The rhetorical and discursive construction of appeal in annual reports: relevance and reliability of information in Chief Executive Officers' Letters and Chairmen's Statements

This study investigates companies’ attempts to build rapport with their audience, using a small corpus of non-financial texts from corporate annual reports – such as CEO’s Letters and Chairman’s Statements – as a case study. The findings show that, across all the contexts analysed, these attempts involve rhetorical strategies that appeal to rationality, credibility, and affect.