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ADVERTISEMENTS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS

Advertisements made their way into the British press at an early stage of its development, i.e., in the mid-17th century. So they are almost as old as newspapers themselves.

The function of advertisements and announcements, like that of brief news, is to inform the reader. There are two basic types of advertisements and announcements in the modern English newspaper: classified and non-classified (separate).

In classified advertisements and announcements various kinds of information are arranged according to subject-matter into sections, each bearing an appropriate name. In TheTimes, for example, the reader never fails to find several hundred advertisements and announcements classified into groups, such as BIRTHS, MARRIAGES, DEATHS, IN MEMORIAM, BUSINESS OFFERS, PERSONAL, KENNEL, FARM and AVIARY, etc. This classified arrangement has resulted in a number of stereotyped patterns regularly employed in newspaper advertizing. Note one of the accepted patterns of classified advertisements and announcements in TheTimes:

BIRTHS

CULHANE.—On November 1st, 1962 at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, to BARBARA and JOHN CULHANE—a son.

All announcements in the 'Birth' section are built on exactly the same elliptical pattern. This tendency to eliminate from the sentence all elements that can be done without is a pronounced one in advertisement and announcement writing. The elliptic sentence structure has no stylistic function; it is purely technical — to economize space, expensive in what newspaper men call the "advertizing hole."Though of course, having become a common practice, this peculiar brevity of expression is a stylistic feature of advertisements and announcements which may take a variety of forms, for example:

TRAINED NURSE with child 2 years seeks post London preferred.—Write Box C. 658, TheTimes, E.C. 4.

Here the absence of all articles and some punctuation marks makes the statement telegram-like. Sentences which are grammatically complete also tend to be short and compact.

The vocabulary of classified advertisements and announcements is on the whole essentially neutral with here and there a sprinkling of emotionally coloured words or phrases used to attract the reader's attention. Naturally, it is advertisements and announcements in the

PERSONAL section that are sometimes characterized by emotional colouring, for example:

ROBUST, friendly student, notentirelyunintelligent, seeks Christmas vacation job. No wife, will travel, walk, ride or drive and undertake any domestic, agricultural or industrial activity. Will bidders for this curiouslynormalchap please write Box C. 552, TheTimes, E.C.4.

Emotional colouring is generally moderate, however, though editors seem to place no restrictions on it. See the following announcement in the PERSONAL section of TheTimes:

Alleluia! I'm a mum.

(A jocular modification of the chorus of the well-known American song "Alleluia, I'm a bum". A young woman is stating that she has become a mother.)

As for the separate (non-classified) advertisements and announcements, the variety of language form and subject-matter is so great that hardly any essential features common to all may be pointed out. The reader's attention is attracted by every possible means: typographical, graphical and stylistic, both lexical and syntactical. Here there is no call for brevity, as the advertiser may buy as much space as he chooses.

The following are the initial lines of a full-page advertisement of Barclays Bank carried by an issue of TheGuardian:

WHAT WE WANT

A bank's business is with other people's money, so we want people whose integrity is beyond question. Money is a very personal business, so we want people who like people. Banking is work that calls for accuracy, so we want people who can work accurately. Our staff has to have integrity, personality, accuracy. We want them to have imagination too.

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