TED Talks: A genre analysis

Abstract

This research aims at investigating TED Talks as a genre. The analysis focuses on its rhetorical structure, characterized by moves and steps and the communicative purposes of the genre. The corpus comprises 10 talks selected from the website TED Talks. The data are discussed in the light of Bhatia’s (1996/2004) and Swales’ (1990/2004) theories of genre. Results demonstrate that, in terms of the analysis of the rhetorical structure, it reveals a constant pattern of moves and steps along the corpus, since every talk contained the five moves identified by the analysis. These cyclical and more frequent moves are: topic introduction, speaker presentation, topic development, concluding messages, and acknowledgments/gratitude. In terms of its communicative purpose, TED aims to celebrate ideas to a diverse audience worldwide, due to the variety of topics encompassed. This study also allowed us to develop a deeper view of this spoken genre, its features, and the way individuals may benefit from it in their lives.

Stop the stigma: TED Talk reduces negative attitudes about mental health treatment.

“…One major achievement of the TED Talk is that it enhances audience engagement by utilizing multiple semiotic resources that are only available with such a digital format (Xia & Hafner, 2022). Moreover, TED Talks may be particularly well suited to young adults with more limited attention spans and desire for information in multimedia formats (de Miranda & Moritz, 2021; Loya & Klemm, 2016). A thematic analysis of TED Talks presenting individuals with experiences with mental illness identified the need for such first-person narratives to promote effective programming for support and stigma reduction (Morris & Scott, 2021).…”