Persuasive language in advertisement

Discourse has two forms, spoken and written. Advertisement belongs to one of written discourse types. To create an effective advertisement, advertiser should maximize the use of advertisement components to persuade audiences. One of the components is the advertisement text which contains persuasive language. \n \nThe purpose of this study is to find what and how tools of rhetoric and language features of advertisement are used in the advertisement in three advertisement groups: food and beverages, accommodation, and event advertisement. \n \nTo analyze the data, the writer used discourse analysis method along with two parameters, tools of rhetoric: logos and pathos and language features of advertisement. Three advertisement groups were taken as the data from an English print newspaper the Jakarta Post, from Sept 5th to 10th, 2016. \n \nIt was found that the most used tool of rhetoric in all advertisement groups respectively are pathos, logos, and ethos. The most frequent language features of advertisement used in three groups are language game, word and phrase repetition, word and phrase omission, and persuasive words. The most used persuasive word is adjective which mostly contains flowery language so the readers can imagine the \nfeatures in the advertisement. \n \nThe conclusion of this study are: 1) Logos is used to convince people about the features in the advertisement, 2) Ethos is not shown many in the advertisement, due to \nbrand popularity and contact person inserted in the advertisement, 3) Some text not containing logos and ethos just contain information but it is still considerable as \nimportant things in the advertisement, 4) Pathos is used to affect readers’ emotion and advertiser probably tend to use language features which are efficient and effective.