Analysis Of Allan Pease's 'Body Language'

Body Language: How to read others’ thoughts by their gestures is a multimodal text written by Allan Pease. Pease wrote this book in the 1980’s during a time when more women were joining the workforce and the book is described as a “self-help” book. The purpose of this book is to inform the reader on the subconsciousness nature of their gestures, but Pease uses the book as a way to clarify the contrast between the man and the woman. I believe that this book is more directed towards the male audience as it focuses primarily on gestures more associated with men and often uses images of men when demonstrating the gestures. (formal).

What stands out most in this extract is not the writing, but rather the images. Pease’s layout of these strong, clear visual images in the text is to demonstrate clearly the purpose of

He uses “also” when adding additional information to a claim, which demonstrated to the audience that one gesture could have many meanings. In this instance the pose shown in figure 99 can be used as a gesture of fearlessness or readiness. The claim that it can be used for more than one purpose gives gives the author (....). The discourse marker “because” is used to link evidence together and is effective because it demonstrates that even two differents point of view on the same gesture can have common ground. Furthermore the discourse marker “for example” shows direct evidence of what the author is explaining allowing for a more affirmative writing tone as it shows the author has proof to back up his claim and evokes ethos, as we tend to trust claims that show proof. Moreover, the lack of modal auxiliary verbs or discourse markers such as “hopefully” and “I think” give this text and the author credibility as it shows he is sure of what he is writing about.