Metadiscourse in advertising : Persuasion in online advertisements of makeup brands.

Abstract: E-commerce has exploded and with that also advertisements online. To get customers to stay as customers with your company, advertisements become more and more persuasive. To measure this persuasion metadiscourse has been used as a method for this investigation. The aim of this paper is to find out the ways companies use language and discourse to entice customers and keep them buying products. The material chosen for this investigation was advertisements extracted from web pages of make-up brands. Hyland´s categories of metadiscourse were used to extract the relevant features from the advertisements. The results were that all advertisements that had metalinguistic features were also persuasive. Persuasive language occurs as boosters, engagement markers and self-mentions. Also, the metalinguistic features that occur in this investigation are the three categories mentioned above. Further investigation into this topic would be to only view editorial parts of advertisements which most likely will broaden the results within all categories from Hyland´s view of metadiscourse.