A genre analysis of food reviews in a Malaysian online dining guide website / Angelicia Anthony Thane
The ‘Food Culture’ is an increasingly popular notion in our world today. With the Internet, information on various cuisines is easily made available. This phenomenon gives rise to a relatively new digital genre: online food reviews. Hence, this study aims to provide a comprehensive description on...
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| Format: | Thesis |
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2017
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| Online Access: | http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/9935/ http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/9935/2/Angelica_Anthony_Thane.pdf http://studentsrepo.um.edu.my/9935/1/Angelicia_Anthony_Thane_%E2%80%93_Dissertation.pdf |
| Summary: | The ‘Food Culture’ is an increasingly popular notion in our world today. With the
Internet, information on various cuisines is easily made available. This phenomenon
gives rise to a relatively new digital genre: online food reviews. Hence, this study aims
to provide a comprehensive description on online food review focusing on rhetorical
strategies. Swales’s Three-Level Genre model is employed to identify the
communicative purpose, rhetorical structures and rhetorical strategies of online food
review from a popular Malaysian food website, FriedChilies. The analysis of rhetorical
structures is based on a conceptualised framework incorporating both Bhatia’s (2004)
move structures for advertising discourse and Askehave & Nielsen’s (2005) move
structures for online genre. On the other hand, the rhetorical startegies is focused on
visuals as move and relevant discourses found in the reviews. Unlike traditional genre
analysis, the present research concentrates on exploring the roles of visuals and
accompanying discourses in achieving private intentions of the review. Results of the
study shows that the move structure confirms that reviews are of a mixed genre. The
findings also demonstrated that while reviews are supposed to be more informative,
strong promotional elements are subtly incorporated via usage of visuals and different
discourses. This indicates that visuals and discourses may influence and manipulate a
genre’s communicative purpose which in turn affects the genre type and its generic
description.
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