| Summary: | The presence and influence of complementary and alternative therapies have been
increasingly felt in recent years. One reason for this is the active promotion of its services and
products through various media channels. The current study focused on information
brochures that are placed on pharmacy counters and shelves, and examined how they
function as persuasive texts in promoting products and persuading potential users to buy
them. The study utilised genre analysis as a method for examining how language and
information in texts are systematically selected and structured to perform particular actions
and achieve particular communicative purposes. Genre hybridisation as a theoretical concept
is drawn on to explain the inter-generic realisation of forms of discourse. One hundred
brochures providing information on complementary and alternative health products produced
by pharmaceutical companies were collected from pharmacies in Malaysia and analysed for
their communicative content in terms of rhetorical moves used to promote the products. This
paper describes the generic structure of the print content in the brochures and discusses how
it functions to present a favourable view of complementary and alternative health products to
the reader. The results show that across all the brochures, regardless of the type of product, a
uniform set of moves that is comparable to the sales promotional genre is identified. The
findings also reveal that such information brochures on pharmacy counters are in fact
persuasive promotional literature. As these brochures are ubiquitous in pharmacies and
drugstores in most countries, they are an important force in influencing consumer and patient
knowledge, and beliefs about complementary and alternative medicine.
|
|---|