Richard T. Torto: "Persuasive Communication: A Study of the Language of Advertising in the Print Media in Ghana"

Richard T. Torto is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Communication Studies at Univeristy of Cape Coast in Ghana, and a guest researcher at the Department of literature at Uppsala university.

Abstract

Advertising is a form of persuasive communication that operates with goals and strategies leading to a number of impacts on the thoughts, feelings and actions of potential consumers. 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 of the press in Ghana employed Aristotle’s three artistic proofs (logos, pathos and ethos), figures of speech and grammatical elements in the English of advertising for persuasive effect.