Rhetorical structure and persuasive language in the subgenre of online advertisements

Abstract

This paper aims to reveal the rhetorical structure and the linguistic features of persuasive language in online advertisements of electronic products. Nowadays, the bulk of e-commerce is carried out in English, and it is often the case that non-native speakers are required to write different text types for various professional purposes, including promotional texts. This need has prompted the present study and the results have been used to build software to help native speakers of Spanish when writing promotional texts in English. The analysis reveals that these texts typically have two main rhetorical moves: one for identifying the product and another one for describing it. The latter move is further divided into two steps: one including objective features (size, weight, etc.) and the other focusing on persuading the potential customer. This is mainly achieved with the use of a relatively informal style (imperatives, contractions, clipping, subject/auxiliary omissions, etc.) and lexico-grammatical elements conveying positive evaluation (multiple modification, multal quantifying expressions, etc.). The findings show that online advertisements of electronic products may be regarded as a specific subgenre with particular macro-and microlinguistic characteristics, which have been identified in this paper for technical writing assistance.

A genre-based study of tourism language in English textbooks

“…However, across the tourism genres found in the survey, moves and linguistic features-such as moves of promotion and guidance to make tourism more personal, and the use of the imperative and the second-person pronoun "you"-are in fact specific features of the tourism genres. Tourism genre can be considered a branch of the promotional genre, which is said to have two main parts: descriptions of products or services and uses of positive evaluations to persuade the audience to buy the products or services [Labrador et al, 2014]. These two parts were well-represented in the surveyed textbooks through the abovementioned genre features.…”

“…The use of the term "you" in reference to the audience was also found across tourism genres, for example, in 63 % of the tourist brochures and 50 % of the hotel information in the textbooks. The second-person "you" is employed to get closer to the audience and treat the audience as an individual rather than a group of people [Labrador et al, 2014].…”

The discursive construction of teachers and implications for continuing professional development

“…The editorial also makes use of rhetorical questions as illustrated in excerpts E8 to E10. These questions serve a persuasive end (Labrador, Ramón, Alaiz-Moretón, & Sanjurjo-González, 2014) as readers of the texts are convinced to buy into the embedded assertion that spending money on training teachers who failed to achieve the desired C1 band is a waste of money. This assertion is then further reinforced in E11 where the writer draws on constitutive intertextuality to draw attention to the planned retraining of trained English teachers which he asserts is not financially viable.…”

Quantitative Linguistic Computing with Perl

“…Bhatia's concept of the malleability of genres in the hands of expert writers has informed the work of many contemporary ESP researchers (including Grujicic-Alatriste 2013; Labrador et al 2014;Tessuto 2015), Book Reviews 197 and his three-space approach to discourse analysis effectively codifies ESP's eclectic set of theoretical constituents and provides the framework around which scholars from many fields can build their discipline-specific textual analyses. The book is, therefore, well deserving of republication and inclusion in a 'Classics' series.…”