Trust me, trust my words

Abstract

As modern Internet technology advances, some online medicare donation services in China have become available as a new way for the public to respond with financial assistance. This paper aims at identifying, describing, and analyzing the linguistic features of Chinese online medical crowd-funding and investigates how the online help-seekers negotiate their trustworthiness discursively. For this purpose, 500 pieces of help-seekers’ personal statements were collected from crowd-funding website (https://www.qschou.com), described and analyzed in accordance of discourse analysis. Results show that the help-seekers adopted three macro-discursive strategies to construct their trustworthiness: Embodiment-oriented strategy, evidence-motivated strategy, and emotion-oriented strategy. Detailed linguistic and para-linguistic means to realize these strategies are examined in great detail. Further research in this area is needed in order to raise awareness of trustworthiness construction and its difficulties for help-seekers in online crowd-funding scenarios