Background of the Study

1 CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

1.1. Background of the Study

Written communication is becoming widely used by entrepreneurs nowadays to promote their products. A similar trend also appears within the entrepreneurs who sell their products to help potential customers earning money through internet business. These entrepreneurs create a sales letter to reach the potential customers. Sales letter is a letter written for a purpose of promoting and selling a product or a service to the customers. It is a type of business letter which functions to generate business and to bear the task as an announcement letter. 1 Sales letter generally has similar functions to that of advertisements, which are very common to use to promote the entrepreneur’s products. Sales letters seem to have various elements that are obligatory and those that are not or maybe even trivial. It makes sales letters vary one to another. In addition, Kennedy 2000:12 states that a well-written sales letter is able to show the seller to understand the prospective buyers point of view. To persuade customers, the seller must be able to understand their problem and what they want. 1 Cited from http:letters.targetstudy.comsales-letter 2 One can analyze a text through systemic functional linguistics as the theoretical frameworks. A text typically has three meanings, namely: ideational, interpersonal, and textual, which represents how the speaker makes meaning in its utterances. As a persuasive text, sales letter carries distinctive interpersonal meaning, which relates to the social relationship between the sales letter writer and the potential customers. On the other hand, sales letter owns a lot of spoken text features although it has a written form. Thus, the writer is also encouraged to observe the interpersonal meaning and type of language contained in a sales letter. Since there have already been plenty research projects that address mood- residue structure and other type of metafunction, the writer decides to conduct a research project regarding to interpersonal meaning in sales letter as a different research object. The writer limits her focus on the typical mood types being used, social relationship between participants, and text type of sales letter. The research is intended to complete the other research projects which only focused on mood and residue structures.

1.2. Research Problem