Journal of African Studies and Sustainable Development

Several studies have been carried out on social media discourse without much courage for crucial issues like the nexus between stylistics and the language of health advertisement on social media. Consequently, this work has looked into the language of Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) COVID-19 sensitization advertisements with a view to analyzing its codification process. Twenty online advertisement samples were subjected to stylistic investigation at different levels of analysis. The paper discovered that the data exhibit some known features of language of advert; nevertheless some peculiar features are equally exhibited. At graphological level, for example, the adverts place emphasis on COVID-19 by either printing it in capital letters or in bold. Particularistic features of Covid-19 online adverts are also pointed out at the lexical and syntactic levels. Stylistic features such as colouring, bold print and capitalization are used to elicit worthwhile important information of COVID-19 and so have aided in the interpretation of texts. These features make readers aware of the aspect of text that simple reading cannot do, thereby helping readers to appreciate NCDC’s artistic creation better. One cogent discovery was that health advertisements do not exaggerate like other types of advertisement but state only the facts that are clear, glaring vivid and verifiable.

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