Hope everyone's enjoying their recess week so far! (Although I think most of us are pretty much drowning in work... hmm.)

While we were discussing Chinese letters of request last week, I kept getting reminded of the countless 公函s (formal Chinese letters) I had to write back in secondary school. We were taught to follow a particular strict format (similar to the one discussed in class) irregardless of the actual letter content, so it was a matter of time before most of us learned to blindly plug in memorized "facework phrases" to every letter we wrote.

It seems difficult for letter recipients to distinguish between sincere and generic compliments. If I'm one of the Radio Australia producers, I would probably quickly glance through the first section of all request letters without genuinely believing that all of them are "extremely loyal" fans.

Perhaps when writing in Chinese, we need to go the extra mile to make the recipient feel our sincerity, instead of just dishing out compliments as though they are meaningless greetings. Maybe an eloquent writing style will make a big difference.

Also, I found the different discourse types among different cultural groups really interesting. If I were to receive love letters written in different languages (assuming I can understand all of them), I would probably be impressed by the Oriental circular style and their beautiful analogies, as well as the rhythmic balanced style of Arabic writings.

The linearity and explicit writing style of English letters would, in contrast, kill the romance immediately.

Then again, I suspect love letters would have its own written discourse structures, different from the ones we talked about in class. Wouldn't it be interesting to examine that across different language groups? =)