'Can you Read this Leaflet?: User-friendliness of Patient Information Leaflets in the UK and in Italy

Rosita Maglie analyses the genre of PILs from a contrastive angle, by comparing UK and Italian versions of the same texts, with a specific focus on those rhetorical features meant to enhance user-friendliness. Indeed, PILs, for their very nature, contain highly domain-specific contents, i.e. information about medical product provided by pharmaceutical companies but, at the same time, they have to be easily understood by the lay public; hence they need to be semantically comprehensible and cognitively clear. By investigating PILS of three different types of medical products (i.e. on-the-counter drugs, drugs requiring the supervision of an expert, and expert prescribed drugs), this chapter highlights the popularizing strategies found in the different sections of the English texts to facilitate texts readability (i.e. layout and text structuring, terminological and syntactic simplification, etc.). It then compares these occurrences with those found in the Italian version of the same texts, emphasizing both similarities and idiosyncrasies, the latter mainly due to different legal requirements, cultural traditions or domain-specific epistemological assumptions.