‘Ageing youthfully’ or the rhetoric of medical English in advertising

Abstract

This study examines how cosmetics brands adopt characteristics of medical English in their web sites as a rhetorical strategy to persuade consumers. From the joint perspective of rhetoric, understood as persuasive stylistic choices, and a relevance-theoretic approach to pragmatics, the present paper explains how social assumptions about “ageing youthfully” are successfully strengthened in this type of advertising thanks to the alliance with medicine. This work explores various rhetorical devices, specified through both lexical and syntactic features. The analysis suggested here urges to reconsider research conclusions drawn on the use of science in advertising along truth-seeking premises, as well as previous classifications of this type of goods based on purely informative grounds.

Keywords

• medical english
• cosmetics
• web advertising
• rhetoric
• persuasion