领域：学术论文 · 人文科学

3.1 Similarities

The purpose of all advertising is to familiarize consumers with or remind them of the benefits of particular products in the hope of increasing sales, and the techniques used by advertisers do not vary markedly. An advertisement is often merely glimpsed in passing and so, to be effective, its message must be colorful, legible, understandable and memorable. The rules governing the language of advertising are similar. We have summarized the lexical features of English advertisements. If words are leaves of a tree, and sentences branches; the branches must also possess their similarities.

First, length of a sentence in advertising is usually short. A sentence in daily consumer goods ads has 10.3 words on average; in technical equipment ads, 11.8 words; in service ads, 12.3 words.

Second, as to sentence structure, simple sentences and elliptical sentences are often used in advertisements. Compared with complex sentences, simple sentences are more understandable and forceful. Elliptical sentences are actually incomplete in structure but complete in meaning. The adoption of elliptical sentences can spare more print space, and take less time for readers to finish reading. In addition, a group of sentence fragments may gain special advertising effectiveness. Let us compare the following two advertisements.

    a. Baked. Drenched. Tested to the extreme. A Motorola cellular phone …

b. The Motorola cellular phone are baked and drenched to extreme.

    Obviously, by using elliptical structure, sentence a is far more brief, eye-catching and forceful than sentence b. What’s more, it conveys attitudes that sentence b lacks. Sentence a implies a kind of appreciation for the phone, by splitting the sentence into several fragments and rearranging its word order. Therefore skillful arrangement of elliptical sentences may add color to a sentence.

Third, as to sentence patterns, interrogative sentences and imperative sentences are heavily used in English advertisements. Imperative sentences are short, encouraging and forceful. They are used to arouse audiences’ wants or encourage them to buy something.

3.2 Differences
    3.2.1 Headline
    The term Headline refers to the sentences in the leading position of the advertisement—the words that will be read first or that are positioned to draw the most attention. Therefore, headlines are usually set in larger type than other portions of the advertisement. Research (Coutland L. Bovee & William F. Arens, 1992:294) has shown that, on average, three to five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. Therefore, if the advertiser hasn’t done some selling in the headline, he has wasted the greatest percent of his money. So it might be suggested that advertisers should not be afraid of long headlines. 
    A headline has numerous functions. First of all, the headline must attract attention to the advertisement fast. It should take only a few seconds to capture the reader’s attention. Otherwise, the entire message may be lost. A headline also selects the reader, that is, it tells whether the advertisement’s subject matter interests the reader. The idea is to engage and involve the reader, suggesting a reason to read the rest of the advertisement. Therefore, the headline is the most important in an advertisement.
Generally, we can classify effective advertising headlines into five basic categories: benefit headline, provocative headline, news/information headline, question headline, and command headline.
Benefit headlines make a direct promise to the reader. News/information headlines include many of the how-to headlines and headlines that seek to gain identification for their sponsors by announcing some news or providing some promise of information. Provocative headlines are used to provoke the reader’s curiosity. To learn more, the reader must read the body copy. A question headline will pique the reader’s curiosity and imagination by asking a question that the reader is interested in. A command headline orders the reader to do something. It motivates the reader through fear or emotion or because the reader understands the inherent correctness of the command.

4.1 Body Copy of an Advertisement
In general, a written advertisement consists of five parts: headline, body copy, slogan, illustration and trade mark among which headline, body copy and slogan are the main parts. Headline plays a role in catching attention from readers; slogan can be used as a device to create a corporate image and a common practice to conclude advertisement.
In this section we will discuss the body copy as a discourse component. The advertiser tells the complete sales story in the body copy. Set in smaller type than headlines or subheads, the body copy is a logical continuation of the headline and subheads. It is also where the sale is closed. The body copy should relate to the campaign appeal and to the reader’s self-interest, and it must explain how the product or service being advertised satisfies the customer’s need. The body copy may concentrate on one or several benefits as they relate specifically to the target audience. In some cases, especially in daily goods ads, body copy is omitted just because readers know what they are.

4.2 Differences in Body Copy s
   Copy s fall into many categories. Some common types of copy s include straight-sell copy, institutional copy, narrative copy, dialogue/monologue copy.
In a straight-sell copy, the text immediately explains or develops the headline in a straightforward attempt to sell the product. Since the product’s sales points are ticked off in order of their importance, straight-sell copy is particularly advantageous for technical products that may be difficult to use in direct-mail advertising and industrial situations. Many camera ads, for example, use this straight, factual copy to get the message across. The straight-sell approach emphasizes the reason why the consumer should buy something. For example:

Pick up right where you left off with the new C-2000 ZOOM filmless digital camera.
You loved taking pictures then. You’ll love it even more now with the 2.1 megapixel C-2000 ZOOM. It’ll remind you of your favorite film camera of yesterday, but with all the advantages Olympus filmless photography offers today. Only the C-2000 ZOOM, for example, incorporates an all-glass, aspherical 3x zoom lens system featuring a large aperture f2.0 lens that’s exceptionally fast and bright. Along with automatic or manual features like aperture and shutter priority, spot metering, exposure compensation, white balance and ISO settings. And just like your film camera, the C-2000 ZOOM grows with you when you add external flash, lighting equipment, lenses or filter. So bring back old memories while creating new ones with the C-2000 ZOOM from Olympus--THE WORLD LEADER IN FILM AND FILMLESS PHOTOGRAPHY.

Sometimes the advertiser uses the institutional copy to sell an idea or the merits of the organization or service rather than sales features of a particular product. Often institutional copy is also narrative in because it lends warmth to the organization. Service ads, such as ads of banks, insurance companies, public utilities, and large manufacturing concerns are the most common users of the institutional copy.
Advertisers use the narrative copy to tell a story. It often sets up a problem and then creates a solution using the particular sales features of the product or service. It may then suggest that the audiences use the same solution if they have that problem. Service advertisements are often written in this . 

翻译考点：
考点1：“institutional copy”应译为“机构宣传正文”或“机构广告正文”
考点2：“advertisement slogan”推荐译为“广告标语”，不可译为“口号”。
考点3：“exceptionally fast and bright”应译为“出色的大光圈性能和进光量”，不可直译为“异常快速且明亮”
考点4：“wasted the greatest percent of his money”中的“the greatest percent”推荐译为“大部分的”，不可直译为“最大比例的”