Persuasion in the English of Advertising in the Ghanaian Newspapers

Abstract

Advertising is a form of communication that functions with goals and strategies leading to a number of impacts on potential consumers. Advertising, thus, operates with certain objectives resulting in various effects on consumer thoughts, feelings and actions. Above all, the ultimate goal of advertising is the persuasion of potential consumers of the exceptional qualities of goods and services. Whatever strategy advertisers employ to persuade their audience, language plays a pivotal role since it functions as the vehicle for the transmission of the advertising message. Language forms an integral part of advertisements (henceforth, adverts) and it serves as a means of communicating specific information with the aim of persuading an audience. In this paper, I focused on persuasion in the English employed by copywriters in adverts in the Ghanaian print media. The study was underpinned by the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of Persuasion. The qualitative research design was employed and the analytical framework was the qualitative content analysis technique. The findings of the study proved that copywriters in Ghanaian press employed Aristotle's three artistic proofs (logos, pathos and ethos), figures of speech and grammatical units in the English of adverts for persuasive effect.