Advertising books: a linguistic analysis of blurbs

Advertising books: a linguistic analysis of blurbs

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The purpose of this paper is to present a preliminary approach to the study of blurbs, brief texts traditionally displayed on bookcovers, and nowadays also on the Internet, which provide information about a book to potential readers.This study Butterfly Acrylic Plaque focuses on four of the most widelyknown publishing and bookselling companies in the English-speaking world: Penguin, Ballantine, Routledge, and Barnes & Noble, and analyses more than 60 blurbs displayed on their web sites.The study indicates that blurbs may constitute a genre characterised by a definite communicative purpose and by the use of specific linguistic and discourse conventions.

Blurbs perform an informative function based on the description of the contents of a book.But this function is secondary to their persuasive purpose, characteristic of advertising discourse, because blurbs recommend the book by means of Soccer - Bags review extracts from various sources in an attempt to persuade the prospective reader to buy the "product." In order to achieve their communicative purpose, blurbs make use of a wide range of linguistic and discourse conventions typical of advertising discourse: complimenting, elliptical syntactic patterns, the imperative, the address form "you," and what I have called "curiosity arousers," usually in the form of rhetorical questions and excerpts from the book.