ABSTRACT
Advertising, as Wernick (1991) says, is a form of rhetoric. Rhetorical skill is part of what advertising agencies are hiring out to their clients, and rhetorical aims – to persuade, inform and impress – have typically governed the form of advertisements. ‘Rhetoric’ usually describes the spoken and written arts. Because it has been associated with classical culture and with verbal communication, rhetoric is considered to describe a language of ‘the past’. However, classic rhetorical methods and intents have continuities within today’s technologically sophisticated and semiotically enriched media-based advertising, in terms of function (e.g. to persuade), and in terms of some of its forms or figures (McQuarrie and Mick 1996). Voice-over artists (informal or grave) and copywriters (straightforward or ‘purple’) are exercising versions of the ancient arts of rhetoric, as are sales people, celebrity endorsers, telemarketers and party political broadcasters; even art directors and editors, as they cut an ad to achieve a dramatic crescendo or when they lay out a page, deploy a ‘rhetoric’ of sorts.
