Pandemic Discourse: Persuasive and Emotive Strategies of Creative Hope and Despair

This paper explores persuasive and emotive communicative strategies to create hope and despair used in American and Chinese media during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The discourse of the pandemic has become the object of close attention of researchers from different fields of knowledge. Persuasive strategies are aimed at convincing the audience of the need to take certain measures or change behavior. Emotive strategies are aimed at evoking certain emotions in the audience. A corpus of the articles on the topics connected with the COVID-19 pandemic is analyzed to find out the communicative strategies. The study aims to describe the specific features of the COVID-19 discourse; find out the specific tactics in persuasive and emotive communicative strategies that are used to create hope and despair in contemporary printed media; identify the relationship between the tactics attributed to coronavirus and compare them for the texts of different periods. The paper consists of the introduction, the literature review covering specific terms, the data analysis part includes methodology part and the analysis of the articles, the conclusion, and the reference list. As a result, the analysis will show the most effective tactics of creating hope and despair and the difference between them in different periods pf the COVID-19 pandemic.