Class 18: Health promotion and health metaphor

Today we looked at health communications. Probably one of the biggest areas of science communication (bar the weather forecast), this area nevertheless often gets forgotten by PUS promoters. This is maybe because these communications don't come from the usual suspects, but from the government, charities, and businesses.

Health communication comes in all sorts of formats, but we focussed on just one: leaflets. We had a whole bunch of these, advising us on everything from meningitis to migraines, and evaluated their audience, purpose, and effectiveness (good practice for the essay due in next week). Generally we quite liked the ones we had; although we noted that their purpose was ultimately to inform, educate, and change behaviour, which raised the memory of traditional PUS.

We then had a look at the metaphors the leaflets used. The ones that we found were often in images; other than the 'military' metaphor of disease the text seemed to use relatively few 'live' - i.e. obvious - metaphors. However, a final point at the end was that, according to Lakoff and Johnson, all of our language is actually suffused with metaphor - we just don't notice it any more.

One thing I didn't get chance to mention: health promotion as a recognisible genre. We talked at the start about we recognised health communication, and mentioned things like purpose and who the communication comes from. But are there other things in the style that make us think 'health promotion'? Take a look at this ad and think about what it's trying to mimic and why...