World Class Lecture: Prof. Vijay K. Bhatia in English Literature of University of Sumatera Utara

Summary

In a detailed exploration of genre analysis, Professor Vijay K. Bhatia delves into the complexities of how genres are structured and understood, emphasizing their communicative purposes. He draws distinctions between different definitions of genre provided by various theorists and connects these to practical examples, such as book blurbs and advertisements. With an engaging narrative, Prof. Bhatia outlines the evolution of genres over time and how they reflect particular social and professional practices. Attendees are encouraged to consider the pervasive nature of genre in communication and its importance in both academic and commercial contexts.

Highlights

• Professor Bhatia shares exciting examples of genre analysis through book blurbs and advertisements. 📚
• The historical development of genres, such as research articles, is discussed in detail. 📜
• Genre is portrayed as a tool for understanding both professional and social communication practices. 💼
• Attendees are encouraged to apply genre analysis in their research, especially for thesis writing. 🎓
• The discussion extends to how modern media and advertising continuously innovate within genre frameworks. 📲

Key Takeaways

• Genre analysis is a fascinating field that examines the structures and meanings of various forms of communication. 📚
• Professor Bhatia offers insights into the evolution of genre, using engaging examples like book blurbs and advertisements. 🧠
• Genres are defined by their communicative purposes and are crucial in understanding how information is shared across different platforms. 🎯
• The lecture emphasizes the importance of genre in both academic and commercial spheres, showing its universal relevance. 🌎
• Prof. Bhatia highlights the need for understanding genre theory to enhance research and communication skills. 📈

Overview

Professor Vijay K. Bhatia's lecture on genre analysis offers a deep dive into the intricacies of how different genres are structured and understood. With a comedic approach at times, he explores the historical evolution of genres and how they serve as a fundamental part of communication across various platforms. Through engaging examples such as book blurbs and advertisements, attendees gain insights into the practical applications of genre theory.

The lecture positions genre as a means of understanding the intent and structure behind different forms of writing and communication. Professor Bhatia contrasts different definitions from notable theorists, such as John Swales and Caroline Miller, highlighting their importance in shaping our understanding of genre analysis today. With excursions into the history of research articles, the discussion paints a vivid picture of genres developing over time.

Professor Bhatia's talk places significant emphasis on the relevance of genre in both academic and commercial contexts. He encourages students and scholars to adopt genre analysis as a tool for enhancing their research and communication skills, particularly in modern mediatized environments. This lecture not only offers theoretical insights but also practical guidance for applying genre analysis effectively in various fields.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Welcome Professor Vijay Kumar Bhatti welcomes students to the session. He is a PhD and a professor in the Department of English at the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, City University of Hong Kong. The session provides an opportunity to hear Professor Bhatti's perspective on the presented topics.
• 00:30 - 01:30: Prof. Vijay K. Bhatia's Introduction The chapter begins with an introduction by a host, welcoming the audience to a three-day event. The host expresses hope that the event will be enjoyable and beneficial for the attendees' future research related to the topic being discussed. The host then introduces Prof. Vijay K. Bhatia, who is referred to as 'prophet batiya', and invites him to start his presentation. Prof. Bhatia thanks the host and proceeds to share his screen to begin the presentation.
• 01:30 - 04:30: Genre Theory Overview In this chapter, the presentation begins with ensuring that the participants can see the shared screen.
• 04:30 - 10:00: Definitions and Theories of Genre The chapter begins with an introduction from the speaker, who expresses gratitude for the welcoming introduction and expresses pleasure in being virtually present in Indonesia. The speaker reminisces about their last visit to Indonesia, which was a long time ago, coming from Singapore, but notes the benefit of keeping in touch through virtual means. The chapter sets the stage for a two-lecture series held over the days the speaker is addressing the audience.
• 10:00 - 18:00: Analyzing Genre: Newspaper Reports and Discourse In the chapter titled "Analyzing Genre: Newspaper Reports and Discourse," the speaker begins by addressing the audience, acknowledging a varied level of familiarity with genre theory or genre analysis. The speaker makes no assumptions about the audience's background knowledge in this area, acknowledging that some may be entirely new to the subject. The goal of the chapter is to provide an introduction to genre analysis, ensuring accessibility to those with little to no prior knowledge.
• 18:00 - 26:30: Genre Analysis Model and Critical Perspective The chapter introduces the concept of genre analysis by exploring various definitions and perspectives on genre as articulated by different scholars. It aims to familiarize readers with the theoretical underpinnings of genre analysis by providing detailed examples that facilitate better understanding. While the chapter delves into some theoretical aspects, it primarily focuses on practical analysis, ensuring it remains accessible and comprehensible to readers who might already have some familiarity with such analyses.
• 26:30 - 41:00: Blurb Genre: History and Analysis The chapter begins with the speaker outlining their approach to analyzing different types of texts. The speaker references John Swales, an academic they worked with in the 1980s while pursuing their PhD in Birmingham. Together, they focused on defining genre and specifically worked on the analysis of legal genres.
• 41:00 - 64:00: Further Analysis: Advertisements and Linguistic Devices The chapter titled 'Further Analysis: Advertisements and Linguistic Devices' explores the concept of 'genre' in academic contexts. It highlights a definition from a book written in 1990, stating that a genre is a class of communicative events. These events, as described, involve different forms of communication, whether it be in writing, speech, video, or audio. The chapter seems to delve into how different media facilitate communication in various academic and scholarly disciplines.
• 64:00 - 71:00: Break The chapter titled 'Break' discusses the concept of communion as a class. It highlights that communion is not about a singular text or event but involves a collection of similar communicative events. The individuals who participate in these events share a common understanding of the purpose behind their communication, leading to a unified objective when they interact with one another.
• 71:00 - 100:00: Advertisements and their Impact on Communication This chapter delves into the role of advertisements within the broader frame of communications. It asserts that the awareness and sharing of advertisements' communicative purposes are crucial, especially among discourse communities. These communities, composed of experts, recognize specific purposes behind the advertisements, which in turn define their genre. Essentially, communicative purposes provide the rationale for a genre, and this understanding helps in identifying and categorizing advertisements within the appropriate genre. The chapter aims to clarify these concepts by further disambiguating the connection between communicative intent and genre classification.
• 100:00 - 110:00: Discussion and Questions The chapter titled 'Discussion and Questions' revolves around the concept of community within the realm of newspaper writing and journalism. It highlights the various participants in the community such as journalists and educated readers who frequently engage with newspapers and news reports. The discussion is likely centered on the roles and interactions of these community members.

World Class Lecture: Prof. Vijay K. Bhatia in English Literature of University of Sumatera Utara Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 [Music] okay i would like to welcome you here uh their students prof uh vijay kumar bhatti i'm a phd is a professor in department of english college of liberal arts and social sciences city university of hong kong so it's it is a good time for us here to listen to prophecy bhartiya point of view on the topics presented for the
• 00:30 - 01:00 three days consecutive days i hope that you will enjoy and can do something on your next research dealing with this topic okay ladies and gentlemen please join me to welcome prophet batiya to do the presentation prophecy the screen is yours thank you thank you dr sawyen now let me actually share my screen
• 01:00 - 01:30 okay can you see the screen hello yes yes yes we can see that okay okay right
• 01:30 - 02:00 okay let's begin thank you very much for a very generous introduction and welcoming me and it's a pleasure to be in indonesia after a long long time you know i remember when i came there it was long time ago from singapore after that i haven't been able to come but this is a virtual trip so i don't mind at all so long as we are in touch with each other right okay now in the in two lecture series today and tomorrow
• 02:00 - 02:30 uh this is for um you know the audience i don't know exactly you know what are the who are the people actually but i assume that you will probably have some understanding or maybe a little bit of an awareness of genre theory or genre analysis uh but i don't assume any background knowledge on your part simply because i know there will be some people who may not have any idea about general analysis so what i want to do is today i will
• 02:30 - 03:00 introduce genre analysis what we mean by genre analysis how do we define it how different people have defined it and then secondly i will analyze a few examples in detail so that you know how it works so there'll be a little bit of theory but mostly on analysis which most of you will be able to understand and i hope and i'm sure most of you will be familiar with the kinds of analyses i'm
• 03:00 - 03:30 going to do or kind of kinds of texts i'm going to analyze right then let's go now when it comes to defining genre john swales who i worked with in the 80s in birmingham he was my phd supervisor i was doing my thesis and we also worked on legal genres and
• 03:30 - 04:00 academic genres now later on he wrote the book in 1990 where he defines genre as follows a genre comprises a class of communicative events now communicative events means any event where two people or three people or one person communicates it may be in writing it may be in speech it may be in one video or it may be audio or any kind of you know medium
• 04:00 - 04:30 and it's it's a class of communion we are not talking about one particular text or one particular event it's a class so many examples of the same communicative event so it's a group of communicative events and the members who participate in this they share they have a common understanding of the communicative purpose of that communication when they communicate talk to each other they have a common purpose and they are
• 04:30 - 05:00 aware of it and that awareness or sharing is very important for us now these purposes are recognized by expert members of the parent discourse community and thereby constitute the rationale for the genre so these communicative purposes are the way we define genre we identify genre because they actually provide the rationale let us disambiguate it a little bit further
• 05:00 - 05:30 they share the first thing is that the members of the community for example if you think of newspaper um writing or newspaper genres or news reports then of course the members of the community now who is the community there are journalists there are educated people who regularly read newspapers and news reports and
• 05:30 - 06:00 there are some people who probably are beginners but those people who are actually part of the community who have been there reading newspaper reports looking at newspaper reports on a regular basis they are the members of a community and when you are actually a member of what he calls discourse community then of course you know what we mean by news reports you have some certain expectations you share with
• 06:00 - 06:30 the writer you know what exactly do we expect the news reports to be about and how these are written so it provides some kind of a rationale some kind of an understanding of genre how do we recognize the integrity of the genre no communicative purpose the rationale which means the communicative purpose it shapes the schematic structure of this course schematic structure the way it is put
• 06:30 - 07:00 together the way it is organized rhetorically and it gives them a little bit of shape a flexible shape but still quite conventional quite standardized of discourse it influences and it constrains the choice of content and style and how it is written always keeping in mind what the other people who are reading it what the other people
• 07:00 - 07:30 are expecting from you so you have to when you are involved in any kind of genre writing then you have to be aware of the communicative purpose and your style should be in keeping with the kind of style and the kind of content the kinds of things you can talk about the kinds of things you can't talk about for example if you're talking about newspaper reports then most of the people who who are involved in writing the journalists they know
• 07:30 - 08:00 what the readers are going to expect they know they cannot use anything that they like they have to report facts they have to see what is available in the world outside what is it that they have witnessed and they have to report it exactly that way so these are the expectations and they try to meet those expectations and the communicative purpose therefore is both a privileged criterion this is the main criterion of course
• 08:00 - 08:30 there are other possibilities like you know there could be who are the people who are writing it who are the people you know in what kind of situation you read and write and what kind of you say style you write in so all these things are there they are important but the privilege the most important actually criterion for identifying genre is the communicative purpose
• 08:30 - 09:00 and it forces people the writers particularly and even the readers informed readers something members of the discourse community to look at it in a particular way so that they can actually focus on comparable rhetorical action rhetorical action means the way you write it the discursive event the way you write it how do you organize it so you they narrowly focus on the way news reports are written
• 09:00 - 09:30 or they narrowly focus on the way research articles are written by academics or the way law reports are written by lawyers so anything which is identified on the basis of a communicative event or communicative purpose as an instance of a genre it has all kinds of constraints now by the way this is not the only definition we have in the community that is one definition
• 09:30 - 10:00 which is given by swales now caroline miller oh sorry it is not 1884 it is 1984. sorry for the title now she is also a genre analyst but she comes from america and the american tradition is slightly different from what john swales and i did in britain so
• 10:00 - 10:30 there is a you know the uk version of genre and there is an american version of genre and she describes genre as a conventional category of discourse a conventional we are talking about conventions even in soils work you know that is what people share category of discourse based in large scale typification of rhetorical action typification is the term now typically
• 10:30 - 11:00 used by members of a particular community which amounts to the same thing that all those people who share rhetorical purposes they share the communicative purpose here they are talking about the rhetorical action action is the same as you know discursive action you can write it you can do things and you can um write it in any medium so that is typical of a discourse community so typical of for example i
• 11:00 - 11:30 talked about the journalists it is typical of journalists to write newspaper reports in a particular way so that is how we identified and it requires meaning from situation and from the social context in which situation arose so they actually bring in the situation or the social context so that is the second definition the way it is distinguished by caroline miller similarly at the same time in australia
• 11:30 - 12:00 jim martin defines genres in his own way and he comes from systemic functional linguistics and he is a basically he's a grammarian he is a linguist uh less of discourse analysis but he defines genre as a staged goal-oriented social process again he talks about social process whereas john swells talks about a community purpose a discourse community he says the social purpose
• 12:00 - 12:30 it's much wider but at the same time it is goal-oriented which simply means it has certain communicative purposes to achieve and it is done in different stages we'll talk about those stages we'll talk about those uh rhetorical organization a little bit later now this means essentially that when looking at genre we are especially interested in the way they achieve their social purpose which they usually do in more than one
• 12:30 - 13:00 step so they go a little bit further they talk about the steps that people normally take in order to organize what you if you think of the newspaper report that case i think the similar exam same example you take then of course there are certain steps certain stages the steps are you have to have a headline then you have actually the summary of that and then the events one after the other and that's how it goes it's all done in stages
• 13:00 - 13:30 so if you compare now the three definitions of if you compare the three definitions what we can summarize what we can actually find common ground is it's an investigation of situated linguistic behavior it is linguistic behavior we're talking about language
• 13:30 - 14:00 now language may be spoken it may be written it may be visual it may be recorded or whatever you know can be medium you can think of but it is situated in a particular situation so it can be defined as a typification of rhetorical action as the americans did or it could be regular regularities of staged goal-oriented social processes as did martin or it may be consistency of
• 14:00 - 14:30 communicative purpose but if you think of the common ground one of the things which comes out very clearly is that most of the people who participate in this kind of genre which is either a rhetorical action or a rhetorical or social goal achievement or any other kind of communicative event a it is conventional it is standardized
• 14:30 - 15:00 to a large extent how do we see it is as standardized that means if there are 50 people or 100 people or thousands of people in the world who write newspaper reports in different parts of the world in different countries in different media houses most of them more or less write the same way because there are conventions there is common understanding how come all these people
• 15:00 - 15:30 actually write the same way and how come all over the world people expect the readers expect the same kind of genre from these people now that is what is what we call it is typical it is regular it is consistent whether you look at historical action or whether you look at the social process or whether you look at the communicative purpose the consistency the repetition
• 15:30 - 16:00 the common element is that the whole community the members of the community all the members of the community they think alike they share these purposes they share this rhetorical action they share social processes and goals so that is actually in nutshell what genre is all about so it is a communicative event which is standardized conventionalized to a large extent which is typical of a particular discourse community or a particular you
• 16:00 - 16:30 know community or a particular particular social process and to achieve certain goals and community getting communicative purposes so that's how genre analysis is defined and understood now let us look at a more general scenario now take any particular text it can be
• 16:30 - 17:00 viewed as just a text for example if you take an essay written by a student or a research article written by an academic or a textbook written by a textbook writer it can be seen as a text which means it has certain way of organizing it has words and phrases paragraphs and
• 17:00 - 17:30 meanings associated with that right so the organization and everything is part of the text so it can just be considered as text and you can analyze text as such you don't have to go beyond it if you are analyzing this as a text but at the same time it is possible to see any of these events any of these examples whether it is a newspaper report or whether it is a textbook or a research article or a
• 17:30 - 18:00 student essay can be considered as a genre because it is meant to achieve a specific communicative purpose a student essay when they write it they write it as a genre there are fixed ways of writing an essay and you're doing it to achieve to kind of write an essay for examination or for submission to your teacher and you have some understanding of what the teacher expects and the teacher has some understanding of what the students are
• 18:00 - 18:30 expected to write so you share this kind of understanding which is part of the classroom work that you do similarly textbooks a textbook writer knows how to do it how to write a textbook what is the purpose of the textbook in what way he can or she can actually write so that the students can understand it what is the relationship between the reader and the writer the students and the textbook writer the
• 18:30 - 19:00 same goes for any other kind of text any other example that you can take in addition to that you can go a little bit further and you can look at it the same thing you can look at it as part of professional practice student essay is part of academic practice in the university textbook is part of academic practice in the university education system
• 19:00 - 19:30 the authors they are part of the the part of the profession and they have certain practices they have certain ways of doing things so textbook can be part of professional practice you can go even further and broadly think of a textbook as coming from a particular professional culture for example a textbook in
• 19:30 - 20:00 accounting will reflect accounting culture the culture of the people who actually are experts in accounting if you take a legal textbook it will reflect to some extent legal culture so the writer of the textbook the writer of the research article they are all familiar with and they're part of this professional culture the professional culture is some kind of a mindset mindset you know every
• 20:00 - 20:30 discipline has its own professional culture every discipline has its own mindset if you think about it then of course you can actually compare how the accountants think about their job and how the lawyers think about their job how the marketing person thinks of their job because they have their own mindset different mindsets but when you look at this kind of
• 20:30 - 21:00 analysis then at the bottom end you have the text but as you move up you are moving towards context the context is defined in one sense as genre or as professional practice or professional culture they provide the context in which the text is written the text is interpreted the text is analyzed the text is
• 21:00 - 21:30 reacted to the uptake of the text depends on these contextual factors on the other hand if you look at it when you talk about text and part of the genre you are talking about discourse now making a distinction between text and discourse this course is the value of a particular text a text is a physical representation of words phrases sentences paragraphs and
• 21:30 - 22:00 chapters and things of that kind but when you think of a genre you are talking more about not one particular kind of text but a kind of entity which we are familiar with a textbook and the moment you analyze it you consider this as professional practice in addition to genre and text you are studying
• 22:00 - 22:30 performance how people perform how the textbook writer performs how does he do it and that is an important aspect of any kind of analysis any kind of analysis and if you go even further and talk about professional culture then you are talking about the identification of the writer as a valid member of a particular
• 22:30 - 23:00 professional culture an effective and useful and successful member of a particular community for example textbook writer if a textbook writer writes a very good book textbook which is very successful to a large extent it will reflect the disciplinary culture the disciplinary mindset
• 23:00 - 23:30 now it is a different matter these days because you do have nowadays interdisciplinary textbooks but let us not go into that we will talk about these maybe perhaps at some other time so considering this kind of understanding i developed a model for discourse analysis model for genre analysis in 2004 where i said
• 23:30 - 24:00 you can actually have a disc textual perspective means means simply look at the text and you want to analyze it analyze this course as text and you are within a textual space you operate within the space which is provide that means a text which is given to you so you actually look at the whole paragraph the complete paragraphs a complete textbook or a complete research
• 24:00 - 24:30 article or maybe perhaps you know any other thing or even you know um a kind of research article or maybe perhaps your student essays that you write or reports that you write and in order to understand that in order to analyze it you need textual knowledge knowledge of the language knowledge of the way sentences are written the knowledge of the way sentences are put together into paragraphs the knowledge of the semantics the meaning system of
• 24:30 - 25:00 language how meaning is reflected in language so you do look at all these things but the moment you go to the higher level then i have combined the two the professional practice and discourse as genre because they have a shared understanding they operate within what i call socio-pragmatic space
• 25:00 - 25:30 which is not simply social but also pragmatic because people do actually manipulate in order to be effective manipulates resources that you have linguistic resources that you have how do you actually make use of language not everybody will write if you're thinking of you know newspaper reports then all the reporters do not write exactly the same way although they have the same conventions but they write differently
• 25:30 - 26:00 they want to be innovative they want to be more effective and everybody has his or her own style of writing so there is a bit of manipulation a bit of exploitation that takes place so actually if you think of discourse as genre and discourse as professional practice then of course they are they have some kind of a common area of expertise which i put it as sociopragmatic and strain you can go a little bit further
• 26:00 - 26:30 this course of social practice now here we are not talking about genres we're talking about discourses in general now for example you know two people talking to each other casual talk and if you want to analyze that then of course yes it is the social interaction you're talking about and you are entirely within a social space and all you need is social knowledge what sort of social knowledge that if
• 26:30 - 27:00 two people are talking then there are ways of communicating with each other nobody no not two people speak at the same time this is part of a social understanding when you are talking then of course one person speaks at a time and then the topics that you normally raise and the kinds of things that you talk about they are in a way interrelated or contextually related or similar you cannot talk about three entirely different things in a matter of one
• 27:00 - 27:30 minute and switch topics you know at random you don't do that so there are social um practices we don't want to talk about that is not the area i'm interested in so when we talk about genre i'm particularly interested in the middle circle sociopragmatic space so if you look at the bottom side you have a textual practice and if you look at the top end it is socio-critical perspective
• 27:30 - 28:00 and of course in between in the middle you have professional practice and genre theory particularly focuses on professional practice and on the other hand you have a discursive practice which means discuss the practice what i mean is how people write the practice of writing now writing simply doesn't mean that you have to write a text you may probably be speaking
• 28:00 - 28:30 way i am doing it i'm performing a discussion practice but at the same time i'm working within a professional practice because i'm talking about a professional discourse as professional practice as an academic this is a very typical practice for people or to professors to talk about give lectures
• 28:30 - 29:00 on these days online lectures webinars and things of that kind and then there are social purposes social practices which are you know beyond our concern at this stage now that given that kind of background i don't want to give you more theory there's a lot more but i don't want to give you at this stage i'll talk about it a
• 29:00 - 29:30 little bit more tomorrow when i give you another talk second session so at the moment that is all the theory i want you to understand now the next question that arises is how do we analyze how do we practice this theory how do we make use of this kind of understanding in order to analyze genre and i want to take up
• 29:30 - 30:00 a very unfamiliar genre which many of us may not probably be aware of as it exists although we might have seen all of them and what i call are what is socially in society society has actually a way of giving names to these genres but these names are not given all of a sudden these names are given over a period of time genre names are created over a long
• 30:00 - 30:30 period of time maybe 10 10 years 20 years why because you have to have a common understanding a shared understanding of communicative purposes amongst all the members of the or most of the members of a particular community so if you all of a sudden say i want to give this text a particular name a particular name to this particular genre then of course
• 30:30 - 31:00 other people may not be aware of it and it will not be conventionalized it may not be standardized it may probably take a long time to do it and to give you some understanding of that there is a very interesting book written by charles bazelman and what he did was he traced the birth of what we know today so commonly is the research article
• 31:00 - 31:30 journal research the journal articles were not created overnight and he goes to 1920s and 1930s the time of newton and other people and in the beginning when he traced their history he discovered that in the beginning when these people were doing research they had no way of writing there were no conventions of writing so they were writing in the form of individual letters communicating with
• 31:30 - 32:00 friends and colleagues look this is what i did the other day and this is what i found and the other person will respond saying oh that is interesting i did this something like this and i found something different so they used to communicate and spread knowledge through letters it was only after about 20 30 years the name the research article was invented a research report was
• 32:00 - 32:30 invented and the name was given and later on the journals were established so it has a long history so what i mean is when we talk about conventions when we talk about standardizations when we think about the names given to these genres they are conventionalized and conventions take a long period of time to get known to get shared by members of a particular community
• 32:30 - 33:00 if you are not a member of a particular community then of course you may not have any understanding of that so let us take actually an unfamiliar genre of course which is now known as book blurbs imagine that you have never heard of the name book blurs and you want to analyze examples of that
• 33:00 - 33:30 you have to acquire some kind of knowledge about this genre where do you get it from these days it's very easy these days you just go to google and it gives you practically everything anything that you need you get knowledge about that but some 30 years ago 20 years ago 40 years ago there was no google and people had to go to dictionaries people had to do all kinds of research go to the library spend a lot of time in
• 33:30 - 34:00 order to find out what book blurb is like and this is what if you do that then this is what you get origin of blurbs it was originated in 1907 by an author named gale burgess he was writing a comic book
• 34:00 - 34:30 and on the jacket of the comic book he embellished a drawing of altitudinous young lady a fat attractive very very romantic looking you know young lady whom he specially called dubbed as miss belinda blurb so he had this picture of this lady and he called it she is miss belinda blur that was the name given to her
• 34:30 - 35:00 and then what happened in 1914 after several years he defined blurb as such people asked him you know why do you call her blurb and he says because blurb is a flamboyant advertisement an inspirational testimonial which is full of praise as it sounds like a publisher on
• 35:00 - 35:30 the jacket of the latest fiction we find the blurb any book today if you lay take any book then on the book jacket particularly the back side the back page you find a blur and the blurb is written in agile adjectives abundance of adjectives and adverbs attesting that this book is the sensation of the year
• 35:30 - 36:00 which means it's a kind of an advertisement so blurb is seen as a kind of advertisement for a book which is always published on the jacket of the book the back side of the book okay that is one interpretation there are more modern interpretations
• 36:00 - 36:30 for example birchfield in 72 he says a brief descriptive paragraph a note of the contents are characters of a book printed as a commendary advertisement on the jacket or a wrapper of a newly published book these days they are very common anywhere you find books and you go to the back of the book first because that gives you a brief introduction to what the book is all about so it can be considered as a fine a kind of you
• 36:30 - 37:00 know brief advertisement much later longman's dictionary of mass media says commendatory publicity release or advertisement one which is often inordinate in its praise are boosting of a new subject also called a puff peace the blurb is a puff piece which means fulsome in praise
• 37:00 - 37:30 you always talk about good things about the book as you do in advertising and it often appears on a book jacket so now you know what we are talking about we're talking about a genre which is known as book blurbs which is published on the jacket the back you know side of the book and it gives some introduction on the content of the book and of course
• 37:30 - 38:00 it is very commendatory can be seen as an advertisement okay now let us look at now as a genre we give it a context so what do we understand now what's the communicative purpose the communicative purpose is to describe and evaluate the book and how because you want to influence future
• 38:00 - 38:30 actions attitudes and judgments of the readers you write it because you know the people will go to the back of the book first and you want to influence their future actions so that they can buy your book they get attracted by your book the attitudes change and they make a judgment about buying a book or not buying a book that is the purpose of the blood situation what kind of situation the
• 38:30 - 39:00 message needs to be brief effective and adequate to fit the constraints of a book jacket when you talk about book jacket there's limited space and you can't write too much because the moment you write too much in small print then of course the readers will lose interest in it when they go to a bookshop several books they pick up one they hardly have a few
• 39:00 - 39:30 maybe a minute or two to read it so you have to write your message in such a way that it is effective it is brief and it is adequate so that it can be contained on the book jacket now an important part of contextual configuration is participants who are the participants
• 39:30 - 40:00 now that is a real mystery it wasn't then in early days but these days today it is mysterious because we are living in a promotional culture everything is being advertised everything is being recommended or downgraded or probably com there's so much of competitive environment different products of the same kind are thrown at us
• 40:00 - 40:30 and it all depends on how you present yourself so that raises an interesting question because it's an advertisement so who are the real writers of blurbs is it the author who has written the book because the author is probably the best person to write because he knows what he has written or think of the other side if the author
• 40:30 - 41:00 writes an advertisement for his own book that is the question of trust whether the readers will trust him because you always appreciate your own book for you it is probably the best book in the world so very rarely in fact in almost every case i haven't seen any author writing the blurb or at least it is not presented
• 41:00 - 41:30 the writer as a reader as i write her as no the writer of the book as the writer of the blurb it is generally put there on behalf of the publisher or the publisher does it on behalf of the author so but the publisher may not probably have a good idea of the value of the book so what they normally do is that is
• 41:30 - 42:00 something which is quite interesting they ask the writer they ask the writer to write an introduction to the book and then they take some parts of it and then put it as blur so that is the trick that most people follow medium is mainly written it allows the writer to develop topics arguments as fully as necessary
• 42:00 - 42:30 the reader's point of view is that the written medium reflects avoidance of textual patterns and what happens is when you are writing you can't write in a very complex and difficult manner unless you have a very specific audience in mind so there are ways of writing it you don't repeat too much because you have limited space you don't actually write in a very
• 42:30 - 43:00 complicated convoluted metaphors which need quite a bit of unpacking in order to understand so the channel has some effect on how these things are written the content that is actually a very important thing to a large extent it is influenced by the subject matter of the book you don't write the blurb of a blurb for a detective
• 43:00 - 43:30 storybook the same way as you do for an academic book you don't like the blurb the same way for a classic by a very well established author the same way as you do by a novice writer a new writer a person who writes his first book
• 43:30 - 44:00 so the content all depends on the book and we'll give you examples now it'll be quite interesting to see how the content determines now let us take an example one example and the example i have taken is the empire of fear brian's table four now i'll give you a minute to read it it's a magnificent epic set in an exotic
• 44:00 - 44:30 empire moving from 17th to 20th century and from england to africa malta america the empire of fear is a huge hugely ambitious alternate history it is about alternate history set in a world which diverged from our own when attila and dahun established an empire ruled by vampire aristocracy this is the kind of thing you are talking about and it goes on now
• 44:30 - 45:00 let us look at it more closely now the kinds of words and phrases are predominant it's a typical combination of promotional and descriptive elements note particularly the nature of range of adjectives it depends on the nature of the book that we talked about a minute ago like it talks about a magnificent epic set in an exotic empire
• 45:00 - 45:30 it has some kind of an eerie feeling about it you know as if something which is beyond the experience of most people today it's hugely ambitious alternate history it's not history it's alternate history an astonishing array of colorful characters everything is so attractive but in a mysterious manner crossing the genres between fantasy
• 45:30 - 46:00 science fiction historical fiction and gothic horror so the kinds of things they talk about so you still wonder what is it how do you classify this the empire of fear is a fabulous adventure it provides a fascinating exploration of a culture so consider there are adjectives there are adverbs
• 46:00 - 46:30 predominantly as you do in advertising but the typical narrative form also depends on the nature now look at the narration the story begins in 17th century london after his bizarre death edmund's son knoll flees london moving from medieval superstition into an age of science and reason and it goes on like this as if you know unfolding a story
• 46:30 - 47:00 you remember the narrative the story you know from even you know whenever you were a child probably you listen to your grandma's you know telling your story once upon a time you know something happened and then after this it happened then after this that's how narration normally goes and you have a similar kind of description here the story begins in the 17th century and of course yes there is an attempt to establish the credentials of the author brian stable
• 47:00 - 47:30 ford is a pre-eminent science fiction critic and his other books are listed to influence your decision that you are not reading a novice writer you are reading a very well established author so this is how it is done now let us take one more example from a very different discipline now the discipline that we are part of at least i am part of discourse analysis
• 47:30 - 48:00 now this is a book which is titled an introduction to discourse analysis is written by james paul g and he is a professor of reading the university of wisconsin medicine and this is what if you look at the first paragraph you have if you only read one book on discourse analysis this is the one to read g shows us that this course analysis is
• 48:00 - 48:30 about a lot more than linguistic study it is about how to keep from as he says getting physically socially culturally and morally bitten by the world and it's written not by the author it's written by ron scotland an old colleague of mine from hong kong but he went to georgetown university later on and he was the one who wrote a kind of review
• 48:30 - 49:00 a brief review a kind of endorsement that you normally find in advertising and then of course yes there's a description of the book now let us look at the words and phrases typical grammatical patterns used here look at the unique integrated approach to discourse analysis analysis of written and spoken english enacts social and cultural perspectives and identities a theory of language and use
• 49:00 - 49:30 as well as methods of research method is a set of tools of inquiry tools of inquiry alongside the theory of language and use and it goes on if you look at these are again adjectives abundance of nominal phrases and adjectives but the nature of adjectives is so very different from the empire of fear this has more like an academic book
• 49:30 - 50:00 now this shows that the audience for this kind of book is restricted these are the people who are only interested in academic works people working researchers people working in this course analysis a very specific area and they are addressing some of those people so they can actually get away with the kind but if you look at the nature of patterns the nature of
• 50:00 - 50:30 words and phrases that are used they are actually same grammatical category abundance of adjectives and adverse but the nature of these adjective networks so different from the earlier one now how it is organized let us see organization of this now that is interesting part of it it has a headline
• 50:30 - 51:00 it has endorsement as we read by ron's colon then there is an attempt to appraise the book assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics it's previewing you know you can preview it you know some indication of you know the book and then you describe it in more detail indicating the value of the book
• 51:00 - 51:30 and then you also identify the market who are the people who are likely because this is if you can think of this this has been slightly longish small print the author can get away with it because it is addressing academics it's addressing people who are interested in discourse analysis a very specific audience this is not meant for masses
• 51:30 - 52:00 on the other hand if you were to write a blurb for a fiction a novel or a drama or collection of poems you'll write it very differently and you will not probably have such a huge list of things to do so it all depends on the kinds of book that you are writing the blurb for you target the market and ultimately you
• 52:00 - 52:30 establish credentials of the author that is the last thing that you normally do sometimes people do it at the bottom right now at the beginning right in the beginning people can do that so there is no way that you can say it always has a fixed pattern not necessarily okay now look at the
• 52:30 - 53:00 we're not talking about individual examples now now we are talking about most of the examples that we have found and what we have done is this structure is based on hundreds of examples of booklets from various you know sources various disciplines and different ways of writing so all of them on the basis of that you always have a headline
• 53:00 - 53:30 to attract readers you justify the book how do you justify the book you establish the field the area of activity they said in this case it said discourse analysis and that said it's an alternate history you establish sometimes you establish a niche for yourself that this kind of book is unique as is done in the endorsement if you have
• 53:30 - 54:00 to read only one book on discourse analysis then this is it you appraise the book how do you appraise it you present a preview you describe the book you indicate the value of the book so these are three stages three steps you take when you appraise the book and of course you establish credentials and then endorsement now endorsements
• 54:00 - 54:30 can be anywhere it can be at the bottom of the blurb it can be beginning of the blurb it can be on the sides or anywhere now that is something very interesting about blurbs the way blurbs are organized when they are organized they do not follow any particular linear model and of course your target market so these are what we call six possible moves we call them moves
• 54:30 - 55:00 you can call them stages you can call them steps whatever so there are six moves in general theory we call them moves if you do this then you have to do this then you have to do this then you do this then you do this so these are the different rhetorical moves that you follow in order to describe a particular structure of the genre now a few
• 55:00 - 55:30 generalities general comments you don't find in every blurb all the moves the ones i have written all of them you may not probably find in every blurb it all depends on how people do it but majority of them will have something of this and some of them may probably be missing so there are
• 55:30 - 56:00 moves which are central for example describing the book or indicating the value of the book or established a field is central establishing credential is very necessary endorsement are not necessary so there are certain moves which are central certain moves which are different people even the structure
• 56:00 - 56:30 or the recurrence or embedding of moves the sequence may not probably be the way we have talked about people can actually have in different sequence sometimes you know a move may probably be disconnected part of this will come in the beginning and part of this will probably come towards the middle the relationship now that is the most important thing now the questions if we analyze this as a text
• 56:30 - 57:00 and if we analyze this as a genre then we are saying that we are analyzing genre but we should not forget that this reminds us of a number of other genres which are similar to this we have already mentioned advertising we are familiar with advertising and book blurbs are probably similar to advertising in certain sense in certain ways
• 57:00 - 57:30 [Music] in some sense they are similar to promotional letters the letters that you find could you please keep yourself on mute so there could be some relationship with promotional letters the letters that you normally get in the
• 57:30 - 58:00 email or maybe perhaps in a letter form in the post advertising products there is something common even to some extent there are similarities between blurbs advertisements and job applications what exactly do you do in job applications you're trying to sell your expertise you're trying to promote your expertise whatever expertise you have
• 58:00 - 58:30 whatever qualifications you have whatever background you have in a way you're trying to sell your services to a prospective employer is there some kind of a connection method matter of investigation but you do actually find a number of other genres which are similar to this are they very different are they very much separate without any overlap or is there an
• 58:30 - 59:00 overlap now that is something which we need to go further when we think of genre analysis but we want to go at some other kind of genres which are related to this and that we can that will probably come under critical genre theory we will probably go to that tomorrow in more detail but let us look at these other related genres
• 59:00 - 59:30 which are not exactly like promotions or promotional or advertising not exactly like blurbs what about book reviews they have elements of promotion in some sense advertisements but they are also criticisms in it whereas book blurbs they only talk about the good things of the book whereas book reviews they talk about
• 59:30 - 60:00 good and bad things about the book the weaknesses of the book the strong elements of the book but there is still some kind of overlap some kind of interesting relationship what about various forms of academic introductions like a preface introduction forward or acknowledgement these are called academic introductions
• 60:00 - 60:30 most of the books will have a preface they will have an introduction some of them will probably have a foreword and some of them will have acknowledgement all these are in some sense remotely though connected with book blurbs or advertising so the thing is when we actually look at any kind of discourse or genre
• 60:30 - 61:00 we want to analyze it it is not enough to focus just on one kind of genre although if you do that then of course yes you will get good interesting findings insights but if you want to do more and if you want to go further and see the relationship and the relationship is not simply that
• 61:00 - 61:30 the relationship is how do you appropriate how do you borrow something that people in advertising do in order to write a book review or in order to write an academic introductions or any form of introductions so you always go to the nearest genre which is related closely related remotely related or whatever so you look at that how this is done there and then you follow you
• 61:30 - 62:00 appropriate appropriate means to borrow and appropriate is not a negative term appropriate simply means you know you can legitimately borrow something which other person has written or which is available i remember the first time and this was about more than 15 years ago or maybe more than that i was asked to write an academic autobiography of mine
• 62:00 - 62:30 there was a book to be published which will which they said will give the stories of academics their success in the academy in the publication industry how they succeeded in getting established as an author and they actually particularly had people who were from second language learning context and different disciplines they had scientists
• 62:30 - 63:00 an accountant they had a business specialist they had you know marketing person they had linguists discourse analysts so so many people and when they asked me to write this the question in my mind occurred i've never actually written my autobiography and this is an academic autobiography i'm not talking about my personal life i'm
• 63:00 - 63:30 talking about my life as an academic what sorts of things i went through how did i what sorts of problems i found how did i overcome those problems how did i get established in the academy or in the published world so my first reaction was let us see what people do in biography autobiographies so you go to the nearest which is close
• 63:30 - 64:00 to what you are doing and then see okay this is what people do now i want to make use of this to write an academic biography and that's how it was done so these things do actually contribute they have because they have relationship you actually take advantage of what is the nearest genre that you are interested in okay
• 64:00 - 64:30 other interesting features of lexical grammar if you want to study and then you'll find interesting patterns promoting books and promoting cosmetics advertising for cosmetics or advertising for books is there a comparison is there an overlap are there any differences book descriptions in blurbs and reviews
• 64:30 - 65:00 adjectives in academic books and in thrillers so what's the nature what's the difference between academic books and academic thrillers or thrillers fictional book descriptions in technical subjects how they describe books in technical subjects and in fiction very interesting to compare but they have relationships in terms of grammatical categories they are similar but in terms of semantics
• 65:00 - 65:30 they're different in terms of effect they're different so these actually give you very interesting topics to explore further to analyze further strategies in promoting classics and books by new authors how do you promote shakespeare and a novice author a new author how do you promote milton and a book of poems written by
• 65:30 - 66:00 a local artist poet similarly strategies to promote classical fiction and detective fiction how do you describe actually the story in classical stories and detective stories how do you make it interesting so these are valid questions valid areas of further
• 66:00 - 66:30 description okay so so much for unfamiliar genres so if you think of genre as i said it is identified in terms of communicative purposes which are achieved through the rhetorical processes of narration you narrate you describe you explain you evaluate instruct and things of that
• 66:30 - 67:00 kind these are the generic values or some people call it actually you know the narrative genres or big genre mega genres and then you have a colony of genres which i call promotional genres and then you get genres different genres book blurbs is a genre book review is a genre advertisement is a genre sales letters a genre job applications are genres and there's so many others
• 67:00 - 67:30 you can go on and we have talked about the related ones let us look at advertisements now advertisements could be tv commercials print advertisements radio advertisements if you classify them in terms of the medium the spoken medium or the visual or the written version and if you look at print advertisements and identify them in terms of products then you can have computer ads you have
• 67:30 - 68:00 book ads airline ads card ads or cosmetic ads all of them are advertisements print advertisements and they are classified in terms of product you can further classify this take airline ads and classify them in terms of audience different audiences vocation advertisements for airlines and that's for business travelers they're entirely different very very different although
• 68:00 - 68:30 all of them are advertisements but depending upon the audience you use your strategies you use your words and phrases which will attract people who go on vocation and people who are business travelers and you know these ads the way they are written so you can see there is an overlap when you are analyzing a genre you are not analyzing a particular example you are analyzing
• 68:30 - 69:00 a class of communicative genres a group of genres because they have relationships across everywhere so even if you take one airline ad and you take 10 examples 20 examples you will probably find they are from different audiences different medium and they are related in different ways the strategies are different so
• 69:00 - 69:30 analyzing genre is a very interesting and effective way of looking at how texts are written how the texts are consumed and communicated to specific audiences now the remaining time that i have i will take the prime example which has actually changed the nature of world we live in today that is advertisements how do we view advertisements
• 69:30 - 70:00 what sorts of things it is very attractive simply because this has been changing every day the way advertisements are done the way they are designed and the way they are thrust upon us it was not for nothing that paco described some time ago he said we are living in a promotional world promotional culture
• 70:00 - 70:30 our culture is promotional we are living in an advertising world there's hardly anything which is not advertised and so much of money resources time is spent on advertisements so let's look at advertisements now i'm wondering whether you want to have a break for about five minutes or shall we continue
• 70:30 - 71:00 yes do i get an indication silvana yes okay shall we take a break or shall we continue ah yes uh maybe you you must be very tired prof uh speaking uh you know most okay let's have a break for five minutes okay yes okay lovely batman is slaving yeah yeah
• 71:00 - 71:30 your participants you can address your questions to professor bhatia through this chat box yeah thank you
• 71:30 - 72:00 and check
• 72:00 - 72:30 shall we start yes okay lovely so let us look at another exponent of genre advertisement it's very attractive simply because advertisements and promotions they have changed the whole world of discourse and it has changed so much and it has made the world interesting for us there's hardly
• 72:30 - 73:00 anything that we do these days which does not involve some form of promotion some form of advertisements you know where you advertise your ideas you promote your own ideas of various kinds different kinds of advertisements you find in the world and it has become part of everything even academic articles abstracts that we write introductions that we write in research
• 73:00 - 73:30 articles they are all a form of promotion in some sense there's some indication of promotion because that is what people want to do for various things so let us look at advertisements you know the hardcore advertisements now what are advertisements advertising is any controlled form of non-personal
• 73:30 - 74:00 presentation it's controlled form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas you promote not simply ideas you can promote goods you can promote services by an identifier sponsor that is used to inform and persuade the selective selected market think of think of this the talk that i'm giving
• 74:00 - 74:30 the way i am presenting it there is an element you probably will notice there's some kind of an element of promotion in it because the way i'm describing genre theory and genre analysis that indicates very clearly that i have i've subscribed to this i find it very attractive and that i pass it on to other people so that other people can follow so there is actually an element of promotion which is part of our culture everyday work that we do
• 74:30 - 75:00 so advertising also has been seen as a means of communication of a promise which is informative educational and persuasive so what you do is through advertisements you promise a particular audience that this is what you will find if you use or if you follow my advice if you follow my product or if you take my services this is what you are likely to get
• 75:00 - 75:30 it's informative in the sense that it informs the consumer about the existence of a want satisfying product or service you need some kind of service you're looking for some kind of product and you need to be informed about it so this is informative in that sense it is educational
• 75:30 - 76:00 in the sense that it increases consumer knowledge enhances judgment and the process of reaching our buying a distinction so it enhances your knowledge consumer knowledge in that sense and its persuasion that it should encourage the reader to try to buy the product or service that is the ultimate so advertisements have three characteristics
• 76:00 - 76:30 jeffrey leach very old colleague of mine who is unfortunately no longer there he was the first linguist who wrote an entire book actually in 1966 on a linguistic study of advertisements and he actually said there are four typical aspects of advertisements which are crucial and which are interesting for linguists it has attention value which means it
• 76:30 - 77:00 draws attention to itself it has to be attractive and you can make it attractive by presenting something which is surprising which is unexpected and which explains that there is something available so it has attention value it should be readable it must sustain the interest it has attracted and this is generally done by
• 77:00 - 77:30 making the message easy to grasp and assimilate there's no point in having an advertisement which people don't understand if it's very complex then of course it's no good people won't read it because these are all unsolicited materials unsolicited you don't ask for it they are thrust upon you they are spread all around they are sent to you on email and you are watching a video and then in between it stops and you get one or two
• 77:30 - 78:00 advertisements go to youtube and every 10 minutes you will find a few advertisements one or two advertisements so they are unsolicited unwanted it has to be memorable because many a times you don't have the need to buy one but the advertisers hope that you will remember it maybe for another six months eight months or a year
• 78:00 - 78:30 when you really need it then the mind it should come to your mind you should be able to remember this is what i read some time ago let's go for it so memorability is under the characteristics and of course yes it should have a selling power if it doesn't have a selling power then there's no point in having an advertisement
• 78:30 - 79:00 arrange and variation in advertising and promotion what sorts of things are advertised you can advertise a product you can advertise a service many a times you have goodwill advertising you're not selling a service or product but just you want to be the good books of people making yourself familiar to people advocacy advertising or even you know the lawyers these days in certain
• 79:00 - 79:30 countries you know they are allowed to advertise infomercial now that is a very interesting way of looking at it infomercials are camouflaged advertisements they are presented as something else as information pieces but they are commercials you may probably find scientific reports
• 79:30 - 80:00 advertisements in the form of a scientific report when you look at it you say oh maybe it looks like a science report but when you read all of it it's an advertisement public service announcements of course the hospitals government pamphlets and everything they advertise and then of course political advertising is very common and the list is
• 80:00 - 80:30 not complete there may be any many many more forms of advertising so what i mean to say is our life in various aspects determines or is dependent on promotion and advertising we indulge in advertising and promoting our own ideas we at the same time we are bombarded by you know advertisements from all different sources
• 80:30 - 81:00 now one of the things which is very typical of hardcore advertisements although these days it's less common but it used to be very common is product differentiation you differentiate your product from other products of similar kind and that reminds me of a very
• 81:00 - 81:30 old story i read and i don't know who the writer is but i read it long time ago and that was something very interesting how people different sellers they compete with each other how they differentiate their products and the story goes like this on one of the streets in london there were two sausage cellars one on the left-hand side of the road the other on the right-hand side of the road one day the left-hand side of the road he had
• 81:30 - 82:00 a board a signboard big signboard on top of his shop which said we sell the best sausages in london but that was on the left-hand side the next day the guy on the right-hand side of the road wanted to out-do him and he says well if he is talking about this then nobody is going to buy my actually sausages and he wrote another one a similar board which said we sell the
• 82:00 - 82:30 best sausages in england of course england is much bigger than london but that was not the end of the story the next day the guy on the left-hand side wrote we sell the best sausages in the world no best sausages in the world what can where can you go beyond this but the advertisers are very clever so what the other guy on the right hand side did on the other side was the
• 82:30 - 83:00 following day we sell sausages to the queen now who could be bigger than queen but that is not where it ended because the guy on the left hand side had a huge placard which simply said god saved the queen that was so interesting so people do actually differentiate their products and of course there are laws now when you actually compare your product with other products
• 83:00 - 83:30 there are laws but people have actually strategies to cover those so that they are not implicated in any kind of illegal you know um advertising and i'll give you examples in a bit so product differentiation is the essence of most of these you know product advertisements the strategies have become different they're not as blatant as you had some 200 years
• 83:30 - 84:00 ago now they play with language that is some of one of the most interesting thing about advertisements the way they exploit language lexico grammar lexico grammar means grammatical items and words words phrases grammatical features you know they exploit them like they create new ones like beauty flow
• 84:00 - 84:30 it's a cleaning product which keeps your house or floor beautiful so instead of saying it keeps your floor beautiful said beauty floor that's a name given to it stroft for strong and soft toilet roll pea nuttiest peanut candy rice krispies the breakfast cereal that
• 84:30 - 85:00 went snap crackle pop this about the cereal people like you know crispy breakfast and the cereals which snap crackle and pop one of the things which can help them to achieve product differentiation successfully is not to compare your product with others but
• 85:00 - 85:30 what they do is they use terms like help like virtual and things of that kind these are what they call weasel words the weasel words are used to evade or retreat from a direct or forthright statement or position you don't want to take a direct position so you use these weasel words like instead of saying this product will keep you young we say this product helps you stay young
• 85:30 - 86:00 so if it doesn't then nobody can go to the courts and complain about it it helps prevent cavities it doesn't mean that it will prevent capital cavities but it helps it helps keep your house germ free these days in the kobit uh 19 context you know you will find most of the sanitizers soaps
• 86:00 - 86:30 and all cleaning equipments so all of them they have numbers 97.5 alcohol free or alcohol 90 germs free 99.9 jobs free still leave one percent in case they are proved wrong similarly the words like virtual are virtually which means in effect but not in fact the seats in this 1994 corvette are
• 86:30 - 87:00 virtually handmade virtually handmade this is a car and it says seats are virtually handmade doesn't mean that they are handmade but virtually they look as if they are handmade similarly words like like if you sip mattis rose wine it's like being transported across the atlantic ocean it's like being transported not actually
• 87:00 - 87:30 you will be transported but it feels like ajax cleans like a white tornado it's like taking a trip to rome you set your foot on alitalia and it's like taking a trip to rome helps you see this advertisers get a license to make things anything possible because of these weasel words they make things possible which are not
• 87:30 - 88:00 possible in reality other expressions like i can be up to as much as tackles fights feed the feel of looks like the look of etc etc so they use all these expressions to create some kind of a imaginary world and they're trying to misguide people into believing that whatever they are selling is really or whatever they are saying is really true about
• 88:00 - 88:30 the product or service they also very cleverly compound words because advertisements you don't actually write lengthy paragraphs so what they do is they have to combine compound these words so that in a limited space a limited number of noun phrases they can put in a lot of information a lot of
• 88:30 - 89:00 good you know positive information yeah for example across the room kind of telephone telephone which is across the room kind of built-in bedroom at a price you can afford built-in bedroom it simply means there's a bedroom within the same room dovetail assembly units undreamed of savings space saving in design
• 89:00 - 89:30 day in day out protection this is what you will probably find very handy in kobe 19 context honey coated sugar puffs the best looking small car in the world the wholesome ready-to-eat cereal so they actually have compound words very commonly used typical of advertising of course modifiers because the whole idea is
• 89:30 - 90:00 that they have to modify modify simply means adjectives and the kinds of adjectives which are very very popular which are inconceivable you can't actually have advertisements which has no modifiers the product has to be best-selling delightfully different finest all brand new just right
• 90:00 - 90:30 specially and delightfully different perturbingly moving etc etc multiple modifiers now you have limited space in advertising and you want to squeeze in as many adjectives as possible in a limited space and the careers of these adjectives are noun phrases so they have noun phrases which packed in as many adjectives as are necessary
• 90:30 - 91:00 and there is no limitation you can pack in any number of adjectives in a noun phrase either before the head word or after the headword like look at this two examples i have a vexeless shapeless screamless painless method of unwanted hair removal all you're talking about is removal removal of what hair what kind of hair unwanted
• 91:00 - 91:30 and how do you do it painlessly creamlessly shaveless waxless or similarly the world's first packless cordless lightweight compact integrated video light how many adjectives modifiers multiple modifiers that use exceptions sometimes you find in news report headlines
• 91:30 - 92:00 because sometimes newspaper headlines also use this like this one from last year in south china morning post i discovered unreliable personality driven u.s foreign policy risks unreliable personality driven u.s foreign policy risks chaos due to donald trump's coronavirus diagnosis so people can do that but
• 92:00 - 92:30 when you think of newspaper headlines newspaper headlines serve the same purpose because they have to actually be very brief and they have to be in terms of what you call phrases rather than sentences syntactic innovations
• 92:30 - 93:00 you know how they create new innovations like gentles the smoke and makes it mild gentles the smoke how can you make smoke gentle even it's not irritating your eyes or it may probably be cigarettes it gentles the smoke
• 93:00 - 93:30 where the good life gets rolling good life gets rolling italy begins in singapore when you step on board al italia so you will find italy beginning the moment you board the flight at italia in singapore delicious then and delicious now curls that last and last at last they play on these words in order to
• 93:30 - 94:00 make them attractive in order to for people to stick to it and they are reminded of that and they are found attractive simplicity sometimes simplicity is actually very useful particularly in slogans phillips for a long long time they had this slogan simply years ahead phillips simply is years ahead and there was another one which says just slightly ahead of her time
• 94:00 - 94:30 it's it's got performance down to a science our policies are your best insurance the most convenient way to a soft and silky you a funeral is for the living a funeral is for the living that is something you know which is very very typical in the western world where funerals are quite expensive very very expensive people start saving for their
• 94:30 - 95:00 funerals and it actually affects the kind of savings that they have which is not passed on to the people who live after them so if you have a reasonable funeral service which is cheaper then this was the one which was advertised the funeral is for the living for those people who are living so it transferred some kind of an epidemic imperatives are very common in advertising
• 95:00 - 95:30 live life king size give your baby this heraldic advantage for nearest location call this go to work on an egg this is the egg producing association in england they advertise go to work on an egg take eggs in the morning before you go to your work they use cliches very often to attract people
• 95:30 - 96:00 the cliches and they exploit them how do they do it let's take examples any similarity is purely coincidental that is the cliche that is very well known and most people know it and it's people are familiar with it what they do is they exploit it instead of saying coincidental they say intentional any similarity is purely intentional the sun never sets on the british empire that's a cliche
• 96:00 - 96:30 but lufthansa exploited this by saying the sun never sets on lufthansa territory the shape of things to come a very famous novel exploited by mitsubishi for advertising their car mitsubishi kodi i say the shape of cars to come either you are born with it or you don't have it that is the cliche
• 96:30 - 97:00 but what they say is either you are born with it or you buy it by your product so they do they are very fast masters in exploiting these cliches first impressions that's a very common uh collocation but they change it into fast impressions now look at the structural elements now how these advertisements are structured now this is something very very
• 97:00 - 97:30 you can say flexible in advertising because they actually do not attack they do not actually play within a linear space they have a multi-perspective space space which is multi-modal and multi-dimensional so they can actually play with it with them with the organization any way they like but if you think of the message then of course you have an illustration you have a
• 97:30 - 98:00 headline you have a body copy standing details and signature line this is what advertising industry recommends what they find out this is typically done by the advertising [Music] you can say profession but from the language point of view let us see what we find look at this advertisement if sonic technology can find the titanic
• 98:00 - 98:30 two miles below the ocean and there is a picture of titanic in the frozen sea why not use it to reach black bacteria just below the gum line in 1995 sonic technology swept the ocean floor and unveiled the titanic today however sonic technology is used to reach something far more elusive block bacteria
• 98:30 - 99:00 introducing sony care plus the sony frequency brushing removes hard to reach black bacteria actually reversing in your is although and although it moves at 31 000 brush strokes a minute it's as gentle as a soft manual brush the result if you don't have a better check up after 90 days we will refund your money
• 99:00 - 99:30 that's as amazing as sonic technology itself and then there is a picture of sonic plus and then it further further says the logo sonicare amazing isn't it and then the signature line where you can buy it so if you look at this structure of this then you have a headline for reader's interaction you also have an illustration a picture for reader's
• 99:30 - 100:00 attraction you establish credentials by talking about customers needs rather than saying that this is the best thing product you have as you do in establishing credentials or two ways of doing it you talk about what a customer may probably need and this is a fulfillment of that need or meeting that demand you establish credentials
• 100:00 - 100:30 there is quite a bit of product detailing you retail the product give all the and evaluate the product as you normally do in promotional elements the product are illustrated there is a logo and there's a signature line so that is what a typical advertisement looks like so if you this is hard core advertising this is the basic advertising format in written form and the rhetorical move structure if you
• 100:30 - 101:00 look at it this is what you find headlines targeting the market justifying the product detailing the product of service establishing credentials endorsement or the testimonials offering incentives sometimes you say yes we offer u.s incentives like okay if you buy it within there then you get 10 discount or on a particular credit card bank credit card you will be given additional 10 percent of 5 off so you offer all kinds of incentives and
• 101:00 - 101:30 many a times you use pressure tactics this you know offer of 20 discount 10 discount is valid only up to 31st of october they put pressure on you so that you can buy it before that date and then of course they always say solicit response they have signature lines they say please tell us you know when you need it or if you get get in touch with us we'll be there to help you in whatever way you need
• 101:30 - 102:00 but again as i said it is a multi-perspective and multi-dimensional space multimodal space there are pictures there are you know things which are scattered left right and centered can be placed in any way so it's not a linear space we are talking about so advertising is actually very very unique in that sense so you use the space as best as you can
• 102:00 - 102:30 and people do it very effectively so this is what advertising advertisement is all about now what i want to do is to give you another view of advertising modern days as i said i was saying that you find innovation and innovation there's no end to innovation as we discovered in the product differentiation story i told you about so people actually go to extremes
• 102:30 - 103:00 and we are talking about the discourse we are talking about the organization of this course we are talking about everything but on the other hand you may probably partly because of the creative media partly because of the digital media which is available and the space which is available on digital media we find even more interesting you know illustrations of advertising and let me give you look at the following three
• 103:00 - 103:30 advertisements and talk about these in your normally i give it to people to work on you know if they want to now what are the some of the distinctive features of this form of advertising now compare this advertising to the ones we have talked about what about this one this is number one
• 103:30 - 104:00 what is it this advertising what is it yes there is something which is in small print because life makes wrinkles and this is an advertisement for nivea cream life
• 104:00 - 104:30 gives you you know wrinkles because your children growing up children you know supporting them having to build a house for yourself or buying a car all these things actually you know they have effect on your savings and it gives you wrinkles the best way to get rid of wrinkles is nivea cream so this is an advertisement for nivea cream so it is through illustration visuals
• 104:30 - 105:00 very little very little you know paperwork verbal words and phrases bare minimum that's number one number two mom's demand action this is a different kind of advertisement social action mom's demand action one child is holding
• 105:00 - 105:30 something that is banned in america to protect them now what happened was the one thing which is banned and the other thing which is not banned what is banned
• 105:30 - 106:00 the gun is not banned but the other thing is banned and this is very typical of america similarly one child is holding something that has been banned in america to protect tight guess which one
• 106:00 - 106:30 it is something that a child is holding in his hand that has been banned but not the guns similarly the third one it is no i think i have to blow it up in order to see now this is little that little red dining
• 106:30 - 107:00 no little ledge little red riding hood now that has been banned because in this picture there is a wine bottle held by children and that has been banned but the gun hasn't been banned now this is what they are advertising you know some kind of a moral action they demand action so people in america they know which one
• 107:00 - 107:30 has been banned for which reason and which has been banned for which reason but gun lobby hasn't been banned so people who are asking for action this is what they do so here it's very untypical of the hardcore advertising that we have talked about so variation the third one is this
• 107:30 - 108:00 fedex and it's typically you know the way it is written you have a picture on the top is somebody in china passing on the fedex parcel to somebody in australia and it's as smooth as passing from one person to the other in a jiffy in a second and fedex works like that so these are the
• 108:00 - 108:30 messages we can made visually without any words without any discourse but it is a genre it's a genre of advertising so when i say advertising has become so very productive creative innovative people do actually innovate a lot in this particular genre so i think that is where we have to
• 108:30 - 109:00 think about advertising in a creative manner but advertising is advertising all of them whether they are in written form whether they are in classic or whether they are in you know any of the multimedia format or in digital media nobody will misunderstand this as an advertising nobody will say it is not an advertisement it's simply because the society has given its name secondly we are living in this
• 109:00 - 109:30 particular world which is full of advertising around us and all of us are in a way confronting these advertisements every day so we are willing participants we are actually part of the social community which actually makes use of advertising or use in the sense you know we are disseminated advertising all over and we consume them in some form or the other so this is the shared understanding
• 109:30 - 110:00 which gives us a kind of integrity and identity of all these examples that have quoted whether in a very very written form detailed written form with all kinds of you know linguistic devices used or in a visual form where minimal language is used but there are visuals which are given similarly you may find many of the interesting ones on television so it is a world which is wide open this is an area of study which is wide open
• 110:00 - 110:30 from the point of view of linguistics and language study okay so that's where i stop and yes there are questions okay [Music] section there are some questions of in the chat box oh in the chat box
• 110:30 - 111:00 okay prof the first question bro from yes yes okay the first question is from marco pittoyo i'd like to ask if possible do you think that students with low mastery of english can use critical genre analysis for their thesis for their thesis why not okay ideas why not
• 111:00 - 111:30 why not yes on provider their interest is in some kind of some form of communication that they want to understand they want to analyze it is basically on some kind of a genre which they want to understand some kind of professional practice or some kind of mindset of a professional that you want to understand and they're going to want to analyze there are actually people who are doing you know i have already examined something like about 20 to 30 phd thesis on critical surrounding theory
• 111:30 - 112:00 in different contexts and there are lots of people who are doing it yes it's about five ten years ago when i started talking about it about 10 years ago but the book i wrote was only in 17 although the book got about two years to write so i think it has a history of about eight to ten years and i've done a number of projects on critical random theory using critical gender theories getting data and there's a lot of publications
• 112:00 - 112:30 more than about you know maybe hundreds of publications now what they do is they don't actually not all of them actually use critical genre theory naming it as critical journal theory but the combining other theories because the critical gender theory basically believes in multiplicity of methods multi-perspective analysis it's a multi-perspective so people combine critical genome theory with critical discourse analysis combined with corpus linguistics they combine this with a
• 112:30 - 113:00 number of other narrative you know analysis and things of that kind so people can combine people to combine because the basis is multi-perspective i'll talk about this tomorrow it's a multi-perspective methodology thank you prof i think that uh that is to answer question number one and number two from raihan also i would like to ask can you suggest us what kind of text suitable for our
• 113:00 - 113:30 analysis so it will be answered tomorrow for tomorrow's presentation yes tomorrow i can give you you know the kinds of i mean any kind of text which you think is you know conventionally written is suitable for i normally don't restrict people to you know when i was teaching and i still teach i asked students i let them lose on the world i said go to the world find examples now when they are traveling on the train they find something which is written in some kind
• 113:30 - 114:00 of a picture or some kind of um [Music] warning written somewhere that clicked on that and they bring it back to the classroom and say okay this is what kind of genre is this and how do we describe it and what are the typical characteristics so the world is full of genres the world is full of genres in fact most of the texts that you find most of the conventional communications that you find they are all some instances of genre
• 114:00 - 114:30 and you can analyze them the theory allows you to do that okay how about social media advertisement is it possible social media yes that is relatively new but people are still doing it yes social media you know because in social media you have to establish the genre first yes email for example
• 114:30 - 115:00 if some people believe that it is a genre but if you describe in terms of communicative purpose it is not a genre because it can serve several communication unless you think of it in more general terms otherwise email is a medium email is a medium yeah yes i think there is yes there is a little bit of work similarly you know when you talk about blogs the blogs are possible the blogs can be
• 115:00 - 115:30 established as a genre and number of other things websites can be actually genre so all these social media you know things whatsapp messages and these are more diverse it's a little bit unless they get established at the moment they are not but there are people who are actually working on these things yeah okay next question
• 115:30 - 116:00 [Music] as we know in advertising we sometimes add copy to make the people can get the meaning of the advertisement then there is someone told me that copy for advertising is better to be concise so what is the most important thing in writing copy to make the advertisement copy concise and clear thank you copy concise and clear you mean the message yes yes yes the message i mean look the
• 116:00 - 116:30 the analysis that i did there are all linguistic resources that were exploited in order to make it precise in order to make it succinct and make it effective now these are the linguistic devices that people are using and there is no end to this then all you have to do is if you are a good user of language then you will know okay there are three ways of saying this which is most effective which is more concise which is more clear so that is the decision that the writer has to copywriter has to make
• 116:30 - 117:00 and mind you it's not easy to do it because advertising industry you know they earn a lot of money and they charge a lot of money you know any product that you buy in the market and you pay say uh ten dollars for a particular product now out of ten dollars five or six of them they go for advertising everything every time you buy so almost about 30 to 40 percent of the price you pay
• 117:00 - 117:30 it goes to advertising and packaging and it's not simple for them to write an advertisement no what they do is they don't write a single advertisement they normally write uh advertising campaigns which means there will be about eight or ten or seven or eight different advertisements some for the media you know television media some for oral some for newspaper some for different kinds of magazines you know addressing different
• 117:30 - 118:00 audiences different kind of cultures different countries so they actually make lots of advertisements so these are campaigns if you want to look at it you know the interesting thing would be if initially if you look at very early on there was an advertising campaign uh from apple apple computers they have a number of them and they're very very interesting they will probably be available on the web
• 118:00 - 118:30 if you want to go for that that's quite interesting [Music]
• 118:30 - 119:00 want to drip trough in well if you don't you can you can ask questions tomorrow i'll stick with you so i just want to use uh my to say so much professional yeah thank you very much yeah we truly appreciate the you you know the
• 119:00 - 119:30 time for you to share your experience your lecture today it's really a very interesting lecture i like to have this new term for that that we know usually we only know genre analysis and now this the term critical genre analysis that is a really interesting one if some people who are interested they may probably
• 119:30 - 120:00 i think at 10 okay see you tomorrow same time is that will there be a separate link or the same link oh yes
• 120:00 - 120:30 yes i guess there should be thank you bye