Analysis of Back Cover Books Blurbs in English

The purpose of this paper is to present an analysis of blurbs of five books belonging to the same series in linguistics (Language Series) published by the same publishing house (Hodder Education). The study discusses the two characteristics of blurbs: the communicative purpose and the use of some linguistic and discourse conventions. Blurbs are written to inform about the book as well as to persuade potential buyers/readers to acquire it. A model proposed by Gea-Valor (2005) is applied to these five blurbs. The analysis is split into two parts: the rhetorical structure (in terms of Gea-Valor’s three-move model) and the linguistic and discourse conventions of: complimenting, ellipsis, the imperative, the address form you, rhetorical questions and excerpts from books. The analysis of the five blurbs has revealed that not only the linguistic and discourse features are subject to variation, as claimed by some studies, but also the generic structure (rhetorical moves) varies depending on the subject of the book. In other words, blurbs are topic-controlled.