Visual Rhetoric In Advertisements

Advertisements are playing a more and more important role in modern society. Today in China, advertising industry is flourishing and arouses the interests of many researchers. Until now, unfortunately, most researches on ads still remain at the phase of consumer psychology, traditional verbal rhetorical figures and their translation in the ads. And relatively speaking, not many people study ads from the view of modern rhetoric. The goal of ads is to change the consumer's attitudes and beliefs to persuade them to buy the product. Persuasion is an art of human communication to influence other's thoughts and behaviour. It has always been the nucleus of western rhetoric ever since. In ancient times, it was applied to public speeches and court debates; in modern times, it is used in all kinds of human communication.Advertisements are one of the new forms of modern rhetoric while visual rhetoric is a new development of western rhetorical studies. As is the traditional rhetoric, visual rhetoric is aiming at achieving persuasion during visual communication, playing an essential part in visual advertising. Since the 1960s when visual rhetoric was just explored, quite a lot of studies have been made on its application to ads. But in China, verbal persuasive system is not yet a major interest in academic fields, let alone visual persuasion. This thesis attempts to fill the gap in domestic advertising studies by introducing the visual rhetoric from the west, combining the consumer psychological theories to analyze the specific ads, probing into the persuasive effects of the ads with visual rhetorical strategies and comparing the specific impact of different visual rhetorical devices. It just humbly offers the initial attempt to attract further valuable researches in this field to help boost the development of visual rhetoric and its application to ads...