Rhetoric-Practice-Exercise
Book Review: The Underground Railway
The story behind advertisements
Rhetoric is the study of how language is used in a skillful way to organize and maintain social groups, coordinate behaviors, share powers, and generally spread knowledge. Advertisements have adopted this tactic of language use to pass information with a story behind it. The novel The Underground Railroad integrates and evaluates multiple publications from the 19th century and use rhetoric to tell the story behind those advertisements. Some of the ads in this novel are real advertisements that were published by the government and landlords during slavery in the United States. The commercials tell about the nation’s past, and they have a tricky relationship with the truth. The story simplifies the advertisements to show themes like fundamental injustice, brutality, inhumanity, and the cruelty of slavery. The book also recognizes and, rhetorically, through the ad, tells a story about the unrecognized men, women, and children. They have gone down in history, having contributed to economic development by offering labor (Matthew et al., 2017).
The story behind the advertisements in the novel is a history of North America. During slavery, many slaves tried to escape, and since newspapers were standard, their masters placed run-away-advertisements on them. The information in the advertisements gave details about the individual’s economic, demographic, social, and cultural history of slavery. Ads that tell a story are hard to ignore; hence their message is passed across quickly. Facts and ideas in advertisements need a rhetoric genre of storytelling for it to have an impact on the emotions and therefore influence decision making. It is the skill that involves giving someone else an idea and having them take full ownership of it and take action. Rhetoric can hence be employed in the advertisement as the means of language use to connect your ideas, products, and services with imaginations of the audience.
An example is the typical story of Cinderella that uses a formula that is easy to understand. The story starts with misfortune and represents the old way of doing things or rather the past products. The next in the story is a journey faced with challenges. Finally, the flight arrives at a great fortune, and this represents decision making to buy the product or service. Language is vital in every aspect of the advertisement.
References
Dischinger, Matthew. “States of Possibility in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad.” Global South 11.1 (2017): 82-99.