Speech tactics in online medical advice (based on Health.Mail.Ru)

The article deals with the speech tactics used by doctors in their online communication with patients on www.health.mail.ru. Fourty answers to the patients’ questions were selected as the materi al of our research. The aim of the work is to make the list of tactics used in online written medical discourse and compare it with the one in oral medical discourse. It is shown that it is more reasonable to use only the term «tactics», not «strategies» as applied to the verbal behavior of doctors in online medical advice because of the length of such texts and the considerable communication distance between doctors and patients. We revealed 10 speech tactics: greeting (verbalized in 30 sentences), giving advice (61), statement of fact (44), giving opinion (14), asking for more information (8), appraisal (8), refusal (3), calming (2), giving thanks (1), giving best wishes (5). The quantity of the examples of these tactics differs greatly: the predominating tactics are giving advice and statement of fact, to which giving opinion is allied although it is verbalized in fewer contexts. Their frequency is determined by the aim of communication. Means of their verbalization are impersonal sentences with modal words as well as the structures close to them from the pragmatic point of view - two-member sentences with the meaning of necessity of action. Other means are imperative forms of verbs, performative verbs, modal words and expressions as parenthetical phrases. Such means of verbalization make communicative distance between the doctor and the patient even bigger because the former is presented in online advice as an impersonal knowledge transmitter. As for other tactics, greeting is not as frequently used as it is in oral medical advice due to the different etiquette rules of communication and the genre specificities. The tactics of asking for more information is verbalized with the help of direct and indirect questions, the tactics of appraisal is represented by the words expressing general, utilitarian, normative, intellectual, and difficulty appraisal. Practically no empathy, support, and approval of patients’ actions is expressed in doctors’ verbal behavior. Compared to oral medical discourse, online written medical advice is characterized by less diversity of tactics. The main tactics are connected with giving information, not sympathy or support, which play the important role in oral medical advice. It would be useful to compare the results of this research with sociological and medical research in order to understand whether the described tactics are efficient or not. This information can be used to make recommendations for doctors on how to communicate efficiently with their patients.