WRITTEN COMMUNICATION IN BUSINESS.

The article examines the work of researchers primarily interested in the investigation of written communication in business settings. The author regards 'business discourse' as a field of study with distinct features in the domain of discourse analysis. Thus, the paper overviews the most important contributions to the development of written business discourse with a number of landmark studies. To gain a greater understanding of the written business discourse, the author also investigates some principles and practices of politeness strategies used in written business communication. In order to highlight different ways of expressing politeness in business correspondence, the author will consider examples of requests made in business letters and point out what linguistic forms are used to carry out the proposed strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]