An Analysis of Motivational Language Styles Used by Sherly Annavita on Instagram Reels

This study aims to analyze the motivational language styles used by Sherly Annavita in her motivational content on Instagram Reels and to examine how this language style relates to audience engagement. The research employed a qualitative descriptive approach using content analysis. The data consisted of forty selected utterances drawn from ten Instagram Reels videos published in 2025, which were collected through observation and documentation, and analyzed using two complementary theoretical frameworks: Motivating Language Theory (MLT) proposed by Sullivan (1988), and the language style theory proposed by Keraf (2009), covering word choice, tone, sentence structure, and directness of meaning, while audience engagement was measured using an Engagement Rate (ER) formula adapted from Ryhänen (2019). The results reveal that Sherly Annavita predominantly motivates her audience through Meaning-Making Language (65%), realized through Conversational and Informal word choice, a Simple tone, sentence structures built on Parallelism and Repetition, and a communicative style that balances Direct/Literal Meaning with the frequent use of Metaphor. Regarding audience engagement, the findings indicate a possible association between specific combinations of language style and higher Engagement Rate; the video with the highest Engagement Rate (11.95%) was distinguished by its use of Noble tone and Metaphor, in contrast to the Simple tone and Direct meaning that dominate the rest of the dataset, suggesting that emotionally intense and figurative language may play a meaningful role in shaping audience engagement beyond frequency alone.