Genre‐specific persuasion in oral presentations: Adaptation to the audience through multimodal persuasive strategies

Abstract

Product pitches, research dissemination talks and conference presentations are three oral genres that share important characteristics. Previous literature has described them as multimodal and persuasive oral genres and has shown that speakers resort to multimodal persuasive strategies to achieve their communicative goals. However, they are used in different contexts, which is likely to affect their use of multimodal persuasion, and raises questions as to how genre‐specific persuasion is. The aim of this paper is to explore how speakers adapt their multimodal persuasive efforts to the communicative situation established in each genre, and how this is reflected multimodally. This study combines multimodal discourse analysis and ethnographic methods. The results suggest that speakers multimodally convey a different relationship with the audience in each genre.