Portfolio Task 1 – 99+283+107+877+143 1509/1375 Introduction – 99/130 The mission statement of Hotcourses is a particularly interesting case, in that it defies many standard expectations of mission statements. Its tone is informal and links are sporadically scattered through its paragraphs. These differences are, I believe, motivated by a desire to appeal to a slightly different audience than found in most corporate mission statements; primarily its potential customers. I will be investigating how Hotcourses use the style of their mission statement to appeal to different audiences. I intend to use a genre analysis, with some reference to social actor analysis to further demonstrate this example of audience design. Literature Review …show more content…
The conjunction ‘whether’, starting the sentence is also very interesting. By offering a choice between three alternatives, it is assumed that the reader is one of these, that the reader is somebody who wants to study something, and take a course. Throughout the text, there is a lack of business or legal jargon, which is often found in mission statements (King et al 2014), perhaps to ensure that it is still widely accessible to a wider audience. One particularly interesting feature in the hotcourses mission statement is the use of social actors (van Leeuwen 1996). The three main social actors are the company itself, its employees, and the reader. By explicitly referencing the reader, and directly addressing them, the text creates a synthetic relationship, a subtle persuasive technique reminiscent of advertising texts (Harwood 2005). In the following extract, it is possible to see how the social actors of the company and the employees are separated. Figure 2 Paragraph 3, Lines …show more content…
This suggests that hotcourses anticipate an audience desire to share the mission statement, and are happy to facilitate that. The image seen in Figure 3 also appears to be an unusual choice, that of a beach scene containing 45 adults and one infant. There is no caption, but it is assumed to be the staff, here perhaps attempting to appeal to potential employees by showing the informality and camaraderie within the team, as well as its family