Towards a new genre: a comparative study of business faxes

Abstract

This chapter aims to twofold: first, to characterise fax messages sent and received in international business; second, to look for evidence of a new genre. The discussion of formal features will focus on the fax cover sheet, while the analysis of the content will include the identification of the communicative purposes, the rhetorical moves deployed to achieve these purposes, and any patterns of intertextuality. The majority of the fax messages in both the Finnish and the Turkish data illustrate a marked evolution from the patterns and styles of traditional business and administrative correspondence still taught in schools. The style is predominantly informal in both sets of data, with a large number of sentence fragments and technical abbreviations. The current social, economic, and technological changes in Turkey and Finland as well as elsewhere, in addition to the effects of post-modernism and globalisation, would suggest that new media and traditional correspondence can neither be easily combined nor differentiated.