Interpersonal Meaning in Sales Letters on Internet Business

Abstract

Social relationships and roles between participants in a persuasive text such as sales letters are interesting to analyze. The writer chose sales letters collected from internet forum Warrior Forum as the research materials. The focus of the article is how the sales letter writers influence the potential customers and what social role is played among the participants in sales letter. The author uses interpersonal meaning theory in systemic functional linguistics. The writer restricts the issue only on an analysis of the mood types, social relationships between the participants and text type. The purpose of this paper is to find the structure and interpersonal meaning of the sales letters existed in the Warrior Forum. The analysis show that the interpersonal meaning in sales letter is to persuade potential buyers to purchase the product seller. Sales letter writers also use informal language and show a friendly and credible impression to the prospective buyers even though they are not familiar with each other. The analysis also show that sales letter is a spoken text.