An Analysis of Students’ Application Letter with Its Politeness Strategies and Persuasion at Fifth Semester of Hotel Management Study Program Universitas Negeri Padang.

This study entitled “An Analysis of Students‟ Application Letter with Its Politeness Strategies and Persuasion”. It is categorized into descriptive research. The usefulness of writing application letter is to get an opportunity to be interviewed. The applicants should use politeness strategies and AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) formula to convince the employers that they are the best candidate. This research was aimed to find out the students‟ ways in using positive politeness strategies in the content of the letter. Besides, it was to find out the students‟ ways in using negative politeness strategies at salutation, compliment close, and closing paragraph. Furthermore, this was also to find out the students‟ ways in using persuasive language from the perspective of AIDA formula. The subject of this research were all of the fifth semester students of Hotel Management Program Universitas Negeri Padang in academic year 2016/2017 which consisted of 40 students. The source of the data was taken from the writing test. The data were collected through students‟ writing test. The data collected were simplified and transformed from the raw data into manageable form. Afterwards, the data were classified based on the indicators used. The next step was wrote the conclusion. The findings of this research showed that, there were seven politeness strategies used by the students in writing application letter. Four of them were used in positive politeness strategies, namely noticing, attending to addressee, offering, optimistic, and giving reason strategy. Afterwards, two of them were used in negative politeness strategies. They were giving deference and going on record as incurring debt strategies. Afterwards, it was also found that students used persuasion of AIDA formula simply. This was proved that students‟ score was in quite satisfactory level.