“This is how food was cooked for kings”: Attractive techniques in the names of video cooking recipes on the Zen platform

Abstract

Digital technologies that allow mass audiences to create a wide variety of content have led to the fact that traditional speech forms and genres on the web have changed or acquired a hybrid character. The genre of “a cooking recipe”, which has acquired a video format, is no exception. A modern video recipe is often a hypergenre, since it includes elements of advice or a story of everyday life. Cooking video recipes, unlike traditional recipes, are interactive: they are addressed to viewers, to whom a blogger can address, and those, in turn, can leave comments under the video. The purpose of this article is to study the attractive techniques in the titles of video recipes on the Zen platform, based on the use of descriptive, comparative and interpretive methods. The study of 350 titles of video recipes showed that they often use a narrative, thanks to which images of the communicative past and the communicative future emerge. Struggling for the attention of viewers, bloggers compose incredible stories about getting a recipe or cooking a dish, which are reflected in the title of the video. Typical nonverbal and verbal attractive techniques used in the titles of video recipes on the Zen platform are font selections, numbers, emojis, exclamation marks, as well as words with a positive valuation. The objects of positive evaluation are such aspects of the dish as taste, aroma, health benefits, speed and ease of cooking, cheapness of ingredients, etc. 

Keywords

• video blog
• cooking blog
• cooking recipe
• video recipe