On the main resources used to persuade readers in multimodal texts related to health in the local press

Abstract

Using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as a framework, my purpose in this paper is to describe some multimodal texts related to health published in a local newspaper in Alicante (Spain) in order to analyse the main strategies used to persuade readers and to catch their attention. In this paper, I intend to highlight the main resources used by the newspaper to establish an interaction between the discourse used in the multimodal texts under analysis and the addressees (i.e. the readers of the newspaper). For this reason, I will pay attention to the main visual characteristics of these texts: background, layout, size of the image, frames and information value. As a conclusion, I will point out how our society is influenced by the presence of new texts, which are clearly characterised by the increasing dominance of the visual mode. This implies that new literacies such as ‘critical media literacy’ or ‘critical literacy’ need to be developed as a way of enabling readers to develop a critical attitude to the texts they are exposed to.