Words and Ways in Digital Life Coaching: An Analysis of Rhetorical Devices and Multimodal Resources in Instagram Content
Keywords:
Rhetorical Devices, Instagram, Discourse Analysis, multimodalityAbstract
The research aimed to investigate the rhetorical devices and multimodal resources used by the Instagram influencer ‘Jay Shetty’, particularly within the context of life coaching. Using a purposive sampling technique, the researcher gathered 36 posts from Jay Shetty’s verified Instagram account between 2022 and 2023. Moreover, Harris’s (2018) framework and the multimodal approach by Kress and van Leeuwen (2001) were employed to investigate rhetorical devices and multimodal resources in his Instagram life-coaching posts. The findings revealed that Shetty predominantly employed figurative language and balancing strategies and incorporated multimodal resources in his posts. Furthermore, among the five most frequently identified categories, metaphors (24.30%) and parallelism (23.36%) were ranked as the two most frequently used rhetorical devices, followed by the integration of multimodal resources (11.21%), anaphora (10.28%), and personification (9.35%).
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