Should business students be taught how to say 'no'? A comparison of Flemish and US rejection letters in English

Abstract

Writing “bad news" messages constitutes a skill critical to interpersonal success and effectiveness in many people’s professional lives. It is also believed to be “one of the most difficult tasks facing business communicators" (Salerno 1985). Despite research to the contrary (see e.g. Locker 1999), there is still a relatively strong — if often implicit— preference among textbooks (e.g. Thill and Buvée 2002) for the so-called indirect organizational approach. This communicative strategy includes (i) a buffer opening meant to soften the rejection as a potentially face-threatening act (Brown and Levinson 1987); (ii) an indirect refusal; (iii) one or more reasons for turning down the request, proposal or application; and (iv) a positive ending. The present study is an attempt to examine the extent to which Flemish, US student writers will follow, or depart from, the indirect organizational pattern in the absence of any explicit writing intervention or business genre instruction. The data — a corpus of 21 rejection letters — have been collected as part of a semester-long business correspondence project in which Flemish and US students exchanged letters and other documents by email. The findings reveal that only one third of Flemish and US writers use an indirect approach. Also, writers in both groups combine indirectness and directness in unpredictable ways. However, most interestingly, Flemish and US rejection letters show a strong positive correlation with “best practice" sample letters discussed by opponents of the indirect approach like Locker (1999). This paper concludes by questioning the relevance of writing instruction for advanced students of business communication.status: publishe