PERSUASIVE LANGUAGE

The goal of most media messages is to persuade the audience to believe or do something. Commercial advertising tries to persuade us to buy a product or service. These "persuaders" use a variety of techniques to grab our attention, to establish credibility and trust, to stimulate desire for the product or policy, and to motivate us to act (buy, vote, give money, etc.) We call these techniques the "language of persuasion".

AFOREST

This useful little acronym will help you to analyse the reading assessment texts and to identify the techniques mentioned. Here’s a little reminder of what the letters stand for:

Apart from these techniques, we can find some others:

Now it's time to practice. Can you identify the different persuasive techniques used in the following adverts?

TEXT 1

TEXT 2

Answers:

And more examples:

ADVERTISING QUESTIONNAIRE

Here you have a questionnaire to test how much  you know about adverts. Then ask the questions to your partner and write a report with your answers.

IMAGES (III): READING IMAGES

Let's do some practice analyzing some images:

IMAGES (II): COLOUR

IMAGES (I): TYPES OF SHOT

TARGET AUDIENCE

A very important thing to take into account when we talk about an advert is the group of people to which it is addressed. This is what we call "TARGET AUDIENCE". 

SLOGANS

A slogan is a catchy phrase that is used to help people remember a product and make them want to but it.

Let's know more about slogans with this presentation. How many slogans can you recognize?