Addressing and Convincing
Henk Pander Maat
English summary
In many genres of business documents, writers face a choice: should they directly address their readers by means of second person pronouns or should they use an impersonal, third person style? Empirical research directly dealing with this issue is surprisingly scarce. This project investigates the persuasive effects of second person and third person styles in direct mail letters and magazine advertisements. The most important linguistic manipulation to be investigated consists of replacing second person forms of address by nouns, third person pronouns or articles. Compare:
- When you don't use a skin lotion regularly, your skin may loose its capacity for natural recovery.
- When somebody doesn't use a skin lotion regularly, the skin may loose its capacity for natural recovery.
We draw upon two theoretical frameworks to generate hypotheses concerning the effectiveness of directly addressing readers. In Brown & Levinson's politeness theory, forms of address may be viewed in two ways: they may constitute a positive politeness strategy, aiming at a closer relationship between speaker and hearer, and at the same time the constitute a more direct approach towards influencing the readers behavior. A crucial main factor determining the effectiveness of direct forms of address will be the existing relationship between speaker and hearer, especially the social distance between them. The Brown & Levinson framework also predicts that the effect of using second-person forms partially depends on the kind of information in the utterance. When second person forms are used in utterances containing negative information (e.g. personal problems, diseases), they will be considered more offensive than when used in neutral or positive environments.
In the other framework, Petty & Caccioppo's Elaboration Likelihood Model, a distinction is made between two ways of processing persuasive messages: the peripheral route in which the reader primarily attends to non-content cues like the credibility of the source, is contrasted with the central route in which the arguments in the message are scrutinized. Stylistic devices like second-person forms of address have been shown to foster a more intensive, central way of processing, in which readers relate the message content to personal experiences. But this kind of processing may only occur when real experiences are addressed. Hence we might predict that effects of reader-address on processing route cannot occur in statements about potential future of the readers in the future.
The choice between these hypotheses will be made based on experimental research.