AN ANALYSIS OF LANGUAGE FEATURES IN ENGLISH ADVERTISEMENTS
What’s in Woman’s Realm this week? A wonderful beauty offers for you.
→There’s a wonderful beauty offer for you in Women’s Realm this week.
Fourth, the passive voice is usually avoided because the passive voice gives the audience an indirect and unnatural feeling. In daily communication, passive voice is seldom used; so is in advertisements. Present tense prevails in most advertisements because present tense implies a universal timelessness. On the rare occasions where the past tense and the present perfect tense is used, it stresses the long traditions associated with a product, such as “We’ve taken our whisky in many ways, but always seriously”; or emphasizes its reliability, such as “We’ve solved a long-standing problem,”; or makes an appeal to authority, such as “Eight out of ten owners said their cats preferred it.”
3.2 Differences
3.2.1 Headline
The term Headline refers to the sentences in the leading position of the advertisement—the words that will be read first or that are positioned to draw the most attention. Therefore, headlines are usually set in larger type than other portions of the advertisement. Research (Coutland L. Bovee & William F. Arens, 1992:294) has shown that, on average, three to five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. Therefore, if the advertiser hasn’t done some selling in the headline, he has wasted the greatest percent of his money. So it might be suggested that advertisers should not be afraid of long headlines.
A headline has numerous functions. First of all, the headline must attract attention to the advertisement fast. It should take only a few seconds to capture the reader’s attention. Otherwise, the entire message may be lost. A headline also selects the reader, that is, it tells whether the advertisement’s subject matter interests the reader. The idea is to engage and involve the reader, suggesting a reason to read the rest of the advertisement. Therefore, the headline is the most important in an advertisement.
Generally, we can classify effective advertising headlines into five basic categories: benefit headline, provocative headline, news/information headline, question headline, and command headline.
Benefit headlines make a direct promise to the reader. News/information headlines include many of the how-to headlines and headlines that seek to gain identification for their sponsors by announcing some news or providing some promise of information. Provocative headlines are used to provoke the reader’s curiosity. To learn more, the reader must read the body copy. A question headline will pique the reader’s curiosity and imagination by asking a question that the reader is interested in. A command headline orders the reader to do something. It motivates the reader through fear or emotion or because the reader understands the inherent correctness of the command.
