Promoting State Tourism:

Abstract

Abstract Tourism‐based research of advertising text has contributed significantly to our understanding of advertising rhetoric. However, the primary thrust of this effort has been directed toward the semantic components of advertising messages, such as word meanings and illation, rather than the syntactical nature of the language itself (e.g., active syntax versus passive syntax). Consequently, in a tourism‐based context, this study presents a potentially useful exploration of syntactic structure and its potential in eliciting significant, goal‐directed responses from ad readers. Surprisingly, these responses run contrary to what many copywriters and writing gurus alike might expect and, therefore, raise important questions as to the wisdom of automatically viewing active voice as “standard fare” in constructing ad messages that promote state tourism.