Students analyse and compose business and marketplace texts such as pitches, promotions, business letters and brand messages, examining how language persuades and represents a business

What this dot point is asking

The marketplace is full of language working hard: a shop's slogan, a product description, a pitch to a customer, a business letter chasing a deal, the words a brand uses to describe itself. This elective looks at the texts of business and commerce. This dot point asks you to analyse how these texts persuade and how they represent a business, and to compose your own marketplace texts. The audience is customers, clients or partners, and the purpose is almost always to win something: a sale, a deal, trust.

The answer

Business texts are persuasive texts with a clear goal. Even when they look like plain information, they are usually working to make you buy, agree or trust. Reading them well means seeing the persuasion behind the surface.

How business texts persuade

Marketplace texts use a recognisable persuasive toolkit, often more polished than everyday advertising.

• Benefit language: describing not the product but what it does for the customer, "saves you time" rather than "has a fast motor".
• Reassurance: guarantees, reviews and credentials that reduce the buyer's risk.
• Positive, confident tone: a business rarely sounds unsure, because confidence persuades.
• Calls to action: clear next steps that move the reader toward buying or contacting.
• Brand voice: a consistent personality in the language, friendly, premium or trustworthy, that shapes how the business is seen.

Naming the technique and stating its effect on the customer is your analysis.

How language represents a business

A business is partly built from its words. The language it uses to describe itself constructs an image: a cafe calling itself "your local" represents itself as friendly and community-minded; a firm using formal, precise language represents itself as serious and reliable. This is brand voice, and it is a representational choice. Notice the register a business uses and what image it builds, because the words are doing the work of an identity.

Reading and composing marketplace texts

To read a business text critically, separate the claim from the evidence and notice the persuasion under the information. A glowing product description is selling, not reporting. To compose an effective marketplace text, start from the customer: what do they want, and what worries them? Then write benefits not features, build trust with specifics rather than vague boasts, keep a consistent confident voice, and end with a clear next step. Match the register to the business you are representing.

Examples in context

Consider two original descriptions of the same small bakery. One reads "We sell bread and cakes. Open daily." The other reads "Fresh bread baked here every morning, by the same family for thirty years." A strong response analyses how the second uses benefit and brand language: "baked here every morning" reassures with freshness, and "the same family for thirty years" builds trust through longevity, selling a feeling rather than a loaf. Together these represent the bakery as warm, reliable and rooted in the community. The first version only informs; the second persuades and constructs an identity. The difference is language matched to a customer and a brand, which is what the module rewards.

Common mistakes

Try this

• Take a product description and rewrite each feature as a customer benefit.
• Identify the brand voice in a business text and write one sentence on the image it constructs.
• Find a call to action in a marketplace text and explain how it moves the reader toward buying or contacting.