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Go Figure!

go figure cover

Go Figure! New Directions in Advertising Rhetoric

Edited by Edward F. McQuarrie & Barbara J. Phillips

Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2008

ISBN-13: 978-0765618016

The table of contents is available on Amazon, along with portions of the first chapter, which explains the meaning of advertising rhetoric, and how the rhetorical perspective differs from more familiar psychological perspectives on advertising.  A Kindle edition is available.

Publisher’s web site

A description and the table of contents is available; some geographic areas may be able to access an e-book version.

Google books

A preview is available, allowing you to search the contents and / or browse pages of interest.

Back Story

In business and the social sciences, most scholarly publication takes the form of peer-reviewed journal articles. You must publish in demanding journals, lest you perish. The better the journal, the higher the rejection rate, and also the more grueling the manuscript preparation and revision process.

Accordingly, scholars have always sought other outlets where more preliminary or speculative work could be published.  Conferences have provided the traditional safety valve. Conferences sponsored by scholarly associations publish proceedings on a regular schedule.  Smaller, special purpose conferences will also often produce a book, where the chapters represent revised versions of the papers presented.

For Go Figure!, Barb and I decided to skip the small specialized conference and move directly to writing and soliciting chapters.  The goal was to gather together colleagues who had been working in the area of advertising rhetoric and who would value the opportunity presented by a book chapter, with its more relaxed format and greater freedom to explore.

The book provided me the opportunity to write an introduction to advertising rhetoric, and also a workbench chapter on constructing rhetorical typologies. I can recommend either chapter to anyone interested in rhetorical perspectives applied to advertising. Perusing the list of authors we invited will get you up to speed on most of the scholars active in the area of advertising rhetoric around the turn of the millennium. Each has a larger body of work worth exploring.

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