Persuasive Faculty and Rhetorical Structure Analysis of Popular Filipino Fiction Book Blurbs from 1980 – Present

Abstract

Blurbs, being a subtle yet powerful pitch that influence readers to pick-up a book, might contradict the old adage ‘You cannot judge a book by its cover’. People do get influenced by blurbs (Schaefer & Nelson, 2012). And they provide a vista of writing styles, a rhetoric that not only appeals to readers’ senses, but also resonates the cultural or socio-political ideals of a population at a given decade, which Küçüksakarya (2015) calls “contextually motivated language choices”. A local study, for instance, has forwarded that in the Philippines, culture greatly influences the way of writing (Pariña, 2010), and is a potent factor for persuading people to read. The style of blurb writing for Filipino fiction books, however, still remains unexplored, which is why this study is conducted. Anchored on Gea-Valor’s (2005) textual strategies to analyze twenty (20) blurbs of fiction books gathered from Goodreads – five each from decades 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010 to present, findings showed that Filipino fiction book blurbs are more informational, than promotional. Albeit present in all decades, the blurbs in the following decades also focus on culture and romance. Utilizing Maan and Thompson’s (1986) Rhetorical Structure Theory, the analyses reveal that most blurbs entrench the plot to the potential readers, weaving both the informative and promotional intent of the blurbs. Filipino blurb writers more commonly use positive evaluative adjectives, superlatives, intensifiers, elliptical structure, personal pronouns like ‘we’, ‘us’, and ‘ours’ including rhetorical questions and imperatives directed towards readers, which help establish the Filipino’s communal culture, or the interconnectedness of ‘pakikisama’, which Pariña (2010) noted as one of the features of Filipino writing. The researchers recommend looking into the rhetorical structure and other presentational schemes of blurbs used as virtual advertising to shed light on this growing inquisitiveness towards this genre.