Language Of Advertising

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Research: The language of cosmetic advertising. My research objective was to look into cosmetic advertising and see what language features were used and what affects they had on the reader. The reason I chose this topic was because I have a habit of buying expensive cosmetics that I don’t need and later asked myself what it was about the advertising behind it that convinced me that I “needed” the product? I expected there to be a lot of rhetorical questions used in cosmetic advertising to draw the reader in and invite them to agree with the writer/product, as well as imperatives to demand the reader to buy the product. I also wanted to find out how the language varies between the two different target audiences of adults compared to teenage girls. To do this I compared the language from magazine advertisements that were targeted at younger readers to advertisements that were aimed at older women. I anticipated that beauty advertisements targeted at older women would use a lot more statistics and jargon compared to advertisements aimed at teenage girls who would have a lot of adjectives and rhyme. The third thing I wanted to find out was how the language was changed in cosmetic advertisements from 1960 to today. To do this I compared the language features I found from today’s magazine advertisements to advertisements from 1960 which I sourced on the Internet. I thought that the older advertisements would have more rhyming compared to today's which would have a lot more statistics and technical language. The sources I used were magazine advertisements from Cleo , cosmopolitan , news Weekly and Women’s Day Magazines , The book, Achieving in English 2 by D.J Wort and Internet links such as... http://www.ccpcc.com/jjxj/km1/020664.htm http://quizlet.com/8530/langauge-features-ncea-lv2-english-flash-cards http://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/raps/fairytales/pdf/TexFeat.pdf
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