A combination of advertising and “artful” rhetorical device has been a non-stop topic. Advertisements alone are key factors to guide customers‟ attraction towards the advertised products. Many advertisers believe that if rhetorical devices work efficiently in normal writings, it should also work in verbal elements of an advertisement. Therefore, this research is an attempt to figure out in detail types of rhetorical device which are applied in slogans of English print advertisements. Together with that, the most-used type of rhetorical device is determined in the hope to have an overall idea about the popular trend in rhetoric slogans. Lastly, a comparison in terms of effectiveness is carried out between rhetoric slogans and normal ones which use no type of rhetorical device. In order to find the answers for these above questions, document analysis among the 05 most popular English magazines (Bloomberg, Wired, Men‟s Health, Cosmopolitan and Home) and questionnaires distributed to 20 participants were utilized, leading to fruitful results. Results show that there are 33 out of 52 types of rhetorical device used in more than 400 studied slogans. Furthermore, Epithet – according to Harris‟ classification (2005) in his book “A handbook of rhetorical devices”, an extremely assisting rhetoric type – is the most-used one. Last but not least, rhetoric slogans are proven to be of greater effectiveness in comparison with those without rhetorical device. Since the last question was found out basing on a small-scale survey, the answer to it needs more generalizability, thus requires larger-scale studies. Further studies should be of larger scope to increase the validity as well as reliability of the results. More discussions are needed within the topic of rhetoric advertising language, as there remain a lot of issues to discover.
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A combination of advertising and “artful” rhetorical device has been a non-stop topic. Advertisements alone are key factors to guide customers‟ attraction towards the advertised products. Many advertisers believe that if rhetorical devices work efficiently in normal writings, it should also work in verbal elements of an advertisement. Therefore, this research is an attempt to figure out in detail types of rhetorical device which are applied in slogans of English print advertisements. Together with that, the most-used type of rhetorical device is determined in the hope to have an overall idea about the popular trend in rhetoric slogans. Lastly, a comparison in terms of effectiveness is carried out between rhetoric slogans and normal ones which use no type of rhetorical device. In order to find the answers for these above questions, document analysis among the 05 most popular English magazines (Bloomberg, Wired, Men‟s Health, Cosmopolitan and Home) and questionnaires distributed to 20 participants were utilized, leading to fruitful results. Results show that there are 33 out of 52 types of rhetorical device used in more than 400 studied slogans. Furthermore, Epithet – according to Harris‟ classification (2005) in his book “A handbook of rhetorical devices”, an extremely assisting rhetoric type – is the most-used one. Last but not least, rhetoric slogans are proven to be of greater effectiveness in comparison with those without rhetorical device. Since the last question was found out basing on a small-scale survey, the answer to it needs more generalizability, thus requires larger-scale studies. Further studies should be of larger scope to increase the validity as well as reliability of the results. More discussions are needed within the topic of rhetoric advertising language, as there remain a lot of issues to discover.
