A Comparative Analysis of Stylistic Features in the English of Advertising and News Reporting

尹碩

【Abstract】With the development of society and widespread cooperation among countries， various media devote themselves to take the responsibility of information transference. Many of us have been accustomed to reading a lot of advertisements or news reports in daily life. Advertisements and news reports are with us all the time. They are such things that we are all exposed to. They are also such things that are likely to affect most of us in a number of different spheres of our lives. It is reasonable to say that we live in a world of advertising and news reporting. This passage makes a comparative analysis of these two intensely popular media mainly at three levels， including graphological， grammatical and syntactical， and semantic.

【Key words】advertising； news reporting； graphological； grammatical； imperative； elliptical； participle phrases； and semantic.

A. Analysis

1.At the graphological level

（1）Abundant use of punctuation marks of great force.

Advertising：

Peak： I CAN PLAY！

K-bird： Nobody can stop me！

Both two literary styles frequently use the punctuation marks to make the content more vivid and comprehensible.

（2） Use of Graphological contracts

Advertising：

Most advertisements have a well-through-out manipulation of sharp graphological contracts to achieve the best eye-catching effect.

The words at the bottom are not in the same size. “限量版隆重上市” is larger than other words， which attracts readers attention.

2. At the grammatical and syntactical level

（1） Statements

Advertising：

Adidas：Impossible is nothing.

Kappa：He who loves me follows me.

（2） Imperative Sentences

Advertising：

Nike：Just do it.

Erke：To be NO.1

（3） Use of participle phrases

News reporting：

Carmelo is also the Jordan Brands most tenured signature athlete， leading a family of professionals spanning a wide array of experience， sports and achievements.

The bold part is used as a participle phrase， including further information about Carmelo Anthony.

3.At the semantic level

（1）Simile & Metaphor

Advertising：

The following picture is an advertisement of “Nike”. “I am the bullet in the chamber”. “Nike” just uses metaphor to express how beneficial its shoes are to running.

News reporting：

...perennial All-Star Carmelo Anthony has taken a lifelong journey to become one of the games top superstars.

“A lifelong journey” just means his basketball career and “l(fā)ifelong” implies his career is long.

（2） Alliteration

Alliteration is the use of words that begin with the same sound in order to make a special communicative effect. It appears accidentally in advertising， but hardly in news reporting.

Mizuno：I CAN I Could

B. Conclusion

So far， I have analyzed the prominent language features of advertising and news reporting and done the comparison at three levels. Linguistic similarities and differences between two literary styles analyzed in this paper are shown as follows.

As to graphological features， compared with news reporting， sharp graphological contrasts are more frequently used in advertising to emphasize the theme of the ads and attract readers attention. As for similarities， both use abundant punctuation marks to make the ads and reports more vivid.

As to grammatical and syntactical features， they both include many simple statements and imperative sentences. As for the differences， news reporting use participle phrases more frequently.

As to semantic features， simile and metaphor are both used in advertising and news reporting to highlight the characteristics or special features of the products or news fact. Alliteration is often used to make advertisements more impressive and memorable.

In a word， no matter which structure and what kinds of words are used in an advertisement or a piece of news， all of them serve the purpose of attracting the readers， conveying information to them， urging them to purchase the product or to learn the news fact.