The persuasive power and the discourse of the social campaigns

Agnieszka Woch

Uniwersytet Łódzki

Abstract

The present article aims at analysing the persuasive strategies that the authors of the social campaigns use in order to change the opinions and attitude of their audiences. The scope of the article is to examine the persuasive force of the words used in the slogans of the social campaigns as well as the evocative power of the images on the posters and videos. For this, it will focus on the three objectives of the persuasive discourse, i.e. teaching, pleasing and touching the audience, and examine them in the context of social campaigns that use fear and provocation to achieve their aims. The analysis is based on a corpus of slogans, posters and videos of French, Polish and Italian social campaigns.

Keywords:

persuasive discourse, social campaigns, discourse analysis, emotions