Assessing Students' Writing Skills: A Case Of Romanian Students Of Business English

This article analyses the writing skills of Romanian students of Business English, with the aim of identifying the problems encountered and of determining the extent to which these problems coincide with those described in the English literature on the topic. The study is based on a corpus of business emails written by first-year students at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, its focus being exclusively on stylistic aspects of communication such as concision, clarity, simplicity, and tone. The selected emails are analysed both quantitatively, with respect to the tendency they show towards wordiness, vagueness and complexity, and qualitatively, with respect to the effect this tendency has on communication and the way in which it could be eliminated. The results of the analysis show that some problematic aspects of business documents such as wordiness and vagueness are much more common with Romanian students writing in English than other problems discussed in the literature, for example the employment of unusual or abstract words and the use of the passive voice.