Genre Analysis of University Admission Advertisements and Newspaper Editorials: A Comparative Study

Abstract

Genres are the socially established ways of conducting different things and the socially
developed communicative models for solving communication problems. The present study
attempts to compares and contrasts University Admission Advertisements and Newspaper
Editorials in terms of their structure, content, language, style, rhetorical issues, purposes, and
the intended audience. The study is qualitative in nature as it analyses the data qualitatively.
A total of five University Admission Advertisements and five Newspaper Editorials have
been selected for the study. Swales’ (1990) and Bhatia’s (1993) theories of Genre have been
employed to analyse the selected University Admission Advertisements and the selected
Newspaper Editorials. The study found that the intended audience, schematic structure,
moves, styles, language, and purposes of the two genres are different from one another. The
intended audience of the University Admission Advertisements are students and their parents,
whereas the intended audience of Newspaper Editorials can be anyone.Both the genres use
formal language. However, in University Admission Advertisements, same words are
repeated in the different advertisements, whereas in Newspaper Editorials, words are not
repeated. The study recommends that a comparative genre-based study on different kinds of
advertisements and different parts of newspaper should be conducted to see similarities and
differences between them.