Abstract:
This study aims at examining the discourse elements in posters used to
advertise christian events at UCC and how they influence selected students to
attend events advertised. The discourse elements were used to prepare
questionnaires for sampled students. The data was collected at the Students’
Reference Section of the Main Library using accidental and purposive
sampling methods.
In all, data were collected from 144 respondents and were analyzed based on
the Communicative theory of Roman Jakobson and Aristotle’s Rhetoric. The
analysis of the data revealed that the contents of the posters influenced the
sampled students to attend the events. This is due to the fact that the contents
of the posters evoke certain needs of the some students and equally generated
curiosity in others. We recommended that advertisers study the needs of the
students and evoke them in the advertisements. We also found out that the
sampled students were persuaded to attend the events by all the discourse
elements in the posters but to a large extent the titles and themes persuaded the
majority. We attribute this to the fact that the titles and the themes constitute
an explicit summary of the events. Again, the respondents were familiar with
the discourse elements in their sociocultural context. Based on this, we
recommended that advertisers use discourse elements that are known and
understood by the public.
