Chapter One
Introduction

Communication plays an essential role in today's corporate daily operations.Only through effective communication, whether written or spoken, can a business ensure its message is clearly understood and thus produce the outcomes it has expected.Financial communication, especially in the form of financial disclosure, has become a crucial component of corporate communication.Modern businesses dedicate a great deal of time and resources to financial disclosure, i.e.the periodic reporting of their financial results.Although publicly traded companies in many countries are legally required to report their financial information at regular intervals, this type of financial communication has taken on greater significance in the wake of some high-profile financial scandals（such as Enron）and the loss of confidence in the financial markets due to the on-going negative effects of the global financial crisis that broke in 2008.

From the linguistic perspective, the present research focuses on the persuasive dimension of financial disclosure discourse, which has in recent years received much attention from western scholars working in the field of discourse and business communication studies.In this chapter, an overview of the research will be given, including the research background, the rationale for the research, the research objectives, some key notions as well as the organization of the book.