Women’s health on social media: a corpus stylistic study of Pink October campaigns

Abstract

Women’s health is a significant topic of discussion in Pink October campaigns. These campaigns seek to increase awareness of both breast cancer and women’s general health. This study aims to examine the textual strategies in health communication. This is achieved by applying corpus stylistic tools to investigate linguistic patterns in Pink October campaigns to boost women’s health. The corpus of the study is built from twenty-two websites and it has 16908 words. The data are examined using the eclectic model of McIntyre and Walker (2019) and Leech and Short (2007) frameworks. The quantitative analysis is achieved by using AntConc software to gain an objective, systematic statistical overview of the corpus. The study focuses on word frequency list and keywords in context. The results show that in the distribution of content words, nouns are the most frequently used which are followed by verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Moreover, healthcare practitioners employ a variety of strategies, such as plain language and avoiding jargon so their messages in the campaigns can reach a broad audience from different ages and backgrounds.

Keywords

• Corpus stylistics
• health communication
• Pink October campaigns
• social media language
• women’s health
• Jeroen van de Weijer, College of International Studies, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China