Enhancement of business rhetoric skills is vital in interpersonal communication, moreover in various registers of business media discourse the use of manipulative means is common and inevitable. Due to this fact the audience’s vital task is to learn how to interpret business speech / text and recognize the impact by assessing its functional and pragmatic properties.

The aim of the article is to demonstrate some teaching innovations involving improvement of students’ rhetorical skills.

The author:
- describes the phenomenon of concealed speech impact (speech manipulation),
- analyses the notion of business media discourse and its speech strategies,
- provides a study of frequent manipulative tactics in English business media
- and gives recommendations on teaching methods developing the skill of rhetorical efficiency.

The observations made on the material of quality business press dated 2020-2024 were drawn based on the procedure of functional and pragmatic analysis. In line with its main steps, the intentions and aims of the speech producers were identified, then speech means realizing these intentions were singled out. Conclusions were made including assessment of discourse efficiency and coverage.

As a result of the analysis of the corpus of business media texts, it was shown how manipulative tactics of praise, positive assessment, flattery, stigmatization, blame, criticism, irony are able to form an opinion about various business events and phenomena. Rhetoric teaching methods involve getting acquainted with samples of most pragmatically efficient business texts, analysis and identification of positively and negatively connotated lexemes, incorporating clichés and set expressions into productive speech.

The author concludes that speech manipulation is based on the mechanism of implicature, which forces the recipient to infer meaning based on initial implications and background information.

The results of the study can be used in practical seminars on business rhetoric, culture of speech and linguistics.

Keywords: Business media discourse, speech tactics, manipulation, business rhetoric, teaching methods.