Self-marketing in British online personal advertisements

Abstract

Employing the method of genre analysis, this paper examines self-marketing discursive devices employed in British online personal ads. It is revealed that among the formal devices serving to attract attention, raise interest and incite responses are rhetorical tools typical of advertisements for products and services, the discursive construction of a bond and closeness between the advertiser and the reader, and the adoption of elements typical of spoken face-to-face interaction. As for the content, advertisers not only draw. upon a conventional positive self-presentation but also exploit and resist the conventions of the genre by foregrounding their negative characteristics. Overall, a tendency of a shift from an overt discursive self-marketing to an indirect promotion involving the construction of authenticity is traced in the corpus.