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Getting to the Point (A Comparison of Rhetorical Strategies) Essay

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Lutz vs. O’Neill: Getting to the Point
Advertising is all around us. Companies of all sorts rely heavily on internet, television, print, and various other types of media outlets as means to reach their audience. Advertising aims to bring in more customers and thereby, more profit. All of this is complicated by the fact that, out of the vast number of products and services available, companies want to prove that theirs are the best. From this is born the tricky and unique language of advertising. In their respective articles, With These Words, I Can Sell You Anything and The Language of Advertising, both William Lutz and Charles A. O’Neill discuss popular ploys used by marketing advertisers to rope in the most customers. Lutz takes a …show more content…

He and Lutz’s arguments coincide on the grounds that advertising is primarily about selling a product, and that there is unique language involved in doing so. O’Neill suggests that “Advertising is nothing more than the delivery system for salesmanship” and asserts that it is the consumer, not the advertisers, with the power to buy or not buy a good or service. He later delves into the many techniques used by advertising agencies, from their unique advertising speak to the powerful imagery used to capture the attention of their demographic. Lutz, in his contention, does not seem to be trying to appeal to a specific audience. He rather chooses a stance right off the bat and presses the reader to go along with it through a myriad of non-specific examples and little offering of a counter argument. Lutz therein gives the reader little room to come up with his or her own opinion. This could work to Lutz’s benefit or his hindrance because the reader is really only given two choices; to agree or to disagree. A reader in agreement with Lutz’s argument is given every reason to be. A reader in opposition however can easily point to a lack of substantial evidence to back up some of his claims. Though Lutz does give many examples to support his opinion, they are often either broad generalizations or the author simply using of a lot of words to convey a very basic message. Lutz does however appeal to his audience in that he cites many familiar slogans and products and dissects them

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