Go Figure! ― New Directions in Advertising Rhetoric

The idea is not to make the public think, or to persuade them. The idea is to make them act, to buy. These truths makes the copywriters of Madison Avenue amongst the most adept rhetoricians in the world. These 14 essays by leading scholars in advertising rhetoric evaluate the state of the art and make prophecies about where it is going, addressing the rediscovery of theory as a repository of ancient hypotheses and modern empirical evidence, the workings of convention and persuasion in vulnerable audiences, the symbol-icon relationship, the cognitive and emotional processing model of rhetorical works in advertising, the dark side of openness for consumer response, schema and the processing of visual deviations, examining the structure of style (in complexity, pictorial and multi-modal metaphor, style in imagery and the conceptual and structural heuristics of visual rhetoric) and the inquiry process, including tools for analysis and expanding rhetoric. Annotation c2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)