The Textual Management of the Solicit Response Move in Newspaper Fundraising Advertisements

ABSTRACT A number of studies into fundraising discourse have investigated the functional moves and the language or visual semiotics commonly associated with these. However, there has been no research into structural organization move management in newspaper fundraising advertisements. The goal of this research is to understand how copywriters “manage” the solicit response (SR) move, in newspaper ads. Using a corpus of 70 newspaper fundraising ads, the structural positions (including paragraph positions), repetition patterns, and textual highlighting of the SR move are documented in an attempt to understand how copywriters and ad designers manage the potentially conflicting considerations of pragmatic appropriacy and known reader attention and focus behavior. The results indicate that there are specific locations within the ads which typically carry the SR move, a key location being sentence-final position in main body paragraphs. The research findings suggest the importance that is attached to functional-structural mapping by fundraising copywriters and ad designers.