Understanding the differences in communication styles is becoming increasingly important in business communication as more companies expand their operations to include local and international operations. The purpose of this article is to compare the structural moves employed in the Singaporean and Malaysian promotional genres from the standpoint of moves analysis and comparison. Argument arises on the similarity and dissimilarity of business discourses involving the features of genres between these two neighbouring countries. As a result, a structural linguistics analysis was conducted in order to investigate the variations in communicative purposes as well as the lexical frequency of the sales emails that were written. The comparison between Singaporean sales promotional letter and Malaysian sales emails moves is based on Bhatia's (1993) Singaporean sales promotional letter moves. According to Bhatia's sales letter framework, there are seven moves, whereas in this study, seven moves were identified in Sales Inquiry Emails and nine moves were identified in Sales Reply Emails. Furthermore, Bhatia (1993) classified the moves into two categories: those that were required and those that were optional, based on their frequency of appearance in the text. In terms of communicative patterns, the similarities and differences between the two texts and their respective contexts were discovered. The difference between Singaporean and Malaysian languages, for example, can be explained by the fact that the distribution and sequence of moves differ between the two languages.

No abstract

This study aimed to investigate the generic features in the business emails written by the undergraduates of Universiti Malaysia Kelantan (UMK). Besides that, this study intended to propose a standard generic structure in writing a business email. The emails were gathered from the respondents' assignment that comprised of two email-based questions; however, this study analysed the generic structure of sales reply emails. The emails were compared with Bhatia's promotional sales letter moves. The methodology of this study was computer-assisted corpus analysis (CACA) by Manvender (2011). The data were analysed using a genre-based technique by Bhatia (1993). The particular moves and steps in both types of texts were recognised and categorised individually. The rhetorical structure of sales reply emails consists of three major moves: introducing product, product details, offering incentives. Although the respondents showed similarities in their moves, there were some differences such as the number and content of the moves as well as the contextual patterns.