Partington, Alan (2025). The Language of Persuasion in Politics and the Media: An Introduction. Routledge

Resumo

The book reviewed here is an introductory guide which explains how politicians, journalists, and the media use language to influence the public’s opinions, emotions, and decisions. Its main idea is that persuasion depends not only on facts, but on the way those facts are linguistically presented. Political speeches, interviews, press conferences, newspaper headlines, social media, election campaigns, and satirical texts are analyzed. Key topics include linguistic evaluation, the manipulation of information; the rhetorical strategies of persuasion (contrast, appeal to authority, association of ideas; problem-solution structure; fallacious arguments and the so-called “post-truth”) and the role of metaphors, humor, irony, and satire as mechanisms for criticism and influence.