Advertising Language

Nowadays you can see advertisement everywhere. Advertisements are forcing their way into people’s lives. People refer to advertisements in their daily lives because they are consumers. The advertisers are usually manufacturers, retailers and salesmen. Their merchandises need to be advertised to make consumers pay attention to. Thus majority of products are advertised in different ways, and ‘ads’ come in different forms, like billboards, newspaper advertisements, TV advertisements, and so on. All advertisements are designed to make people buy a product. To a large extent, good advertising leads to success, while bad advertising can mean failure. How can we evaluate whether an advertisement is good or not? How can advertisers make advertisements be attractive? There are several important factors in advertisements, especially the advertising language, and advertising language is different from any other kinds of language. Advertising language is very specific that lots of weasel words are used in advertising language, and advertising language are always very simple; these features can be illustrated by an advertisement that I found in a magazine. Different from any other kinds of language, weasel words are very useful and important in advertising language. In the article “With These Words I Can Sell You Anything” the author William Lutz gives an example with the weasel word “help” to illustrate the effect of weasel words in advertisements. Lutz points out, “The trick is that the claim that comes after the weasel word is usually so strong and so dramatic that you forget the word “help” and concentrate only on the dramatic claim” (2010, ¶.3). In fact, the role of advertisements is to make consumers pay attention to the products. Although the weasel words are actually making no claim at all, they can attract consumers’ eyes and make advertisements attractive. Just as Lutz says, “Remember, the ad is trying to get you to buy a product, so it will put the product in