Analysing Rhetoric in an Advertisement

The intended audience of this ad are potential customers for trucks, as the ad emphasizes Volvo's "Volvo Dynamic Steering". By having famed action-star Jean-Claude van Damme preform a split in between two Volvo trucks fitted with dynamic steering, the advert uses both ethos and logos. By having Van Damme, a celebrity famed for similar stunts, they are giving a bit of sincerity and credibility to their advert, as people trust in Van Damme and will more willing to trust the ad as a result, fulfilling the ethos requirement. Van Damme also has a monologue where he details his life, adding to the ethos factor of the ad. To appeal to logos, the ad states that the stunt was set up to test the "stability and precision of Volvo Dynamic Steering", and as the test went on successfully, the viewer therefore concludes that the dynamic steering must be quite good, in order to have been able to achieve that stunt. To appeal to pathos, the ad has Van Damme doing a precarious stunt (the split), that would usually have viewers on 'the edge of their seats' so to say, but to counter this, they have calming music in the background, putting the viewer at ease, and also implying that the dynamic steering is so good, Van Damme was never in any real danger. All of these factors seek to get the viewer to see Volvo Dynamic Steering as a superior product to their competitors, and hopefully for them, as a result, buy more Volvo trucks.

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Print Advertisement: Nivea Moisturizer

To start off, here's some basic information about the advert. Its target audience is young women, as the main focus of the advert is a young woman, and the product is cosmetic, a product type commonly advertised to this target audience. The cosmetic in question is "Nivea Smooth Milk: Body", a type of moisturizing cream. As the ad is written in English and comes from a German (Western) company, it can be concluded that this advert comes from a Western cultural background. Since Nivea was founded in 1911, it can be inferred that this ad was made in 2011, due to the quote "100 years skin care for life". The ad seems to imply that physical attractiveness is the most important factor in a happy relationship, due to the happy couple featured in the image, and the slogan "For visibily smooth and touchably soft skin" (misspellings came with the ad), which seems to imply to the viewer that moisturizer brought the couple closer together (the image has the...

Coriolanus and the Theme of Power

Shakespeare develops the theme of power in the play, mainly with the characters of Coriolanus, Volumnia, Aufidius, Menenius, and the Tribunes as representative of different forms of power. The titular character, Coriolanus, is a man from an older form of power, the absolute kind, where rulers did not have to answer to the commoners. He approaches politics the same way he approaches military matters: speaks his mind/heart (i.e. insulting the commoners, but it’s what he genuinely thinks of them), being true to himself, and insulting those he regards as enemies or against Rome (in battle this is the Volsces, but he believes that giving the plebeians a voice is a bad idea). In military, he is successful, because military power is absolute, obey or die type of deal, at least in that time; however, politics requires a surgical approach, and careful consideration of what to say, which the other characters mentioned can do better. Menenius acts as a foil to Coriolanus’ skills, because while h...

Letter to the Editor - The Daily Mail

Dear Ms. Laura Clark, Your article, while raising a few interesting and worrying points, completely missed the mark. Instead of blasting ‘text speak’ and saying that “ Youngsters are also in danger of growing up with limited vocabularies because they spend so much of their free time on sites such as Twitter…”, perhaps you should look to the parents and authority figures who should be teaching the children about the English language before blaming technology. As a ‘youngster’ myself, I feel that you shift the blame on to text speak too much, and give it unfair credit. It is also rather insulting to observe the generation raising us, cast their responsibility on to inanimate devices, that they themselves gave us. The fact is, is that both teachers and parents share a certain responsibility to teach children to do the right thing. Perhaps the staff should have made a better effort in making sure that the children knew to differentiate their writing styles for different contexts and ...

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