On Persuasive Strategies In Advertising Language From A Rhetorical Perspective

As the most important means of promoting businesses and the products throughout the world, advertising plays a very important role in today’s age of competition. The aim of advertising is to arouse the consumers’ purchasing interests and make them to take action ultimately. To achieve this goal, advertisers adopt a variety of methods to persuade their customers. Advertising language, as a special form of informing and persuasive, exerts great and constant influence on the consumers’purchasing action.Aristotle, a great philosopher, scientist, and educator in ancient Greek, defined rhetoric as "an art of persuasion" and proposed his three main persuasion principles: logos, pathos and ethos. Although scholars at home and abroad have done a lot of researches on advertising language from the perspectives such as semantics, pragmatics, psychology, sociolinguistics and so on. Few people pay attention to the persuasive function of advertising language from the perspective of Aristotle’s "three main persuasion principles" and style. Therefore, the author of this thesis tries to study printed advertisements in the light of western classical rhetoric.The present thesis is divided into five chapters with specific topics. The study is based on the analysis of49ads from the two widespread magazines:People and Newsweek available in America in2011, among which there are39advertisements from People and10advertisements from Newsweek. Through qualitative analysis of these advertisements, the author unveils that advertisers tend to use moral appeals, rational appeals, emotional appeals and rhetorical devices in their language to persuade the consumers.This thesis helps to explain how western rhetoric functions as the strategy to persuade the consumers in advertisements. The findings are beneficial both for the advertisers to write advertisement copy and for the consumers to make a through understanding of advertising.