Investigating the generic structure potential of english and vietnamese blog posts in content marketing in the light of systemic functional linguistics (SFL)

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES FACULTY OF POST GRADUATE STUDIES KIỀU THỊ LỆ INVESTIGATING THE GENERIC STRUCTURE POTENTIAL OF ENGL

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST GRADUATE STUDIES

KIỀU THỊ LỆ

INVESTIGATING THE GENERIC STRUCTURE POTENTIAL OF ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE BLOG POSTS IN CONTENT MARKETING

IN THE LIGHT OF SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS (SFL)

(Khảo sát tiềm năng cấu trúc thể loại của các nhật ký cá nhân quảng cáo trong tiếp thị nội dung tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt theo quan điểm chức năng hệ thống)

MASTER’S THESIS PROGRAM I

Major: English Linguistics Code: 8220201.01

Hanoi – 2019

VIETNAM NATIONAL UNIVERSITY, HANOI

UNIVERSITY OF LANGUAGES AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES

FACULTY OF POST GRADUATE STUDIES

KIỀU THỊ LỆ

INVESTIGATING THE GENERIC STRUCTURE POTENTIAL OF ENGLISH AND VIETNAMESE BLOG POSTS IN CONTENT MARKETING

IN THE LIGHT OF SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL LINGUISTICS (SFL)

(Khảo sát tiềm năng cấu trúc thể loại của các nhật ký cá nhân quảng cáo trong tiếp thị nội dung tiếng Anh và tiếng Việt theo quan điểm chức năng hệ thống)

MASTER’S THESIS PROGRAM I

Major: English Linguistics Code: 8220201.01

Supervisor: Dr Nguyễn Thị Minh Tâm

Hanoi - 2019

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DECLARATION OF WORK

I do solemnly and sincerely declare that:

(1) I am the sole author/writer of this work;

(2) This work is original;

(3) Any use of any work in which copyright exists was done by way of fair dealing and for permitted purposes and any excerpt or extract from, or reference to or reproduction of any copyright work has been disclosed expressly and sufficiently and the title of the work and its authorship have been acknowledged in this Work;

(4) I do not have any actual knowledge nor do I ought reasonably to know that the making of this work constitutes an infringement of any copyright work;

(5) I hereby assign all and every rights in the copyright to this work to the University of Languages and International Studies (ULIS), who henceforth shall be owner of the copyright in this work and that any reproduction or use

in any form or by any means whatsoever is prohibited without the written consent of ULIS having been first had and obtained;

(6) I am fully aware that if in the course of making this work I have infringed any copyright whether intentionally or otherwise, I may be subject to legal action or any other action as may be determined by ULIS

Date: June 22 nd , 2019

Candidate‘s Signature

Kiều Thị Lệ

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ABSTRACT

Blog posts have been widely considered to be an effective tool in content marketing as they not only get the products exposed to the customers

but also provoke reasonable and appealing motives for them to click buy

Among various types of blog posts, instructional blog post is the most popular type since they can create demand and bring many values to customers Instructional blog posts provide insights and directly address readers‘ problems or concerns

This study aims at finding the Generic Structure Potential (GSP) of English and Vietnamese instructional blog posts, based on the framework of Hasan (1985) The corpus consists of ten English and ten Vietnamese blog posts which were collected from blogs whose views per month surpass 150,000 Moreover, this research also seeks to find the similarities and differences between the two categories

The analysis reveals that 36 types of potential elements might occur in the instructional blog posts Based on the obligatory, optional and iterative elements found in the data, the GSP of English and Vietnamese instructional blog posts is proposed In conclusion, While English instructional blog posts accomplish the mission of advertising, instructing and increasing leads; Vietnamese posts serve the purpose of instructing and increasing traffic to the page

The result of the study can be employed to evaluate the necessity and reasonability of the elements in the instructional blog posts and propose the most efficient factors to compose successful instructional blog posts

Key words: generic structure potential (GSP), blog post, content

marketing

me the chance and the trust to work on this area of research despite the obstacles

I‘m grateful to my dear supervisor professor Dr Nguyen Thi Minh Tam for all her valuable guidance and encouragement She always supported

me with valuable suggestions and positive criticism I‘m thankful for all the help and the flexibility she had with me despite being busy

I have a great joy thanking my dear friend Vu Thi Thu Huong who has been very generous in her friendship with me I wish to show my gratitude to her for introducing this field of study to me and helping me to learn it Thank you for all the academic and moral support during the years of our friendship

My deepest gratitude goes to my dearest mother for all the love and sacrifices to grow me up Thank you for being patient with me in my down times and tolerating my absence at home as well as encouraging me to pursue all my dreams since my childhood

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION OF WORK i

ABSTRACT ii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS iv

LIST OF TABLES vi

LIST OF FIGURES vii

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

1 Rationale of the study 1

2 Aims and objectives of the study 2

3 Research methodology 2

4 Scope of the study 3

5 The significance of the study 3

6 Structure of the thesis 3

CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND REVIEW OF LITERATURE 5

2.1 Generic Structure Potential (GSP) in SFL 5

2.1.1 Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) 6

2.1.2 Genre and genre analysis in SFL 7

2.1.3 Macrostructure analysis and GSP 12

2.2 Blog posts as a special kind of genre 17

2.2.1 Overview about content marketing and blogging 20

2.2.2 Internet/ web Genres 24

2.3 Previous Studies 26

CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY 31

3.1 The data corpus 31

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3.2 Methods of the study 31

3.3 Analytical framework 32

3.4 Data analyzing procedure 33

CHAPTER 4: RESULT AND DISCUSSION 34

4.1 General findings 34

4.2 Qualitative findings 40

4.2.1 Generic structure potential of instructional blog posts in English 40

4.2.2 Generic structure potential of instructional blog posts in Vietnamese 52 4.3 Discussions: Answers to the research questions 62

4.3.1 Answer to RQ1: What is the generic structure potential of instructional blog posts in English? 62

4.3.2 RQ2: What is the generic structure potential of instructional blog posts in Vietnamese? 64

4.3.3 Answer to RQ3: What are the similarities and differences between instructional blog posts in English and Vietnamese in terms of generic structure potential? 65

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 67

1 Recapitulation 67

2 Implications 68

3 Limitations and suggestions for further studies 68

REFERENCES 70 APPENDICES I APPENDIX A I APPENDIX B II

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LIST OF TABLES

Table 1 The data corpus 31

Table 2 Analytical framework 32

Table 3 Newly found elements 34

Table 4 Occurrences and Frequencies of the elements 37

Table 5 Average number of the elements 39

Table 6 Number of obligatory, optional and reiterative elements 40

Table 7 GSP of instructional blog posts in English 63

Table 8 GSP of instructional blog posts in Vietnamese 64

Table 9 English and Vietnamese blog posts GSP in comparison 65

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 Categorization of genre (Knapp & Watkins, 1994, p.22) 9 Figure 2 Swales‘ (1990) model of research article genre 14 Figure 3 Instructional blog post sample 23

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

This introductory section presents a broad outline of this thesis regarding the rationale of study, research objectives, research methodology, scope of study, importance of the research article and structure of the study

1 Rationale of the study

In recent years, more interest is placed on advertising and marketing as tools to bring value and attract target audiences People do not simply use advertisements to introduce and describe their products but to draw audience‘s attraction and enhance their loyalty The challenge here is to create

a text that bridges the gap between the intended audiences and the writer, or particularly the target customers and the copy writers The text which is not able to make the intended relationship within a specific discourse community will not be capable of engaging the readers as insiders and cannot be comprehensible enough within that specific genre However, this aim is satisfied by recognizing the textual variations within specific genres and to see how texts resemble or vary in accordance with their discourse organizations and the linguistic features applied Many materials and writings about how to write an effective blog are tremendously accessible on the internet, but to the best of my knowledge, little has been done on the specific structure of a blog, the factors that make it successful, and the factors that bore the readers Given such a gap, this study attempts to investigate generic structure and typical features of blogs to see whether there is the a specific formula for a successful blog post and how a blog is written to attract target audiences, boost customers‘ loyalty and finally create more traffic for the products or services The results can have good implications for the members

of this discourse community such as copywriters and blog writers as well as advertisers

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2 Aims and objectives of the study

The study aims to explore the generic structure potential (GSP) of a type of content marketing blog posts – instructional blog posts - in English and Vietnamese In order to reach this aim, three objectives are set out as below:

+ to explore the generic structure potential of instructional blog posts in English;

+ to explore the generic structure potential of instructional blog posts in Vietnamese;

+ to identify the similarities and differences between the generic structure potential of instructional blog posts in English and Vietnamese

With such objectives, the study attempts to seek the answers to the three research questions below:

RQ1: What is the generic structure potential of instructional blog posts

in English?

RQ2: What is the generic structure potential of instructional blog posts

in Vietnamese?

RQ3: What are the similarities and differences between instructional

blog posts in English and Vietnamese in terms of generic structure potential?

3 Research methodology

This study deploys the Systemic Functional theory of language to analyze the distinctive rhetorical structures and to find the Generic Structure Potential (GSP) (Hasan 1989) that is inherent in the instructional blog posts Halliday and Hasan (1989) hold that the notion distinguishing any text from non-text is its textual unity The textual unity of any written or spoken text primarily is categorized into two essential features: unity of structure (macro level) and unity of texture (micro level) However, the main purpose of this research is to analyze the generic structure, not the component of each element, only the macro level is put under focus

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4 Scope of the study

This research focuses on analyzing the instructional blog posts which are a popular and widely recognized type of blog posts They are also highly employed as an effective content marketing blog as they can subtly generate demand and encourage customer to click buy The study was premised on theory of genre analysis, proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1985) The aim of this study is to discover the data‘s generic structure potential (GSP) and discover the obligatory structure used to differentiate a particular genre from any others

The data is categorized according to language uses and origin, which are English and Vietnamese Macro-structure analysis is performed on the blog posts to draw the conclusion about GSP of each group

5 The significance of the study

This study purports to ascertain the generic structure potential of blog posts in English and Vietnamese The mutual schematic structures of each group are expected to assist copywriters and blog writers, as well as businesses to enhance the quality and promotional values of blog posts The results of this study may also serve as a reference for further research conducted in the same field

6 Structure of the thesis

This study is divided into three parts as follows:

- Chapter 1 is Introduction which states the rationale, objectives,

methodology, scope, significance and structure of the study

- Chapter 2 provides Theoretical Framework and Literature Review,

which provides explanation of concepts and related studies

- Chapter 3 is Methodology, which clarifies research methods, data

collection procedure, analytical framework and data analysis procedure

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- Chapter 4 presents Results and Discussions, which reports the

analytical results of the study, answers three research questions based on the research outcome and literature review

- Chapter 5 is the Conclusion which recaps the main points of the

study, discusses the Limitations and Implications for further studies

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CHAPTER 2: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND REVIEW OF

LITERATURE

2.1 Generic Structure Potential (GSP) in SFL

In SFL, genre is defined as ―staged, goal oriented purposeful activity‖ (Martin, 1984, p.25) According to Halliday and Hasan, the concept of genre

is defined as ‗type of discourse‘ and initiated the investigation of its text structure (1989) From the definition, it can be seen that genre describes the impact of the context of culture on language as genre is related to culturally- specific purposes Genre is identified by its social purposes, which give meaning to the social activities being described These distinct purposes influent the differences in the stages of the activities used to accomplish these purposes The stages of description imply a structure, into which texts are arranged The reason why genres have stages is that normally people cannot make all the meaning they want to at once The stages are vital to construe the organization of text, as describing the procedure of achieving goals is necessary

Nonetheless, the context of culture or genre is often considered an abstract and general concept It cannot be directly recognized in the language and its encoding in the language is mediated in two ways On the one hand, the mediation is recognized by specifying common staging organization, or schematic structure On the other hand, it is mediated by the second level of context, which is register, by specifying the genre potential of a particular culture in terms of the possible configurations of register variables allowed within a given culture at a given time (Eggins, 1994, p 35)

In terms of describing the schematic structure, constituency and labeling are two basic concepts Eggins (1994) purports that constituency refers to a part/whole relationship between elements of some structure Constituents are identified by functional labeling accordingly the function of different constituents In a schematic structure, constituents are either

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obligatory, optional or recursive and a genre is defined according to the obligatory elements Different genres contain different patterns of schematic structure and these differences also depend on what activities are considered purposeful in particular cultures Texts of the same genre perform similar stages of organization or schematic structure

2.1.1 Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) inspired by ideas from Michael Halliday in the mid nineteenth century has received a spate of interest in applied linguistics As Eggins (2004) explains, the central theoretical claim about language in the systemic functional linguistics theory which is a

‗functional-semantic‘ approach is categorized as follows:

+ That language use is functional

+ That its function is to make meanings

+ That these meanings are influenced by the social and cultural context in which they are exchanged

+ That the process of using language is a semiotic process, a process of making meanings by choosing (Eggins, 2004, p 3)

Deriving from the explanation of SFL by Eggins (2004) the main accounts of systemic functional theory is based on the notion of function, system and the social semiotic nature of language

The functionality of language mainly shows why in specific contexts people make specific choices of language features in contrast with the other possible choices To Halliday and Matthiesen the prominence of naming functional categories lie in the fact that they ―provide an interpretation of grammatical structure in terms of the overall meaning potential of the language‖ (2004, p 52)

The system in this model refers to ―a set of features which stand in contrast with each other in a specific environment of which one will be chosen whenever the environmental conditions obtained‖ (Halliday & Webster, 2009, p 65).This mainly implies that any feature of the language

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chosen is only one option taken from a diversity of options in a language system By this it takes into consideration the paradigmatic elements of language referring to ―a set of oppositions or choices in a particular context‖ (Eggins, 2004, p 192) as well as syntagmatic elements which are ―a sequence

of ordered elements in a linear arrangement‖ (ibid) within language However, SFL perceives language as ―a system network of meaning potential‖ (Morley, 1985, p 42) and describes it as being built up from various systems each of which representing features that differ from one another (ibid)

Despite other linguists who explain language from various aspects such

as psychological, psychoanalytic or aesthetic aspects, Halliday explains it from a social perspective which is relevant to the notion of culture In SFL theory, it is believed that while other aspects are rather relevant to look through language but above all, the language is acquired in a social process and the knowledge is exchanged in a social environment either on institutionalized settings like the school system or in natural settings like parent- child conversations (Halliday & Hasan, 1989, pp 4-5) The semiotic explains that language as one of the sign systems, mainly a prominent one as other systems are learnt and translated through it, makes the whole of culture with a series of other sign systems (Malmkjær, 2010, p 179)

2.1.2 Genre and genre analysis in SFL

2.1.2.1 Genre

There has been many efforts on defining genre, some of the notable works are of Miller (1984), Martin (1984), Swales (1990), Eggins (1994), Bawarshi and Reiff (2010), Bhatia (1993, 2004) According to Miller (1984),

a genre theorist who envisions genre as a social concept instead of a structural one, genre is defined as ―typified rhetorical actions based in recurrent situations‖ Recurrent situations can be defined as socially relevant events, which are categorized, interpreted, and acted on in certain ways He holds that

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what recurs is not the material situation such as a factual event but our construal of a type Martin (1984) regards genre as a ‗staged, goal-oriented, purposeful activity in which speakers engage in as members of our culture‘ (p.25) Meanwhile, Swales‘ seminal work on the purposive nature of genre from the ESP approach has continued to be one of the most extensive definitions of genre Swales (1990, p 58) describes genre as a class of communicative event exposing some shared set of communicative purposes which are often identified by members of the specific professional or academic community where the genre appears This rationale shapes the schematic structure of the discourse and influences and constrains choice of content and style Eggins (1994, p 36) purports that the primary determinant

of genre membership is that of ‗purpose‘ whereas schematic structure and linguistic features are regarded as dimensions to the realisation of genres

Bhatia (1993) has also mentioned the fact that social motive is a defining factor of genres by using other terms such as communicative goal, purpose or end Bhatia (2004, p 23) holds that genre refers to language use within a conventionalized communicative situation to achieve a specific set of communicative goals of a disciplinary or social institution, which cause

―stable structural forms‖ by restricting the use of lexico-grammatical and discoursal resources Genre is the same as notions such as prototype, schema, frame, typification, speech activity, etc

Hyland (2008) claims that genre is a series of texts which share common notable characters, containing the characters that represent for using the language in specific and repetitive situations These characters allow members of a language community to recognize the common features of the texts in the same genre, to read and understand effortlessly or create a similar text (p 543)

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According to Bawarshi and Reiff (2010) genre represents how language

is organized to present and respond, or behave in a reasonable way, they help people reinvent the situation in which the language is used Thus, from a functional approach on the classification of texts, or genres, the aforementioned approaches classify genres according to their functional features All of the authors mentioned above share the same opinion that the purpose of using a text plays a key role in realizing genre of that text, and texts are categorized based on the purpose of which they are used Base of the purpose, necessary characters can be identified to recreate the genre Figure 1 below represents genre with their functions Under each is a list of some commonly used text types that often deploy those genres

The notion of genre and the classification of genres are summarized by Knapp & Watkins in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1 Categorization of genre (Knapp & Watkins, 1994, p 22)

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Genre has also been put in Halliday‘s theory of language which is Systemic Functional Grammar (SFL) What SFL is fundamentally concerned with link the language and its functions in social settings In SFL, language is views as a social semiotic SFL considers genre as ―a staged, goal-oriented, and purposeful social activity‖, in which people engage as members of their culture (Martin, 1984, p 25) In the light of SFL genre is the cultural purpose

of texts and genres are conveyed within texts via their structural and realization patterns (Eggins, 2004) Therefore, genre is a social process aiming at interpreting the organization and structure of language in identifying its social purpose within specific context and culture

The concept of realization is of optimal importance to SFL in which it

is regarded as an importance notion that aids to explain the dynamic relationship between language and contexts While the former realizes social purposes, the latter plays the role of specific linguistic interactions Concurrently, language is also realized as specific social actions and meanings by employing these social purposes and contexts Halliday (1978) wisely describes the ―context of situation‖ as register, in which language is regarded as a form of socialization and acts as an assistant to help people socializing and performing meaningful actions Based on this, Martin (1984) associates genre to register in order to create the relationship between the two and make them realize each other in important ways He argued that register functions at situational level while genre perform at cultural level

Halliday (1985) establishes three kinds of meaning into SFL literature, which are ideational, interpersonal, and textual Ideational meaning is what texts are about (representation of action- corresponds to field), interpersonal meaning refers to how relationships are made through language (describes interactions between participants- corresponds to tenor), and textual meaning makes reference to how information is organized (describes the flow of information within and between texts- corresponds to mode)

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In conclusion, genre is a purposeful use of language which possesses specific schematic structure and linguistic features and serves to achieve particular communicative goals

2.1.2.2 Genre analysis in SFL

In the 1980s, genre analysis arose as a sub-discipline of applied linguistics and then bloomed in the 1990s A genre is regarded as a highly structured and conventionalized discourse existing among the members of a community According to Bhatia (1997), genre analysis focuses on the study

of written discourse that happens naturally beyond the sentence level‖ In attempting to elaborate the term of genre analysis, Dudley-Evans and St John (1998) claim that discourse study is any study of language or text above sentence level This may be involved in the study of cohesive links between sentences, of paragraphs, or the structure of the whole text This is called applied discourse analysis where text analysis focuses on the regularities of structures that differentiate a text form one another In genre analysis, it is optimal to identify the communicative purpose, purposes of the texts or genres under investigation and the use of language in institutionalized settings controlled by communicative conventions existing in and created by a group

of participants in a defined discourse community

Bhatia (2008) claimed that it is essential to have a more integrated approach to genre analysis so as to produce evidence of knowledge employed

in the professional settings Genre analysis is also called discourse investigations Connor (2004) asserts that attention towards genre analysis has rocketed in terms of contrastive rhetoric research, with works concentrating

on textual or structural analysis In contrastive analyses, a generic analysis focuses mainly on generic structures and rhetorical function, such as move, stages, schematic or generic structures According to Bhatia (2013), genre analysis is a special method of analyzing text, conducted by identifying elements contributing to building text and interpretation to answer the

2.1.3 Macrostructure analysis and GSP

According to Dijk (1977, 1980), part from the microstructure, or a horizontal organization, texts also have a vertical organization, or macrostructure, corresponding to the hierarchical organization of text content around its main ideas, or macropropositions Dijk (2007) holds that as the source of a text's global coherence, the process of constructing a representation of a text's macrostructure is central to the process of text comprehension It consists, first, of identifying and representing macropropositions as they are encountered during reading and, second, of determining the relations among the macropropositions These processes are guided by a variety of explicit signals and syntactic cues, as well as the reader's knowledge of how macrorelevant information is conventionally distributed within a text In addition, processing depends heavily on the reader's semantic knowledge to construct macropropositions that are only implied in the text, and also to identify hierarchical relations among macropropositions expressed or implied by the author

The macrostructure is defined as the ―germinal idea‖ (or closely related complex of germinal ideas) that acts as an overall plan in the development of the discourse (Toews, 1992) while the microstructure is defined as a

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collection of coherent basic units of text (e.g sentences) Likewise, the macrostructure is a network derived from the microstructure by application of some semantic rules (Van Dijk, 1988)

Furthermore, according to Engebretsen (2000), the term macrostructure denotes both a textual and a cognitive entity The macrostructure has a semantic representation in the text And that representation has an encounter with the reader‘s interpretive framework (mental schemas) and so, it is established in the mind of the reader He also says that the macropropositions

at the various levels will be partly expressed in the text

Sanders and Schilperood (2006, p.387) holds that macrostructure is the abstract representation of the global meaning structure and macrostructure analysis occurs mainly at the discourse level (Scott, 2009) Macrostructure analysis examines a writer‘s conveyance of meaning at the discourse level and may include measures of organization, cohesion, and genre-specific text structure Elements of macrostructure are often included in qualitative writing analyses, such as in holistic or analytic scoring systems, or can be depicted quantitatively by counting cohesive ties or genre-specific text structure elements present in a written product (e.g., counting story grammar elements

in a narrative text, or marking whether an introduction, body, and conclusion are present in an expository text)

Two popular approaches to macrostructure analysis are: move analysis approach by Swales (1990) and generic structure potential (GSP) analysis by Hasan (1985)

Swales (1981, 1990) referred to ‗genre‘ as ‗a class of communicative event‘ in which its communicative purpose is shared by specific discourse community members To gain insight into the text and its constituents, the way it is composed, interpreted and used, Swales employed genre analysis of the introduction section of each research article From his study, he proposed the model Create a Research Space (CARS) as shown in Figure 2 Based on

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this model, a text can be divided into ‗Moves‘ based on their function in the section and a ‗Move‘ is further categorized into ‗Steps‘

Figure 2 Swales’ (1990) model of research article genre

Swales‘ genre model shares a number of features of the functional tradition of SFL in that he examines genre in terms of the global structure of text and gives ideational labels to the structural elements such as ‗establishing a territory‘, and ‗claiming centrality‘; similar to that found in Hasan‘s GSP model (‗sale‘, ‗purchase‘, ‗closure‘) In addition, Swales also correlates the structural elements with their linguistic signals thus describing the elements in semantic terms and covering the grammatical analysis of the elements within a genre The concept of genre in Swales model includes determining the rhetorical organization of a genre aiming at

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achieving a set of communicative purposes (contextual) and showing how these communicative purposes are signaled by lexical and syntactic choices Swales‘ genre model allows text to be analyzed in terms of its text structure ‗from above‘ and ‗from below‘, offering a practical method

of text analysis that can lead to the establishment of a genre-specific potential This model could be a resource for producing and recognizing the rhetorical organization of texts of a specific genre

However, this study attempts to identify the generic structure of the text without strictly follow the steps or moves, as blog posts tend to be more flexible and free-style, different authors have different ways to organize and employ the elements of the text Therefore, the focus of the research lies on the elements or stages that occurs/recur throughout the text, which is based on the GSP analysis by Hasan (1985)

The model of Generic Structure Potential by Hasan (1985) summarizes the commonality and variation of schematic structure among texts of the same genre There are potential elements or stages that make a genre specific when grouped and put in a certain order and constitution Hasan (1985) claims texts with the same utilizing purposes adopt the same textual structure, therefore written in the form of the same genre She states that for each genre, there are elements, or stages that occur/ recur throughout the text Within the limit of a genre, the full potential of occurrence is investigated by detecting the variable and invariable properties in the organization of a text, proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1989) as follows:

(i) Obligatory elements- What elements must occur?

(ii) Optional elements - What elements may occur?

(iii) Sequencing of elements - what arrangement of elements is obligatory and optional?

(iv) Reiterative - How often may the elements occur?

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As can be seen, the GSP model consists of obligatory, optional and recursive elements that incorporate into a specific sequence Obligatory elements constitute the preferred structure of a text and make it genre-specific, which implies that without these, a text would not be considered as any genre Optional ones, on the contrary, do not contribute to a genre‘s determiners Lastly, iterative elements ―encompass those recursive elements that appear more than once in a communicative event, without following any strict order‖ (Motta-Roth, 1995, p 38)

Hasan (1985) also proposes the stages of a genre of buying and selling, which include Greeting, Sale Initiation, Sale Enquiry or Sale Request, Sale Compliance, Sale Purpose and Purpose Closure The activity may start with either one of the first four stages and the order may be flexible, however the last three stages are static and should be in a fixed sequence (Halliday and Hasan, 1985, p 64) It should be noted that in other cultures, bargaining may

be take into more thorough consideration in a selling and buying activity As a result, the GSP of the genre ―Service Encounter‖ of a ―Shop Transaction‖ is presented as follows

[(G).(SI)^][(SE.){SR^SC^}^S^]P^PC(^F) Hasan (1989) suggested that every shop transaction in English potentially includes the following macro-structural elements: Greeting (G), Sale Initiation (SI), Sale Enquiry (SE), Sale Request (SR), Sale Compliance (SC), Sale (S), Purchase (P), Purchase Closure (SC), and Finish (F) In the formula, the round brackets represent optionality of enclosed elements Therefore, the G, SI, SE, and F are optional, and SR, SC, S, P, and PC are obligatory The dot between elements means ―more than one‖ option in sequence The arrows indicate reiterative The curly brackets show that the degree of reiteration for elements in the square brackets is equal, which means

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that if SR happens twice, SC must happen twice as well The caret signs (^) show sequence

2.2 Blog posts as a special kind of genre

The exact origin of the blog remains unknown, however, it is widely agreed that the term weblog was coined by weblog writer Jorn Barger in 1997 (Blood, 2000; Jerz, 2003; Safire, 2002; Turnbull, 2002) It appears that blogs originated as a way to share information of interest These early blogs had three primary features: they were chronologically organized, contained links

to sites of interest on the web, and provided commentary on the links

There is a strong agreement on the central features that make a blog a blog Most commentators define blogs on the basis of their reverse chronology, frequent updating, and combination of links with personal commentary The Weblog Review, a blog reviewing site, evaluates three features on a 5-point scale: design, consistency, and content, with the lion's share of the rating's weight, 80-90%, dedicated to the blog's content The Weblog Review classifies blogs by grouping them into fourteen content-focused categories: adult, anime, camgirl, computer, entertainment, humor, movies, music, news/links, personal, photography, Spanish/Portuguese, teen, and video games Another classification is offered by Jill Walker(2003), in her contribution to appear in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory: she notes that blogs can vary in their media content, with most blogs primarily textual but others classified into "subgenres" such as photoblogs, videoblogs, and audioblogs

Rebecca Blood's widely cited blog entry on the history of weblogs offers a classification of blogs into two "styles," based largely on content: an original filter-style, where the blogger is primarily an editor and annotator of links, and a later, more personal "blog-style" weblog, where bloggers engage

in "an outbreak of self-expression" (Blood, 2000)

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Blogs take many forms On most blogging sites, bloggers can choose from a number of boilerplate formats or customize their own pages But the basics of blogging are consistent across portals and individual blogs As blogger Meg Hourihan puts it, "If we look beneath the content of weblogs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share the format"(Hourihan, 2002) All blogs contain dated entries, starting with the most recent, and a majority include external links Blogs are composed of "posts," which include

a date, a time stamp, and a permalink and often include a link for commentary and the author's name, especially if multiple authors contribute to a blog Hourihan (2002) finds that the combination of links and accompanying commentary is the distinguishing feature of the blog, creating connections that "bind" bloggers into a community

When bloggers talk about blogging, two themes relevant to these questions are ubiquitous: self-expression and community development

Self-expression is a salient theme among some bloggers, who find the same opportunity that television talk shows afford their participants: the opportunity to tell their stories in a mediated forum to a potentially large, though distant and invisible, audience Bloggers mark both their linking and their commentary as means of self-expression: as ways to foster "a unique voice, a definite attitude, a clearer motivation"(Graham, 2002), to explore old interests and discover new ones (Blood, 2000), to provide a "forum for the voices in my head" (Powazek, 2002) or to "experiment [with] self-expression" (Barrett, 1999)

Relationship development and social control are primarily external, directed outward, functions that use self-disclosure to build connections with others or to manipulate their opinions These second two dimensions of blog disclosure support the second omnipresent theme, community building Even

as they serve to clarify and validate the self, blogs are also intended to be

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read Maintaining traffic and link statistics seems important to bloggers, and many provide readers the opportunity to provide feedback either by posting comments directly on the blog or through email Some even invite readers to purchase items for them from their Amazon.com wish lists Many are conscious of the fact that they have readers and, to varying degrees, consciously write for them

Adespresso, a famous American advertising website, founded in 2013, provides some advice for writing blog Firstly, blogs should be posted regularly so readers can visit the website and read your blog as a habit Besides, top ranking posts need updating regularly Secondly, blogs have to

be optimized for leads or sales More specifically, they must always include a call to action (CTA), some information about how the product solve the problem mentioned and/or headquarter of the company Thirdly, plenty of internal linking should be deployed for users who bounce around the blog until they are ready Finally, keywords should always be included for the site

to be found Each blog post should be optimized for the keywords that bring the most relevant traffic to the site (Adespresso, 2016)

Ultimately, blog posts belong to the Internet genre They are created for two purposes One the one hand, they express the authors‘ personal opinions, perspectives and emotion; therefore, bloggers often mark their commentary as

means of self-expression (Blood, 2000) On the other hand, bloggers can

develop relationship and manipulate others‘ opinion (Hourihan, 2002) Serving either purpose, blogs all share the same features, i.e reserve chronology, frequent update, containing links to site of interest, combination

of links with personal commentary, along with related elements such as a date, a time stamp, author‘s name, external links, commentary, top ranking posts, CTA, internal links ,and key words (Adespresso, 2016) Contents of blog are diverse and flexible, with most blogs mainly textual; however, they

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can be categorized into subgenres such as photo blogs, video blogs and audio blogs (Walker, 2003)

2.2.1 Overview about content marketing and blogging

Starting with the 2.0 webs and current 4.0 webs, traditional marketing

is losing its priority and advantages, therefore, marketers need to find other ways out of the situation to maintain the popularity of their brand to

savage for copywriters, making the marketing race more and more

online resource providing information about content marketing related things, defines content marketing as the following: ―Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.‖2 From the definition, it is shown that the content marketing must bring value, so that the customers will gain something, normally what they want or are interested, before taking any profitable actions such as buying a product or registering a service Therefore, copywriters have to make sure that for any piece of content marketing they compose, the recipient must receive value from it The goal here is to provide

as much value from the content marketing to as much of target audience as possible Content marketing is superior to traditional advertising and marketing because they encourage the buying process by raising awareness of solutions and educating customers about a product they may have never considered before

1 Content Marketing Institute is a website launched in 2007 as Junta4, its initial name Content Marketing Institute is the leading global content marketing education and training organization, teaching enterprise brands how to attract and retain customers through compelling, multichannel storytelling

2 What is content marketing? Retrieved from: marketing/

https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/what-is-content-21

Content marketing is different from traditional product-marketing which contains sales collateral and product-specific information Content marketing includes educational articles, blog posts, e-books, videos, entertainment, and webinars that answer specific questions and provide readers with something they cannot get elsewhere It‘s the best way to make your product unique and attract customers

In various consumable formats, content marketing refers to the act of educating, sharing knowledge, advice or entertainment The following are some of the most popular format: blog articles, videos, podcasts, social media marketing, emails, webinars, info graphics, cartoons, quizzes, generators/ calculators, assessments, apps

According to Ruffolo (2017), blogging is the foundation of Content marketing Blogs pioneered content marketing They have become popular and common place where people can access high-quality and well written information for free Although blogs are just a gateway for other mediums of content marketing, they are often on the shorter side which is quick and thorough at addressing industry topics Before digging deeper down, it is important to understand what blogging (blog article or blog post) really is According the Oxford learner‘s dictionaries, blog is a website where a person writes regularly about recent events or topics that interest them, usually with photos and links to other websites that they find interesting So as a noun, it is

a regular updated website or web page, typically one run by an individual or small group, that is written in an informal or conversational style As a verb, blog is to write something in a blog So it can be understood that to blog is to add new material to or regularly update a blog Once a blog is made publicly accessible, it can be typically found through links on the website, emails and online keyword search engines Everyone can also find them on the blog owner‘s social media profiles which are hugely prevalent these days Via a few clicks, people can find blog content of the related topic on one continuous

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streaming page or posts on individual pages accessible through one or more pages They can be in form of post title links, excerpts and related tags, which are typically presented to readers in reverse chronological order, in which the most recent content often appears first

Writing blog is more than just posting something on your business website According to Guillory (2015) the blog seems to be more attractive if

it is various in length and types Normally, 400 to 600 words sounds perfect, but in-depth contents or skyscraper contents have to be of great length These posts should be about 2,000 words of useful and informative knowledge with

a frequency of one or two of them a month There are diverse types of posts such as instructional post (how-to), product review, lists, roundups of your best posts, interviews and tips

Rowse (2005) argued that instructional blog posts are one of the most popular and effective types of blog in content marketing They focus on teaching people how to do something of a specific topic, therefore the title of these posts often begin or contain the words ―how to…‖ or ―the way to…‖ Figure 3 below is an extract from an instructional blog post

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Figure 3 Instructional blog post sample

Retrieved from:

perform two major functions: (i) provide readers with comprehensible,

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concise but in-depth guide which solves a specific problem and/or address their concerns; and (ii) combining with subtle messages to trigger profitable action

2.2.2 Internet/ web Genres

The Internet and in particular the World-Wide Web provides a particularly interesting setting in which to study the use and development of genres for several reasons First, the capabilities of the new medium have led

to the development of many new genres of communication (Crowston, 2000) Space limitations preclude a comprehensive review of the development of the Internet, but it‘s notable that the increased functionality of the Internet has been paralleled by an explosion in Internet genres In particular, the technology of the Web extends the notion of a document—and thus the notion

of genre—because Web pages can provide functionality in addition to information (Crowston, 2000) Indeed, some Web pages are more comparable

to computer interfaces than to conventional paper documents As a result, functionality may be important in understanding genres on the Internet Furthermore, the rapid development of this medium suggests a high level of experimentation with potential genres Bearman (1994), for example, notes the rapid evolution in what he refers to as ―forms of material‖ in electronic media in general

Second, since many Web sites are open to the public, many examples

of Web communication are easily available for study Furthermore, because there is no central management of the Internet or the Web, there is no explicit management or enforcement of genres of communication, as might happen in the introduction of a communication system in a corporate environment (Orlikowski et al., 1995) Instead, individual Web developers individually choose how to present their information, drawing on their understanding as members of a community, what Orlikowski et al (1995) called implicit structuring from the point of view of the Web page developer rather than the

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recipient of the communication Yates and Sumner (1997) refer to the

―democratization of genre production‖ as ―communities evolve increasingly well-defined genres to better support their particular communicative needs and work practices‖ However, even in this free-for-all, mutual acceptance of genre is important to enable communications Yates and Sumner (1997) argue that on the Web, genres help in both the production and consumption of documents because genre adds ―fixity‖ in a medium that does not otherwise distinguish very well between text types

Finally, there are many communities meeting on the Web, bringing experiences with different genres and using the Web for many different purposes The Web is sometimes used for direct communication where someone with a Web server ―delivers‖ a document to members of a known community by giving them a URL (Yates & Sumner, 1997) For example, some academics use the Web to communicate with colleagues by publishing their own papers and with students by publishing syllabi and assignments Another example of communication within a predictable community is computer companies announcing new products, publishing catalogs or providing troubleshooting tips on-line for their customers However, in many other cases the audience is unpredictable Unlike the Usenet or electronic mail groups, there is no clear separation of communities into different channels of communication as is the case for journals or talks given at conferences, for which the audience is likely to have shared interests

Indeed, it seems a stretch to say that there is a single Web community

at all Instead, the genre repertoire reflected in a collection of Web pages will

be the result of interactions within and among multiple communities In some cases, a genre may act as a type of boundary object (Star et al., 1989), providing a common point of contact between different groups (Freedman & Medway, 1994) In others, this mixing may lead to genre confusion, meaning that there is a practical need to understand the way genres enable

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communication For example, organizations have used the Web to publish information such as product brochures, annual reports, country, state, and city home pages, government agency press releases, etc These organizations tend

to use familiar genres when putting information on the Web However, a person happening to reach a document on one of their Web sites has a good chance of being outside the community in which that genre evolved As a result the document may be confusing and the communicative purpose lost

To conclude, internet/web is a new genre of communication, which provides not only information, but also functionality (Crowston, 2007), including interaction and sharing The Internet or the Web contain no explicit management or reinforcement (Orlikowski et al., 1995) but still there is fixity grounded by the genre (Yates & Sumner, 1997; Star et al., 1989) The web can be used for direct communication (Yates & Sumner, 1997) to predictable community or to unpredictable one; however these two are likely to share the same interest (Crowston, 2007)

as an example, the GSP was generated as follows:

[TT^OR]^CA^1^2^RS^1^2^[F]^(MR) The elements generated in the catalogue include: Title TT, Orientation

OR, Conflicting Action CA, Resolution RS, Finis F and Moral MR while

MR is an optional element, the remaining elements are obligatory

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A number of Internet genres have been dedicated careful analysis For example, Suen (2009) pays attention to the generic characteristics of hotel homepages, trying to identify the textual and image features that make a genre out of this digital reality Building on Bhatia‘s (2004) framework, this study also adopts Kress and van Leeuwen‘s (1996) multimodal analysis framework for analysing images on hotel websites, as visual images also create meaning

in communication The ‗representational‘, ‗interpersonal‘ and ‗compositional‘ meaning of the images used on hotel homepages are investigated

―Representational meanings are about the representation of the world They are revealed through narrative and conceptual images Interpersonal meanings refer to the social relationship between the participants Contact, distance, point of view and modality contribute to the realization of interpersonal meanings Compositional meanings are the relations of the representational and interactive meanings of an image to each other They are realized through the interrelated systems of information value, framing and salience.‖ Her corpus consists of 12 hotel homepages; the features she analyses are the moves of the text, the lexical-grammatical features, the hyperlinks, and the use of the images

Schmidt (2007) recently developed a framework for studying blogging practice, which is grounded in social structuration theory He identifies a number of important aspects to bear in mind for the study of blogs, emphasising in particular three structural elements, namely rules, relations and code In the definition of both rules and relations, Schmidt includes studying links as part of the analysis Schmidt uses the concept of communities of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991), but in a more general sense than Lave and Wenger do, to describe a group of people who share a blogging practice Schmidt further defines blogging practice as 'individual episodes in which a blogger uses specific software to attain specific communicative goals' (Schmidt 2007) However, it is not only linking practices and community

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building which characterize the blogosphere Efimova and de Moor (2005) approach conversations in blogs not only by looking at the blogs per se, but also with the socio-technical context of blogs in mind They emphasize that connections to phenomena outside a blog, including other media, have to be taken into consideration when studying a community According to them, even looking at a single specific blog conversation reveals very different approaches to writing, linking and commenting and also shows how conversational practices differ (Efimova & de Moor 2005)

Miller and Shepherd (2004) have studied the blog as social action and conclude that 'the blog-as-genre is a contemporary contribution to the art of the self' Their study is based on genre theory and includes a discussion about generic semantic content, syntactic or formal features and social action They problematize the concept of a generic blog, since they note that, even though blogs have not existed very long, major differences already exist in how blogs are used However, their point of departure in the space between the public and the private leads them to conclude that the blog can be regarded as a genre with a basic characteristic of cultivating and validating the self (Miller

& Shepherd 2004)

Herring et al (2005) suggest, based on a study of 203 randomly selected blogs, that blogs should be treated as a hybrid genre Their content analysis of the distribution of blog types according to their communicative purposes and structural characteristics shows that blogs are frequently updated, include few links and few comments and are predominantly used for self-expression The idea of studying blogs as an evolving genre has been used by Lomborg (2009) in her work to propose a definition of the personal blog In her framework, she uses three dimensions, content, directionality and style, to distinguish the personal blog from other blog types Puschmann (forthcoming) similarly uses genre theory as a basis for his study of corporate blogs He poses as a problem the possibility of seeing blogs as a genre

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deriving from a certain community's textual habits and norms Instead, he points to the technology's role as passing on knowledge of formal conventions that are needed

There are some attempts to identify the core elements of blog posts and features of an effective and successful blog post Winner (2001) proposed that blog posts canonically encode the following information: Title, text, Tags/Categories, Author, Time of publication and URL The Author, time of publication and the URL of the post is different from the other fields as they constitute extra-textual information that is automatically related to the situation and not manually allocated by the blogger According to Vos (2018) business blogging is on the rise and is generating more leads for B2B companies in comparison to those that do not blog If done well, the blog can bring more SEO benefits and long-term ROI for the business To create an exceptional blog, the blog should have high quality content, which means the post need to be in-depth, data-driven and actionable In order to get people reading and finally converting, the blog post have to focus on solving reader‘s pain points, visual storytelling is an effective tool Vos (2018) suggests that people are 90% visual beings and blog articles with images get 94% more views Besides, videos are also powerful tool as they is going to make up to 80% of all online traffic by 2021, so it is important to embed video content into your text posts Another factor that attracts readers‘ attention and hooks them into the post is the cover images However, these images should be unique and exclusive to the blog only She suggests that a highly effective blog should contain the following components: (i) cover image is a picture to illustrate for the whole content of the blog post; (ii) visual contents include images, video content, info graphics to illustrate for the details of the blog posts; (iii) LSI keywords (Latent Semantic Indexing) are keywords semantically related to the main keyword They can be synonyms, or simple words that are frequently found together in the same context with the

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keyword; (iv) communication channels which are social networks, relevant forums, Q&A communities or corresponding websites; (v) an infinite scroll of related/ previous posts which is organized reverses chronologically will attract readers to the old but insightful and relevant to them

Meyer (2015) argues that a successful blog post which attracts mainly quality readers should include (i) links which are represented in the form of anchor texts showing what readers should expect when clicking on the link (ii)Writer‘s Commentary often characterized by an irreverent or sometimes sarcastic tone Skilled editor often convey this commentary in one or two sentences along with the links, but it can be presented in a separate essay This is the personal opinion of the author with a less reliance on reportage and data (Raven, 2017)

According to Blood (2000), the blog post contains (i) the head acting as the title of the blog post; (ii) the body which include an essay expressing writer‘s opinion or commentary along with additional facts, anchor texts presenting the URL of the referenced sites, and SEO key words which stand for Search Engine Optimization which help content approach a wider circle of audience and is a key factor behind blogs and write-ups going viral; (iii) the head which contain the comment section Blogs are built around SEO keywords and the writing is often changed to incorporate the same

Ultimately, most of the previous researches focus on study blogs as a social action and put them in a social- technological context Although some researchers tried to identify elements that make blog posts successful, there are very few studies analyzing the generic structure of blog posts To fill in the gap, this paper apply the model by Hasan (1985) to identify the Generic Structure Potential (GSP) of instructional blog posts

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CHAPTER 3: METHODOLOGY

3.1 The data corpus

In the corpus of 20 instructional blog posts, 10 of them are in English and 10 are in Vietnamese These are all high traffic blog with over 100,000 to 7,000,000 views per month The content focuses on how to write a succulent blog, increase traffic to fanpage and technique to attract click when selling products on Amazon These blogs are created to attract customers or raise traffic for the page and increase conversion Simply put, the blog itself is used

as (i) an advertisement, apart from (ii) instructing readers to do something; they subtly relate their products/services/tools/courses as a useful tool to customers

The corpus is visually represented as the Table below:

Table 1 The data corpus

English instructional blogs Vietnamese instructional blogs

3.2 Methods of the study

This study attempted to investigate the generic structure potential of English blog posts and thus detect the differences between blogs in two categories (corporation and personal) Two methods were employed in the process_qualitative approach and quantitative one, in which the former is dominant By adopting qualitative method, each blog was analyzed to identify the elements present in each of twenty blogs After that, the occurrence of each element was counted and synthesized using quantitative method to detect which one was obligatory, optional and iterative; thus rendered the generic structure of the whole corpus and of each targeted group Based on the results, conclusions about the functions of the corpus‘ blogs, the differences in the presence of elements in categorized groups were drawn