Persuasion in Self-improvement Books

Book excerpt: This book investigates how persuasion relates to values in self-improvement literature, revealing the discursive practices used to persuade and engage their readers, and construct a credible persona. The author adopts a corpus-driven approach that encompasses an examination of genre analysis and linguistic features such as narrative, pronoun, grammar and structure. The book further draws on insights from original interviews with writers and readers of self-improvement books, as well as people who do not read the genre. It begins by providing a helpful overview of the concepts of ideology and genre. A brief history of self-improvement books and their values and assumptions provide the context for the analysis. Where relevant, linguistic features in self-improvement books are compared with other genres (e.g. academic text, conversation, news). This book will be of interest to students and scholars in the fields of linguistics, culture and media studies.