Nowadays, the bulk of e-commerce is carried out in English. At the same time, however, the emergence and growth of Arab e-commerce has attracted attention from e-commerce giants, such as AliBaba and Amazon. Acquiring a deeper understanding of culture-specific advertising practices is thus quickly becoming necessary for digital advertisers and marketers seeking to tap into both English- and Arabic-speaking consumer markets. Despite this, little has been written on online advertising discourse within the particular contexts. To address this, the present study reports on a pragmatic two-level rhetorical analysis of the macro-structure of the sub-genre of online advertisements in English and Arabic and focuses on the identification of the persuasive linguistic features employed to signal constituent moves. Drawing upon Swales’ move-step model of rhetorical analysis, the exploration of a comparable corpus of 100 online advertisements of skin care products per language introduced new layers in the rhetorical organisation of [online] advertisements. The results revealed that English and Arabic advertisements consisted of both common and culture-specific rhetorical moves. The persuasive strategies employed common lexico-grammatical features at syntactic, semantic, and discoursal level, albeit to a different extent. Overall, the results of this study illustrate that online advertisements of skin care products could be considered as a particular sub-genre with context-specific macro- and micro-structures. Through the investigation of the specific datasets, this study expands upon the existing analytical frameworks used for the study of advertising discourse and adds to the intercultural exploration of the rhetorical structures and persuasive strategies used in online advertisements.

Even though abstracts are short, they require a specific type and formal structure that is accepted by academic discourse communities (San & Tan, 2012). They are governed by a discipline's own conventions i.e. a series of moves that characterize the flow of the discourse and linguistic features. This study aims to identify the rhetorical moves and metadiscourse markers that are deployed in the abstracts of projects that were written by undergraduate students in the English department at the faculty of Arts/Gharyan University. The data consisted of 30 abstracts. Hyland's models (2000; 2005) were adopted in this study. The first model (2000) was used to analyze the rhetorical moves. The second one (2005) was employed to analyze the metadiscourse. The findings revealed that most of the abstracts did not consist of the five rhetorical moves. The introduction and purpose moves were prominent, while the method, result, conclusion, and structure (new move) moves were not prominent. The absence of some of the rhetorical moves in the English abstracts of undergraduate projects might make the project abstract unable to achieve its communicative purposes and will lead to difficulty for readers to understand the content of the abstract. For metadiscourse, the findings showed that interactive metadiscourse was deployed more than interactional metadiscourse. Among these two categories, transitions, frame markers, and endophoric were used more frequently.