Roles of Visual and Linguistic Metadiscourses in Developing Persuasive Infographic Resumes

An infographic resume is an effective medium of exchanging information from job applicants to employers, and it greatly affects and persuades employers to take action. The current study examines both how frequently linguistic and the visual metadiscourse markers (MMs) are employed in infographic resumes and the role they take in creating persuasion. A corpus of 30 infographic resumes totaling about 2463 words was extracted from digital content marketers, software engineers, and service advisors. To compare the employment of the two metadiscourse types, and find out the way visual metadiscourse perfectly coordinated with linguistic metadiscourse in creating persuasive interaction and evoking employers to hire the job applicants, we built on Hyland’s (2019) metadiscourse model and Kumpf's (2000) visual metadiscourse to analyze the corpora. Results indicated that boosters and attitude markers demonstrated higher frequencies than other linguistic MMs and were considered to be meaningful and influential ways of persuasive language. In addition, it was shown that all visual metadiscourse categories were mostly established in the data examined. The findings revealed that both linguistic and visual metadiscourse is significant in establishing the discourse, attracting the audience, and satisfying the employers’ curiosity. They were proved to be essential in persuasive language.