Healthy Skepticism Library item: 11609

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Solly M.
'Don't get caught out': pragmatic and discourse features of informational and promotional texts in international healthcare insurance.
Commun Med 2007; 4:(1):27-35
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=17714041

Abstract:

This paper examines the pragmatic and discourse features of a number of multimodal international healthcare insurance texts. The texts contain specialized language related to the provision and treatment of healthcare and to insurance coverage and are aimed at a fairly well-defined target readership, many of them actual or potential expatriates. They thus serve a useful function, that of providing the readership with an informed and comprehensible guide to the services and products available. Some of them have a more strictly promotional aspect, that of advertising specific insurance policies. In particular, the paper focuses on the language choices favored by these texts and the strategies they serve, noting that the distinction between their informative and promotional dimensions is not always clear-cut. It further suggests that the writers of these texts make a specific use of discourse features and languaging strategies in order to achieve their rhetorical purposes.

Keywords:
MeSH Terms: Humans Insurance, Health* Internationality* Marketing* Persuasive Communication*