Differences between Filipino and Filipino-American’s written outputs: a contrastive rhetoric of professional discourse

Abstract

The study examined the emails of a Filipino and a Filipino-American personnel sent to the company’s email bank in order to see differences in hyper codification and contextual differences of the text structures. These sample emails were then presented to other Filipino personnel of the company in order to identify their subjective impressions, in terms of effectiveness, appropriateness, and clarity. The result indicated that the Filipino personnel’s emails, which contain the mission/vision of the company, contain more vivacity, dynamism, life, and contextual features. Yet, though these may be taken as wordy or circular by native speakers, other Filipino personnel find the emails and the mission/vision more distinct, more understandable and more direct to the point as compared to the emails and the mission/vision of the Filipino-American personnel.