Language in Advertising

The wide use of advertising has created a special style of English--advertising English. Its unique features, simple language and immense attraction separate it from other kind of language. In the development of advertising English, this kind of language has formed its own features in several aspects.

As a means to disseminate information, advertising English must be compact, vivid, visual, emotional and attractive. Therefore, morphology in advertising is quite different from common English.

The function of advertising is to provide information, attract consumer, exploit market, and promise the quality. Therefore, advertisement must pay attention to its impelling language, and the first step is to use popular and oral language to make it easy to understand and memorize.

In some advertisements, the advertising copywriter misspells some words on purpose, or adds some suffix or prefix to the common words. Although the new words still keep the original meanings, they are quite different from the original words in spelling, which will make the advertisement more vivid, interesting and attractive.

The meaning of "je ne sais quoi" is "I don't know what". The purpose to use this simple French is to show the French flavor of this drink. The loanwords in some advertisement are good methods to express the exoticism of the products.

Because the advertisement fees are so high that it's essential to use some contraction to cut short the length, and reduce the cost.

Although the ultimate purpose of advertising is to persuade consumers to buy its products, advertisements seldom use the word "buy" in it. Statistics show only two out of ten advertisements use the verb "buy" directly. On one hand, the advertisers try their best to promote their product; on the other hand, they don't want to give the consumers a feeling of spending their money. Therefore, the choice of verbs is very careful in advertising.

The most frequently used 20 verbs and phrasal verbs are:

Try, ask, get, take, let, send for, use, call, make, come on, hurry, see, give, come, remember, discover, serve, introduce, choose, and look for.

The most frequently used adjectives are:

1.new 2. crisp 3. good/better/best 4. fine 5. free 6. big 7. fresh 8. great

9. delicious 10. real 11. full, sure 12. easy, bright 13. clean 14. extra, safe 15.special 16. rich

There are lots of compound words in advertisement mainly because the element of compound words could be any part of speech, and has few limits in grammar and word order.

The following are the main ways of word forming:

adj+noun: short-term goal, high-fashion knitwear

noun+adj: the farmhouse-fresh faste, brand-new

v-ing+adj: shining-clean

noun+v-ed: honey-coated sugar puffs, home-made

adj/adv+v-ed: warm-hearted, perfectly-testured cakes

noun+v-ing: a relief-giving liquid, record-breaking

adj+v-ing: innocent-looking, fresh-tasting milk

adv+v-ing: hard-working, the best-selling soft toilet tissue

noun+noun: economy-size shredded wheat, a state-of-the-art cell sorcer

adv+noun: up-to-the-minute sculling

More simple sentences, less complex sentences

It will get better effect to use simple sentences than compound sentences, because the readers will get bored on reading complex sentences. Another reason is to reduce the cost of advertising, and effectively stimulate the consumers.

The imperative sentences have a meaning of claiming, calling and commanding, similarly the goal of advertising is to persuade and urge consumers to accept its product or service. Therefore, there are lots of imperative sentences in advertising, such as:

Disjunctive clause is unique for advertising English, which separates a long, complex sentence into several simple sentences by using full stop, dash, semi-colon, hyphen, etc. Those sentences are independent in form, but are related in the content. The use of disjunctive clause could add more information and save more space and money. The separated parts are usually the features of the product, so that they could emphasize the good points of the product.

There is an example of Amtrak, which has successfully used the disjunctive clauses:

Amtrak has created a new. nationwide passenger rail system. Literally from the ground up. A system that represented a viable alternative for people who fly. For business or pleasure.

Minor clause has simple elements, which could lay stress on the key words. It could not only reduce the length and cost, but also disseminate information more effectively.

Rhetorical devices are variations of literal or ordinary form of expressions. Their use is to make the thought more striking and effective, for they have the power to vivify and illustrate. A fresh, apt rhetorical device appeals to the imagination, creates mental pictures and makes the speech or writing vivid, impressive and interesting. For this reason, advertisers often use various rhetorical devices to increase the readability and appeal of an advertisement and to arouse consumers' interest of buying the product.

Personification is a figure of speech in which inanimate objects or abstractions are endowed with human qualities or are represented as possessing human form. The use of personification in advertising will endow the product with human emotion, and will make them amicable to consumers.

Simile is a figure of speech in which two essentially unlike things are compared, often in a phrase introduced by like or as.

Metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison.

In some advertisements, the copywriters often use the method of repetition to stress certain information.

Rhyming is correspondence of terminal sounds of words or of lines of verse.

Advertising language as a special kind of language is very different from common language. It has its own features in morphology, syntax, and rhetorical devices. Simple and attractive are two general features of advertising English. Because there are different types of advertisements, and they are differed in the way of writing according to their target audience, the product or other aspects. Therefore, we must analyze the features of different kinds of advertisements, in order to find a proper position for our own advertisement, and choose methods fit it best. In the statistics of four groups of advertisements I find that: consumer advertising uses the widest range of forms and devices, whose main task is to attract readers and urge them to buy the product; business advertising, on the contrary, needn't put much effort in attracting its readers, its words are more practical; service advertising has the similar feature as consumer advertising in the use of words, but the former describes more about its product in some imaginable way; public interest advertising is a nonprofit action, which however still needs to attract readers' attention, tries to strike the reader in emotional way and urges them to take action immediately.