| Recent years have seen increased attention being given to a genre-based approach to facilitate discourse analysis in language studies. Following the methodology of Swales and Bhatia, a genre analysis focuses on the functional components, "moves" of a genre, the strategies used to realize moves, the most common linguistic realizations, and the underlying social, cultural and cognitive explanations for the choices.This paper attempts to arrive at a multi-level analysis of personal advertisement—a usually classified newspaper advertisement in which somebody expresses interest in meeting others or sends a message of a personal nature to somebody else. By examining 100 English personal ads placed by native writers, 7 moves in this genre were identified, among which move 2, move 3 and move 7 appeared to be obligatory while others were merely optional. Moreover, it was noticed that there is a preferred sequential pattern in the moves which could be explained by the social values and thinking pattern dominant in the culture to which the discourse community belong.Finally, an investigation at the micro-level was conducted to learn about the most common linguistic signals of the genre, regarding them as the result of language specialists' manipulation of particular genre constraints and generic knowledge to realize communicative goals.
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