Speaking of Digital Communication: Home-Based Telehealth for Patients and Providers

Abstract

The ‘lay’ view of communication tends to assume that language is a vehicle that carries clearly identifiable meanings or information, regardless of context and individual variation. This can result in a disregard for the ambiguity and complexity of meanings in context, and an assumption that communication problems can be ‘fixed’ by training people to encode their messages better, via lists of dos and don’ts. This poses a challenge for linguistic consultancy, when the findings of systematic linguistic research do not lend themselves to producing lists of expressions to use and avoid. This chapter reflects on the challenges, strategies and benefits of communicating nuanced results of a corpus-based study of metaphors for cancer to different stakeholder groups, including patients, healthcare professionals and the media.