This case study of three female Chilean scientists with distinct levels of scientific writing expertise—novice, competent, and near-expert—investigates their notions about drafts. Interrogation of data—that is, document analyses, an entry questionnaire, a set of semistructured interviews, and member-checks—identified seven different notions about drafts: (1) draft as a canonical structure of scientific research articles, (2) draft as influenced by medium/time, (3) draft as an incomplete text, (4) draft as a process, (5) draft as product, (6) draft as a nondefinitive version, and (7) academic writing as a draft from scientific writing. Findings show that some shared notions about drafts transcend writer profiles and that these notions are rooted in writer identity, their writing practices, and the context of producing scientific research articles.

Digital technologies have dramatically changed the way scientists produce, circulate, and disseminate scientific knowledge. Here we investigate women scientists’ writing activity and digitally mediated discursive practices in their professions. Using survey techniques, we identify patterns of professional and public science communication online across the disciplines. We also explore the potentially interrelated genres—“genre systems”—that routinely enact typified rhetorical actions in their professional contexts. The findings show that their socioliterate activity fully reflects the importance that their professional contexts attach to certain “privileged” genres of professional communication (e.g., journal articles), despite the fact that the respondents value highly genres of socially responsible research (e.g., blogs, infographics). Statistical analyses further confirm that “disciplinary culture” is a determining factor in the extent to which respondents engage with collaborative genres and participatory science genres. We report significant differences in the use of digital mediation tools to communicate science online to both expert and lay audiences. Finally, we discuss several implications for writing pedagogy and the development of digital skills to support scientists, especially women, who want or need to promote and disseminate their research widely.

Researchers’ investment in reader engagement includes the construction of an appealing abstract. While numerous studies have been conducted on abstracts’ rhetorical features, scant empirical attention has been paid to negation use in academic writing. The current study seeks to narrow the research gap from a general and diachronic perspective by adopting an interpersonal model of negation. We found that while not, no, and little tend to be the commonly used negative markers in Science abstracts, little increased diachronically but decreased for not and no. Functionally, writers prefer to use interactive negations and employ relatively more negative markers that function as consequence (interactive dimension) and hedging (interactional dimension) in their abstracts. Finally, we discuss the possible reasons for such results as well as their pedagogical implications.

In order to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the varied ways multiple language competencies are invoked in scientific communication and publication, this study features a content analysis of a collection of English, French, and Arabic abstracts from 14 articles of Al-Awamia, a Moroccan agronomic journal. Mapping rhetorically significant differences across abstracts in different languages suggests that EN/FR abstracts are tailored to an international specialist audience and Arabic abstracts favor a domestic policymaker audience in several key ways. The textual moves made to address these different audiences are typical of those studied by scholars of science communication, and accordingly this study indicates that plurilingual textual practices in scientific writing are associated with differences in audience and stakeholders. These findings carry implications for trans/pluri/multilingually oriented scholars of scientific communication, as well as for those who prepare future researchers for the demands of publication, suggesting that the flexible use of diverse linguistic resources is important to scientific practice in a globalized world.

In science disciplines, students need sufficient and well-designed support to successfully gain writing competence along the different stages of their writing development. This study examines effective inquiry-based writing pedagogies and the contextualization of scientific writing instruction for supporting student writers in the scientific community. The researchers first systematically reviewed effective pedagogical practices that can help students gain writing competence through inquiry-based learning, then explicated how scientific writing is situated in inquiry-based writing instruction (IBWI) with respect to text structures using a genre-based approach. A systematic review of 40 empirical studies published between 2000 and 2021 was conducted. The researchers examined the pedagogies, methods, and models that effectively support IBWI and identified some emerging trends that aim to raise undergraduates’ scientific writing communicative competence. Implications for how scientific writing should be situated in IBWI were provided to help disciplinary faculty respond more precisely to science students’ writing needs in tertiary settings.

While many STEM faculty believe Writing-to-Learn to be an effective instructional tool, instructional barriers such as the time and effort required to provide substantive feedback to their students limit the use of writing in STEM classrooms. Incorporating peer review and revision into the writing process can help mitigate these barriers while additionally supporting the learning process. This study presents an analysis of a Writing-to-Learn assignment that incorporates peer review and revision into a large introductory statistics course, where this study specifically focused on whether engaging with these processes results in changes in how students write about the content targeted by the assignment. Our results demonstrate that students made content-focused revisions between drafts that increased the amount of content they explained correctly. Additionally, our study provides evidence that students benefit from reading peers’ work in a content-focused peer review and revision process. Overall, this study shows that incorporating peer review and revision into writing assignments focused on developing content knowledge provides students with substantive feedback and enhances students’ conceptual learning.

This study investigates the added burden Mexican and Taiwanese non-native English speaker (NNES) researchers perceive when writing research articles in English as a second language (L2) compared with their experience of first language (L1) science writing. 148 Mexican and 236 Taiwanese researchers completed an established survey of science writing burden. Results revealed significant differences between L1 and L2 science writing with an increased burden for L2 science writing consisting of an average increase of 24% in difficulty, 10% in dissatisfaction and 22% in anxiety. No significant differences between the Mexican and Taiwanese researchers were found. Regression analyses established that the variables of science writing burden contribute to a sense that English is a barrier to writing science. We maintain that the additional burden of L2 science writing constitutes a linguistic injustice and a barrier to science that should be addressed by relevant constituents.

While scholars in the field of writing studies have examined scientific writing from multiple perspectives, interest in its thematic structure has been modest. Recent studies suggest that the themes in scientific writing tend to be anchored on one or a few points of departure. There has also been an attempt at quantification using the thematic-density index (TDI), although this has only been tested on abstracts. In this study, we investigated the thematic structure and TDIs of 30 research articles in biology. The results revealed a progressive thematic pattern in the introduction section, followed by an anchored development in the subsequent sections. The anchoring was realized by the pervasive use of the first-person pronoun “we.” The mean TDI was lowest in the introduction section (2.593) and highest in the results section (7.095). The results were consistent across the articles in the corpus, underscoring the uniform way in which the articles were thematically structured, and in turn suggesting a core thematic pattern for scientific research writing in general. Based on these findings, the authors suggest that future studies compare the thematic structure of the introduction section vis-à-vis the other sections, and investigate the possible factors resulting in such a structure.

Even as deficit model science communication falls out of favor, few studies question how written science communication constructs relationships between science and industry. Here, I investigate how textual microprocesses relate scientific research to industry practice in the Washington State wine industry, helping (or hindering) winemakers and wine grape growers in making research relevant to their work. Critical discourse analysis of a corpus of wine science texts suggests that textual microprocesses continue to enact a deficit paradigm: scientists as knowledge producers and the industry public as knowledge deficient. Through its extension of features of scientific discourse, the industry-oriented literature abstracts research practices from context which could aid in drawing relationships with industry practices. In aggregate, these texts suggest an opportunity to increase research relevance to industry practice by writing the research–industry relationship differently, recontextualizing research in practice.

New media are having a significant impact on science communication, both on the way scientists communicate with peers and on the dissemination of science to the lay public. Science blogs, in particular, provide an open space for science communication, where a diverse audience (with different degrees of expertise) may have access to science information intended both for nonspecialist readers and for experts. The purpose of this article is to analyze the strategies used by bloggers to communicate and recontextualize scientific discourse in the realm of science blogs. These strategies involve adjusting information to the readers’ knowledge and information needs, deploying linguistic features typical of personal, informal, and dialogic interaction to create intimacy and proximity, engaging in critical analysis of the recontextualized research and focusing on its relevance, and using explicit and personal expressions of evaluation. The article shows that, given the diverse audience of science posts, bloggers display a blending of discursive practices from different discourses and harness the affordances of new media to achieve their rhetorical purposes.

This empirical study surveyed academic staff at a Swedish university about their experiences and perceptions of the use of English in their academic fields. The objective was to examine how the influence of English in disciplinary domains might affect the viability of Swedish in the academic sphere and to investigate how it might disadvantage Swedish scholars. The data findings were analyzed quantitatively and are complemented with a qualitative content analysis, outlining perception and attitude patterns in the responses. Findings suggest power asymmetry between English and Swedish, as the data contain indications of perceived unequal opportunities between native and nonnative speakers in the international academic community. Swedish scholars highlighted the nuanced expressions of academic discourse found in social science writing as creating particular difficulty when writing in English.

This article reports on the types of scientific writing found in two primary grade classrooms. These results are part of a larger two-year study whose purpose was to examine the development of informational writing of second- and third-grade students as they participated in integrated science-literacy instruction. The primary purpose of the present article is to report on the “genre set” (Bazerman, 2004) established in this community around science instruction. Using Halliday’s (1993) Systemic Functional Linguistics approach and Hasan’s (1985, 1994) Generic Structure Potential, I describe the genres of scientific writing and drawing activities in which these children regularly participated. Findings indicate that children participated in several distinct scientific genres, some of which were flexible, and some of which were highly constrained by the teachers. Each of the genres represented a distinct purpose, structure, and linguistic nature of scientific discourse. The influence of this particular genre set on children’s appropriation of scientific discourse is discussed.

The history of writing to learn college science is tied to the development of laboratory methods. Such student-centered learning was widely hailed in the 1890s as student enrollments increased dramatically and a backlash grew against lecture and recitation methods. However, as the author shows using archival examples from Dartmouth College, Amherst College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, science educators have too often relied on reductive measures of students' grasp of content rather than the kind of argument about scientific findings that is the stuff of real scientific writing and of real science. Although some contemporary science educators continue to tout the value of writing to learn science, the laboratory report or research article itself is a genre that dominates student activities but still largely suffers from the ills of its predecessors. Ultimately, the author calls for a renewed focus on laboratory writing, for both science education and writing studies, to fulfill the promise of previous reform efforts.

Researchers studying science communication have criticized the sensationalism that often appears in journalistic accounts of science news. This article looks at the linguistic sources of that sensationalism by analyzing the journalistic coverage of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study of hormone replacement research, which was abruptly canceled in July 2002 and became the subject of many news articles. The article uses a coding system to analyze seven magazine and newspaper articles that appeared shortly after the WHI study was halted. The coding shows a high incidence of concrete nouns in the journalistic accounts and looks at the ways the syntax of their attributions are ordered to emphasize vivid nouns, the ways their verbs contribute to narrative, and some of the narrative devices employed in the journalistic reporting.

Researchers studying science communication often examine how texts addressed to different audiences contribute to the formation of knowledge on a given issue. This article examines how arguments on scientific issues travel from text to text by considering how certain figures of speech persist from version to version. It uses a specialized genre of articles appearing in Science and Nature that introduces research reports appearing later in the issue. These pieces refer explicitly to a research report in the same issue, and in addition to their own agendas, re-present the researchers’ claims and supporting evidence. To investigate how the core of an argument survives, the expression claims and lines of support in epitomizing figures are compared. The articles sampled suggest that the figure antithesis, embodyingsingle-difference arguments,often persists from version to version. But in the process of perfecting a figured expression, arguments may be subtly changed in subsequent versions.

Commentary: When this essay first appeared more than 10 years ago, it built on a small but substantial body of scholarship that declared scientific writing an appropriate field for rhetorical analysis. In the last 10 years, studies of scientific writing for both expert and lay audiences have increased exponentially, drawing on the long-established disciplines of the history and philosophy of science. These newer studies, however, differ widely in approach. Many take the perspective of cultural critique (e.g., the work of Bruno Latour and Stephen Woolgar), whereas others use the tools of discourse analysis (e.g., Greg Myers, M.A.K. Halliday, and J. R. Martin). But, application of rhetorical theory also thrives in the work of John Angus Campbell, Alan Gross, Charles Bazerman, Jean Dietz Moss, Lawrence J. Prelli, Carolyn Miller, and many others. Randy Allen Harris offers a useful introduction to this field in Landmark Essays on Rhetoric in Science (1997). “Accommodating Science” applies ideas from classical rhetoric and techniques of close reading typical of discourse analysis to the question of what happens when scientific reports travel from expert to lay publications. This change in forum causes a shift in genre from forensic to celebratory and a shift in stasis from fact and cause to evaluation and action. These changes in genre, audience, and purpose inevitably affect the material and manner of re-presentation in predictable ways. Two concerns informed this study 10 years ago: the impact of science reporting on public deliberation and the nature of technical and professional writing courses. These concerns have, if anything, increased (e.g., the campaign on global warming), warranting continued scholarly investigation of the gap between the public's right to know and the public's ability to understand.

Commentary: When “Thucydides and the Plague in Athens: The Roots of Scientific Writing” was written in 1988, genre analysis was an emerging area for scholarship. Thucydides' Historiae, which includes numerous political speeches in context, provides a rich resource for exploring the ancient roots of rhetorical genres. Thucydides' text also sheds light on the origin of a specific scientific genre - the medical case history. In describing a devastating plague in Athens, Thucydides uses the Hippocratic approach, following an ancient genre or form that is remarkably similar to the modern medical case history. Thucydides' case history of the Athenian plague enabled 20th-century epidemiologists to establish a diagnosis of the illness (influenza plus toxic shock syndrome), predict its return, and validate their diagnosis during a 1987 flu epidemic. Although “Thucydides and the Plague in Athens” only hints at Thucydides' genre knowledge, his case history of the plague and his presentation of speeches display considerable insight into the social construction and function of these recurring forms. In explaining the speeches in his text, for example, Thucydides says, “[M]y habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions” (1.22). He prefaces his account of the plague with a statement of purpose: to help future scholars recognize future outbreaks of the same illness. These remarks, viewed in the context of genre theory today, suggest that Thucydides not only knew how to use genres but also understood their social origin and purposes.

Hedging refers to linguistic strategies that qualify categorical commitment to express possibility rather than certainty. In scientific writing, hedging is central to effective argument: Hedging is a rhetorical means of gaining reader acceptance of claims, allowing writers to convey their attitude to the truth of their statements and to anticipate possible objections. Because hedges allow writers to express claims with precision, caution, and modesty, they are a significant resource for academics. However, little is known about the way hedging is typically expressed in particular domains or the particular functions it serves in different genres. This article identifies the major forms, functions, and distribution of hedges in a corpus of 26 molecular biology research articles and describes the importance of hedging in this genre.

Writing in the humanities may, typically, be distinguished from writing in the social sciences in its treatments of abstractions. Writing about literature is here characterized as data-driven, in that it begins with a text and proceeds up the ladder of abstraction by interpretive classifications which are likely to diverge from one interpreter to another. Social science writing is described as conceptually driven, in that writers begin with communally defined abstractions which then drive the selection and discussion of data; the divergence between writers' abstractions characteristic of data-driven writing is less likely to occur in conceptually driven writing. This article describes how the difference shows up in professional academic writing, some of the confusion students experience in trying to shift from one kind of writing to another, the strengths and weaknesses of each kind of writing, and the benefits to be gained from alternating between the two kinds.

Two famous passages in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War illustrate the origins of scientific writing and shed further light on the relationship between scientific writing and epideictic rhetoric. Thucydides' account of the plague in Athens in 430 B.C. uses a structure based on the Hippocratic approach, as well as “scientific” medical terminology. The report of the plague is immediately followed by Pericles' Funeral Oration. Similar themes appear in both segments, but the rhetorical strategies are markedly different. This article analyzes the juxtaposed examples of scientific and epideictic discourse by applying theories from rhetoric and sociology advanced by Perelman, Fahnestock, Havelock, and Durkheim, as well as schema theory and reader-response theories.