A Text Analysis of Advertising Books on Their Back Cover: English vs. Persian

Today, we are surrounded by advertisements that want us to buy more and more. One of the places in which advertisement appears is on the back cover of books, in a form known as blurbs.Blurbs usually provide an informative and a persuasive function. The informative function supplies information about the content of the book, while the persuasive function describes thebook in a positive manner in order to attract the reader to buy the book. From a discourseperspective, blurbs on English books use three moves: ‘description’, ‘evaluation’, and ‘about the author’. This study investigated the occurrence of the three moves in 22 English and 22Persian books. The findings suggest that all of the three moves occur to a less extent in Persian blurbs especially one move. In addition, examples of all the three moves in English and in Persian are provided. The findings of this study can be useful for ESP courses that aim to teach the genre of blurbs, and also for Persian publishers trying to increase their sells

Keywords:

book advertisement , blurb , genre , move , English discourse , Persian discourse