Kendal Lamarand
Dr. Steve Krause
English 328
Second Paper
NEW AGE, OLD STYLE
For this assignment, in which we were to pick an advertisement and analyze it using the material from Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students, I chose an ad that appealed to me as a recipient of this assignment, and as a consumer. Until now, it had not occurred to me that advertising was so closely associated with the stylistic aspect of the English language. However, after reading the selection from Crowley and Hawhee’s book the relationship between the two made perfect sense to me. Truthfully, I was ashamed that I had not come to this realization earlier with all of the obsessing that I do over commercials and ads. Since I now had a better grasp on the concept I thought that it would be simple to identify the ancient rhetorics in the advertisement that I chose. While the rhetorics applied were sufficiently apparent, the arduous component of the task was to determine and indicate how and if they are effective in modern language.
Since the whole of the advertisement is encompassed in one aspect of style--the general levels of style-- I believe that this should be acknowledged first. "Ancient teachers distinguished three general levels of style which were appropriate to various rhetorical settings: grand, middle, and plain"(Crowley, p.234). The style used in the advertisement I chose, and I am sure many others found this true also, was the middle style. The coursepack excerpt informs, "The middle style does not use ordinary prose, but is more relaxed than the grand style" (234), and also, " A rhetor using the middle style develops arguments in a leisurely fashion and as fully as possible, and uses as many commonplaces as can be worked into the argument without drawing attention to their presence"(235). I am inclined to believe that this style was used because it is the most common and at the same time, not too generic. In other words, just about anyone could read the advertisement that I chose and be familiar with most everything that it is trying to express.
The very first statement in my advertisement is a rhetorical question: "Never hear of anyone cursing out the on-board masseuse, now do you?" The text defines a rhetorical question as, " a figure in which rhetors ask questions to which they don’t really expect an answer"(234). The answer to this question is, obviously, no; but it makes the reader wonder why the question is asked in the first place and want to read on to find out. What a reader of this ad would discover--, as did I-- is that the next sentence is brutally honest, if not, not honest enough: "We know how frustrating air travel can be". This is an example of one of the Figures of Thought, litotes, "(understatement), where a rhetor diminishes some feature of the situation that is obvious to all"(252). There is no possible way, in a one-page advertisement, that all of the exasperating conditions of air travel could be listed. The sentence used in the ad allows for the summation of that thought. The use of personification, another figure of thought, is incorporated when the advertisement uses the phrase "Upper Class is rubbing everyone the right way"; this gives the term "Upper Class" human qualities.
In describing the sentence structure, I would say that the periodic style is used. Some of the characteristics of this style are, "an obvious structure"(239), "carefully constructed and satisfactorily ‘rounded off’"(240). Another clue a sentence would be classified as periodic, is the prolonging of the main part of the sentence until the end. This is evident on at least one occasion in the advertisement: "That’s why we offer comforts that bring out the best in business passengers, like our on-board massage therapy." There is, in this ad, one example of a figure that interrupts normal word order.
In the sentence, " With five amazing treatments to choose from, it’s no wonder why more of our passengers arrive rested, relaxed, and dare we say, smiling", the use of asyndenton is demonstrated; that is, the elimination of "connectors that ordinarily appear between colons or commas" (243). The use of personification, another figure of thought, is incorporated when the advertisement uses the phrase "Upper Class is rubbing everyone the right way"; this gives the term "Upper Class" human qualities.
The advertisement makes use of only one of the Tropes discussed in Crowley’s and Hawhee’s selection; metaphor. While the examples of this are few, the impact is ample. The metaphors used are in reference to "a masseuse who’d love to get her hands on you," and being "rubbed the right way."
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