Metadiscourse, rhetoric and the pandemic: A verbal-visual analysis of public information posters

The outbreak of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic has had a radical effect on public-sphere communication in both traditional mainstream and new social media. The information on healthcare and risk prevention that has aimed to help people cope with ‘staying safe’ and contain the disease, has appeared in a number of different guises and forms. By employing various media channels, communication campaigns have used advertisements and posters designed to influence people’s behaviour and persuade communities to pay more attention to the rapid spread of the virus. Here, we have used a multimodal perspective to analyse an ad-hoc corpus of 30 public information posters selected from English-speaking institutions and health care associations. The posters under scrutiny were published on the Internet during the first waves of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020 and the first months of 2021