A Genre Analysis Of English Medical Product Brochures

With the improvement of people’s living standard,the medical and health industry has been paid more and more attention.The medical product brochures as an important text for medical companies to promote products,establish corporate image and deliver effective information that can help people to understand the basic information and main performance of the product quickly.However,most medical product brochures have not been systemically analyzed yet,and readers still have insufficient understanding towards medical product brochure.Meanwhile,the study of genre analysis has attracted wide attention of linguistics and discourse scholars in the past 30 years.Although other business genres have gradually become the central point in literature research,there are few medical product brochure studies based on linguistic and cultural tradition.This paper collects a total of 90 product brochures from General Electric,Philips and Siemens Healthineers,based on the genre analysis theories proposes by Swales and Bhatia(1993).After analyzing the 90 samples from the three companies,and the calculating assistance of Microsoft Excel,the results show that the medical products of General Electric,Philips and Siemens are mainly composed of seven language moves,but there are still some differences in the specific language move structures.GE has only four moves while Philips and Siemens do not have much difference in move structure.Meanwhile,this thesis also adopts GSP model to identify the obligatory and optional elements in medical product brochures.The results show that headline,main advantages and about company are obligatory elements in medical product brochures,and different companies have different sequence in arranging product brochures.Finally,this thesis intends to provide some implications about business English writing,company promotion and genre analysis theory application based on the analysis of medical product brochures.