An analysis of persuasive elements in the English of advertisements in newspapers in Ghana

Abstract

Advertising is a genre of mass media communication which unearths the exceptional qualities of products and services in a persuasive fashion. It is also a form of marketing communication through which business organizations inform the general public about new or improved commercial endeavors. Advertising in modern time comprises varied component parts (visual imagery, graphic and color designs, print and auditory techniques.); however, language plays an indispensable role in the transmission of the message. Language has an immense influence on human beings and the way they behave. The language of advertising influences the reasoning, thinking, feeling and the general attitude of the audience. Copywriters, like poets, choose their words carefully in order to achieve a particular rhetorical effect. They use language in such a way that they attract attention, arouse interest or desire and create need. Language forms an integral part of advertisements. The current study focused on persuasive elements in the English employed in advertisements in newspapers in Ghana. The study investigated the extent to which Aristotle’s three artistic proofs (logos, pathos and ethos), figures of speech and grammatical elements in the English of advertisements in the Ghanaian newspapers were employed by copywriters for persuasive effect. The current study was underpinned by three theories, namely, Aristotle’s Rhetorical Theory, Conventional Figurative Language Theory and the Standard Theory of Generative Grammar. These theories lent support to the three thematic trends of the study. The qualitative research design was employed given the interpretive nature of the analysis of the corpus. The current study did not involve human subjects as data sources because the corpus was from written documents. The purposive sampling method was employed owing to the subjective nature of the process of data collection. The qualitative content analysis approach was adopted as the analytical framework for the study. This made it possible for the coding of categories of the textual data based on the themes, patterns and trends that emerged. The findings of the research revealed that copywriters in the Ghanaian newspapers employed Aristotle’s three artistic proofs, figures of speech and grammatical elements in the English of advertisements for persuasive effect.