the journal literature that relates specifically to the expression of a you-attitude. Several studies - Wells and Spinks (1990 ), Brockman and Belanger (1993), Shelby and Reinsch (1995) -have examined the general presence or absence of you-attitude in various kinds of letters, but there has been little attention to the text characteristics that express you-attitude. A notable exception is Campbell, Riley, and Parker (1990 ).…”