Despite extensive research on metadiscourse, methodology descriptions in research articles provide limited guidance on how to identify, classify, and, particularly in cases of clustered items, quantify metadiscourse markers. This article discusses the methodological challenges of analysing metadiscoursal adjectives, using the example of novice academic writers’ use of adjectival interactional metadiscourse markers. Our exploratory analysis of the corpus (654,925 tokens) revealed that, in a non-negligible number of cases (13.5%), metadiscoursal adjectives co-occurred with other linguistic items that were performing different metadiscoursal functions, thus putting a different interpretation on the initial observation. The phenomenon whereby both the adjective and its co-occurring item exercise a prominent metadiscoursal function—which we labelled superimposition —has been observed in previous studies but has not been adequately explored and has led to divergent, and often incomparable approaches, to metadiscourse quantification. We argue that metadiscoursal superimposition as a methodological approach can help bridge the gap between the individual marker analysis and their use in academic writing discourse, thus providing a structured, quantifiable, and functionally richer framework. We discuss the benefits, possible pitfalls, and implications of our proposal that superimposition be included and quantified as a supplementary step in metadiscourse quantification analyses.

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.

Drawing on rhetorical genre studies, we explore research article abstracts created by generative artificial intelligence (AI). These synthetic genres—genre-ing activities shaped by the recursive nature of language learning models in AI-driven text generation—are of interest as they could influence informational quality, leading to various forms of disordered information such as misinformation. We conduct a two-part study generating abstracts about (a) genre scholarship and (b) polarized topics subject to misinformation. We conclude with considerations about this speculative domain of AI text generation and dis/misinformation spread and how genre approaches may be instructive in its identification.

This article presents the development of a specialized data set for analyzing Estonian metadiscourse markers in academic usage, extending Hyland's interpersonal metadiscourse model to a non–Indo-European language. Our goal is to show how metadiscourse, as a feature of a writing tradition, can reveal aspects of writing in languages other than English, complementing the traditionally Anglo-centric perspective in metadiscourse research. By analyzing 21 Estonian linguistics research articles, we offer a transparent procedure to address methodological issues in metadiscourse studies and demonstrate the need for language-specific adjustments in the framework. We introduce statistical methods for analyzing multidimensional associations among marker categories, linguistic level, and rhetorical text structure. The findings suggest that Hyland’s metadiscourse model can be adjusted for specific languages, highlighting the influence of language structure on metadiscourse category variation and linguistic expression levels. The study reinforces that the distribution and manifestation of metadiscourse are shaped, among other factors, by unique writing traditions.

While the IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) format is common in scientific writing, it may not currently be as ubiquitous as often thought. We undertook a systematic, corpus-based study of primary section headings in research articles across a range of STEM disciplines to investigate adherence to the IMRAD structure in relation to type of study (computational, empirical, or theoretical) and field. We identified four categories of structure: IMRAD, IMRAD+ (IMRAD with additional sections and/or different order), Nested IMRAD (multi-part studies), and Non-IMRAD. Papers in biology mainly used an IMRAD format, while less than half in engineering or social sciences did so. While empirical papers tended to use IMRAD formats, most computational papers did not. Thus, our findings show that IMRAD is a common but not universal structure for contemporary scientific writing. Awareness of these differences should encourage teachers of scientific and technical writing and scholars of writing studies to pay closer attention to the actual structural forms used in different STEM disciplines and with different methodological types of research studies.

Studies of emergent online science communication genres continuously seek to understand novel forms of popularizations aimed at facilitating expert-with-public engagement. To understand how scientists can successfully engage with audiences in dynamic online environments, we examine Reddit’s science subreddit, attending to the acclaimed Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) series, and subsequent Science Discussion Series (SDS). A move analysis on a corpus of AMA and SDS original posts reveal moves used when engaging audiences through these installments.

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.

Discussion sections of research articles are important because they are where researchers make claims for advancing knowledge in their fields. There has been a growing interest in research articles focused on Discussions. However, only a few studies have centered on the role of arguments. What is missing in this literature is the potential for rhetoricians to identify specific, sentence-level arguments. The idea is that to analyze persuasion in Discussions, rhetoricians should be able to identify arguments contributing to persuasion. Toward that aim, I refer to Aristotle’s Rhetoric as a catalyst for specific arguments and examples from thirty science research articles.

This article examines the power of special topoi to characterize the discourse of literary criticism, and through emphasis on rhetorical action, it sheds light on the limitations of topos analysis for characterizing research articles in disciplinary discourse more generally. Using an analytical approach drawn both from studies of topoi in disciplinary discourse and rhetorical genre theory, I examine a representative corpus of 21st-century literary research articles. I find that while most of the special topoi recognized by Fahnestock and Secor and Wilder remain prevalent in recent criticism, contemporary literary critics tend to draw on only a select subset of those topoi when making claims about their rhetorical actions. The topoi they use most often— mistaken-critic and paradigm—help identify the ways knowledge-making work is undertaken in literary criticism, a discipline often considered epideictic rather than epistemic. But what the special topoi do not capture is precisely the distinctly motivated, actively epistemic character of this disciplinary rhetoric. Based on these findings, I suggest that special topoi must be seen as functioning in the context of the rhetorical action undertaken by literary research articles. These articles undertake not simply persuasion but the particularly humanistic act I refer to as contributing to scholarly understanding: a rhetorical action worth attending to for scholars of disciplinary discourse, because it is deliberately more concerned with practice than product.

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.

Research abstracts are an increasingly important aspect of research articles in all knowledge fields, summarizing the full article and encouraging readers to access it. Graetz suggests that four main features contribute to this purpose—the use of past tense, third person, passive, and the non-use of negatives, although this claim has never been confirmed. In this article, we set out to explore the extent to which these forms are used in the abstracts of four disciplines, the functions they perform and how their frequency has changed over the past 30 years. Drawing on a corpus of 6,000 abstracts taken from the top 10 journals in each of four disciplines at three distinct time periods, we found high but decreasing frequencies of past tense and passives, an increasing number of third person forms, and more than one negation every two texts. We also noted a remarkable decrease of past tense and passives in the hard sciences and an increase in applied linguistics, with sociologists making greater use of negation. These results suggest that abstracts have developed a distinctive argumentative style, rhetorically linked both to their communicative function and to the changing social contexts in which academic writing is produced and consumed.

This article reports from a qualitative case study exploring how a team of agricultural scientists framed their nonscientific audiences for science communication. Our results indicate communication audiences and strategies were shaped by state extension systems. As a result, we argue that technical communicators can contribute to agricultural science communication teams by modeling rhetorically engaged communication and building capacity for audiences overlooked by extension models most focused on economic impact.

Predatory publishers deliver neither the editorial oversight, nor the peer review of legitimate publishers, and benefit from those whose positions require academic publications. These publishers also provide a home for conspiracy theorists and pseudoscience promoters, as their lack of scrutiny offers fraudulent academic research articles a veneer of scholarly credibility. While most predatory journals were designed to dupe researchers, the fraudulent articles they often publish are designed to be found by members of the public, and their accessibility ensures that unlike legitimate research, they are likely to be employed as evidence by those seeking evidence. While studies have examined the common features of predatory journals, their emails, and their websites, this essay situates fraudulent academic articles in posttruth discourse, offers a taxonomy of illegitimate research articles, and highlights their common rhetorical features, in the hopes that the concepts discovered here can further contribute to pedagogy and public understanding.

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In Theory and Best Practices in Science Communication Training, scholars and trainers examine the rhetorical context of science communication, including audience engagement and communication object...

Ethics and Practice in Science Communication (2018) is a collection of works drawn from various conferences, symposia, and journals that explores the ethics of technical communication and the commu...

What aspects of writing are doctoral students metacognitive about when they write research articles for publication? Contributing to the recent conversation about metacognition in genre pedagogy, this study adopts a qualitative approach to illustrate what students have in common, across disciplines and levels of expertise, and the dynamic interplay of genre knowledge and metacognition in learning to write for research. 24 doctoral students in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) were recruited from subsequent runs of a genre-based writing course and were interviewed within a 2-year period when they submitted an article for publication, 3 to 11 months after course completion. Over time and across disciplines, doctoral students’ metacognition converges on four main themes: genre analysis as a “tool” to read and write, audience and the readers’ mind, rhetorical strategies, and the writing process. Furthermore, these themes are extensively combined in the students’ thinking, confirming conceptualizations of expertise as an integration of knowledge types. Metacognition of these themes invoked increased perceived confidence and control over writing, suggesting key areas where metacognitive intervention may be promising.

Scholars in the field of writing and rhetorical studies have long been interested in professional writing and the ways in which experts frame their research for disciplinary audiences. Three decades ago, rhetoricians incorporated stasis theory into their work as a way to explore the nature of argument and persuasion in scientific discourse. However, what is missing in these general arguments based on stasis are the particular arguments in science texts aimed at persuasion. Specifically, this article analyzes arguments from the stasis of value in introductions of science research articles. This work is grounded in the Classical topoi, or topics, cataloging types of arguments and identifying seven topoi. I analyzed 60 introductions from articles in three different science journals, totaling the number of value arguments and arguments comprising the topoi. Findings yielded different proportions in types of arguments, sharp disparities among the journals, and widespread use of value arguments. The broader issue at work in this article is how scientists make a case for the importance of their research and how these findings might inform writing and argumentation in the sciences.

This article explores science communication in the context of COVID-19 through a case study of a January 31, 2020, bioRxiv preprint publication that led to conspiracy theories by suggesting that SARS-CoV-2 originated in the laboratory through genetic engineering. Analysis will consider the initial preprint, the scientific critique that led it to be withdrawn, the conspiracy theories that continue to circulate, and the larger debate that this example has sparked among advocates and critics of open science.

While data 1 has shown that COVID-19 disproportionately affects Black people, the CDC’s early data listed race as “missing/unspecified” at high rates. Incomplete demographic data obscures the virus’s full impact on marginalized communities. Without more information about who the virus is affecting and how, we cannot protect our most vulnerable. This article demonstrates disconnects between reported datasets and data visualizations in public-facing COVID health and science communication and suggests steps that technical and professional communicators can take in creating or using data visualizations accurately and ethically to describe COVID conditions and impacts.

In this original research article, we report findings locating technical and professional communication (TPC) courses and programs from 1,235 not-for-profit two-year colleges (2YCs); argue for an updated 2YC TPC research agenda at 2YCs; and provide concrete steps for increasing 2YC faculty inclusion in the field of TPC through conference attendance, service, and membership in national TPC organizations.

Interdisciplinary collaborations to help students compose for discipline-specific contexts draw on multiple expertise. Science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM) programs particularly rely on their writing colleagues because 1) their academic expertise is often not writing and 2) teaching writing often necessitates a redesigning of existing instructional materials. While many writing studies scholars have the expertise to assist their STEM colleagues with such tasks, how to do so—and, more fundamentally, how to begin such efforts—is not commonly focused on in the literature stemming from these collaborations. Our article addresses this gap by detailing an interdisciplinary Writing in the Disciplines (WID) collaboration at a large, public R1 university between STEM and writing experts to redesign the university’s introductory biology writing curriculum. The collaborative curriculum design process detailed here is presented through the lens of wayfinding, which concerns orientation, trailblazing, and moving through uncertain landscapes according to cues. Within this account, a critical focus on language—what we talk about when we talk about writing—emerges, driving both the collaboration itself and resultant curricular revisions. Our work reveals how collaborators can wayfind through interdisciplinary partnerships and writing curriculum development by transforming differences in discipline-specific expertise into a new path forward.

Engaged public science communication can support community resilience as policymakers, resource managers, and citizens come to terms with the effects of environmental disturbances, natural disasters, and climate change. Drawing upon fieldbased ethnographic research of public-facing outreach and education at Fire Island National Seashore (FIIS), the researcher considers how, in the wake of a catastrophic storm,&hellip; Continue reading Community Resilience through Public Engagement: A Study of Outreach and Science Communication in a Coastal National Park Site by Jamie Remillard

In this article the authors envision a more durable and portable model of scholarship on public engagement with science through partnerships between rhetoricians of science and quantitative social scientists. The authors consider a number of barriers and limitations that make such partnerships difficult, with an eye toward discovering ways that researchers may overcome them. The authors conclude by articulating guidelines for reciprocal transdisciplinary work as well as specific recommended practices for such collaborations.

Reflections currently seeks submissions for Volume 19, Issue 2, Fall 2019. Reflections publishes scholarly research articles (18-30 pages); brief profiles of community-based writing and civic engagement organizations, partnerships, programs aimed at disseminating information and sharing models from which other faculty, scholars, and administrators can benefit; brief project/course profiles of community-based writing and civic engagement that are not developed&hellip; Continue reading Call for Submissions: Volume 19, Issue 2, Fall 2019

The research article is a staple genre in the economy of scientific research, and although research articles have received considerable treatment in genre scholarship, little attention has been given to the important development of Registered Reports. Registered Reports are an emerging, hybrid genre that proceeds through a two-stage model of peer review. This article charts the emergence of Registered Reports and explores how this new form intervenes in the evolution of the research article genre by replacing the central topoi of novelty with methodological rigor. Specifically, I investigate this discursive and publishing phenomenon by describing current conversations about challenges in replicating research studies, the rhetorical exigence those conversations create, and how Registered Reports respond to this exigence. Then, to better understand this emerging form, I present an empirical study of the genre itself by closely examining four articles published under the Registered Report model from the journal Royal Society Open Science and then investigating the genre hybridity by examining 32 protocols (Stage 1 Registered Reports) and 77 completed (Stage 2 Registered Reports) from a range of journals in the life and psychological sciences. Findings from this study suggest Registered Reports mark a notable intervention in the research article genre for life and psychological sciences, centering the reporting of science in serious methodological debates.

The Internet has helped to change who writes about science in the news, how news is written, and how it is taken up by different audiences. However, few studies have examined how these changes have impacted the uptake of scientific claims in online news writing. This case study explores how online news genres take up knowledge claims from a research article on climate change over a period of one year and shows how shifting boundaries between rhetorical communities affect genre uptake. The study results show that online news writers predominantly use the news report genre to cover research findings for 48 hours, after which they predominantly use the news editorial genre to engage these findings. Analysis suggests that the news report genre uses the press release and the article abstract as intermediary genres, but the news editorial uses only the abstract. I argue that the switch between genres repositions the scientist, the journalist, and the public epistemologically, a reorientation that favors uptake in news media outlets supporting action to mitigate climate change and its effects.

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.

To investigate how college students understand and use cloud technology for collaborative writing, the authors studied two asynchronous online courses, on science communication and on technical communication. Students worked on a group assignment (3–4 per group) using Google Docs and individually reflected on their experience writing collaboratively. This article explores leadership and how it interacts with team knowledge making and the collaborative writing process. Guidelines are outlined for instructors interested in adopting collaborative, cloud-based assignments, and the tension between providing clear instructional guidance for student teams and allowing teams to embrace the ambiguity and messiness of virtual collaboration are discussed.

Crowdfunding is a novel mechanism for garnering monetary support from the online public, and increasingly it is being used to fund science. This article reports a small-scale study examining science-focused crowdfunding proposals from Kickstarter.com. By exploring the rhetoric of these proposals with respect to traditional grant funding proposals in the sciences, this study aims to understand how the language of science may be imported into this popular genre.

It is in the interest of scholarly journals to publish important research and of researchers to publish in important journals. One key to making the case for the importance of research in a scholarly article is to incorporate value arguments. Yet there has been no rhetorical analysis of value arguments in the literature. In the context of rhetorical situation, stasis theory, and Swales’s linguistic analysis of moves in introductions, this article examines value arguments in introductions of science research articles. Employing a corpus of 60 articles from three science journals, the author analyzes value arguments based on Toulmin’s definition of argument and identifies three classes of value arguments and seven functions of these arguments in introductions. This analysis illuminates the rhetorical construction of value in science articles and provides a foundation for the empirical study of value in scholarship.

This manifesto presents positions arrived at after a day-long symposium on agency in science communication at the National Communication Association Annual Meeting in Las Vegas, NV, November 18, 2015. During morning sessions, participants in the Association for the Rhetoric of Science, Technology, and Medicine preconference presented individual research on agency in response to a call to articulate <em>key problems that must be solved in the next five years to better understand and support rhetorical agency in massively automated and mediated science communication situations in a world-risk context</em>. In the afternoon, participants convened in discussion groups around four <em>topoi</em> that emerged from the morning’s presentations: automation, biopolitics, publics, and risk. Groups were tasked with answering three questions about their assigned <em>topos</em>: What are the critical controversies surrounding it? What are its pivotal rhetorical and technical terms? And what scholarly questions must be addressed in the next five years to yield a just and effective discourse in this area? Groups also assembled capsule bibliographies of sources core to their <em>topos</em>. At the end of the afternoon, Carolyn R. Miller presented a reply to the groups’ work; that reply serves as the headnote to this manifesto.

This article argues that students should be encouraged to use metatext to announce the purpose and organization of their academic papers.

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.

This article analyzes a proposal submitted to a funding unit in Michigan Technological University by a PhD Forestry student. A rhetorical-cultural approach of the text provides evidence to argue that scientific writing is rooted in a cultural practice that valorizes certain kinds of thought, practices, rituals, and symbols; that a scientist’s work is grounded and shaped by an ideological paradigm; hence, scientific texts have material existence. We find out that science writing is kairotic, selective, and persuasive. The results of the analysis provide enough insights for technical communicators to think about the role that institutions and disciplines play in knowledge production. Thus, technical communicators will not only think about rhetorical moves when they are composing, they will also think about the articulations between contexts and ideological practices and how they shape the identity of writers and communicators.

This article explores how three writers in ecology understand and enact a disciplinary writing style. To accomplish this, it draws on theoretical approaches to style from sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, as well as analyses of drafts of coauthored texts and video-recorded literacy history and discourse-based interviews. This study finds that metaphor and embodied actions such as gestures are valuable sites for comparing writers’ stylistic understandings and practices. The three writers expressed broad agreement when describing the qualities of good scientific writing, using similar verbal and gestural metaphors, such as Communication as Journey and entailments of the Conduit Metaphor. Yet in discourse-based interviews, specific stylistic choices provoked conflicting preferences not only between writers but even within them over time, as they sometimes changed their minds about what they had preferred over a year earlier. These conflicting and changing views, and the writers’ arguments for them, complicate popular notions of writing style: that a particular discipline has a style uniformly shared among experts and that experts’ mastery of their own style is stable and absolute. The finding that stylistic disagreements are undergirded by similar metaphors in language and gesture highlights the ways our stylistic understandings are tied to life histories and are also deeply embodied. Working from a sociocultural perspective, I provide a richer, more complex empirical and theoretical understanding of what it means to command a particular disciplinary style.

Many science students believe that scientific writing is most impressive (and most professionally acceptable) when impersonal, dense, complex, and packed with jargon. In particular, they have the idea that legitimate scientific writing must suppress the subjectivity of the human voice. But science students can mature into excellent writers whose voices are clear, interesting, unburdensome, efficient, and accurate. To do this, they must abandon their ponderous scientific voices and use techniques that produce good style. When I teach for the Science Communication Center at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, I focus on helping students improve their scientific voice. I use workshop-style instruction, review of student writing, tutorial staff, and free online tutorials that I have developed. This article meditates upon the nature of good scientific voice as it analyzes examples of student writing to show improvements made through specific stylistic techniques.

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 paper presents a study designed from a socially situated and activity theory perspective aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of how Ph.D. students regulate their academic writing activity. Writing regulation is a complex activity of a highly situated and social nature, involving cyclical thought-action-emotion dynamics and the individual’s capacity to monitor his/her activity. The central purpose was to analyze how writing regulation takes place within the framework of an educational intervention, a seminar designed to help Ph.D. students write their first research articles. The seminar not only focused on teaching the discursive resources of disciplinary articles in psychology but also sought to develop students’ recognition of epistemic stances (ways of knowing) and identities (ways of being) of their academic and disciplinary communities. While doing this, the seminar also aimed at helping students overcome the contradictions they encountered as they constructed their identities as researchers and writers through writing. We collected data on seminar participants’ perceptions (through analyses of interviews, diaries, and in-class interaction) and practices (through analyses of successive drafts and peers’ and tutors’ text revisions). Contradictions represent a challenge for which the individual does not have a clear answer. Consequently, solutions need to be creative and often painful; that is, the individual needs to work out something qualitatively different from a mere combination of two competing forces. The unit of analysis was the “Regulation Episode,” defined as the sequences of discourse and/or action from which a contradiction may be inferred and which, in turn, lead to the implementation of innovative actions to solve. Results showed that contradictions regarding students’ conceptualizations of their texts—as artifacts-in-activity versus as end-products—and of their identities as disciplinary writers become visible through certain discursive manifestations such as “dilemmas” and “critical conflicts” (Engeström &amp; Sannino, 2011). The development of students’ disciplinary writing identity was affected by their perceptions of peripheral participation in the disciplinary community and of contradictions between different communities. Two successful ways students resolved contradictions and regulated their writing activity were to redefine the output and consider the text as a tool to think; implementing these solutions resulted in substantial changes to drafts. These results might be used to design socioculturally oriented educational interventions and tools to help students develop as disciplinary writers.

This article reports the results of a qualitative study on the joint publication of research articles by a group of supervisors and graduate students in an Iranian university. The results indicate that the ministry-regulated incentive system for publication had increased the research output of the participants. It argues that material and credentialing incentives for supervisors can be regarded as symbolic violence in the exercise of disciplinary power, which required that the participants form local communities of practice and interconnect with international journal reviewers to get their articles published.

The editors introduce the four research articles in the issue.

The International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, recently established by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is an alleged attempt at public outreach. The NSF encourages scientists to submit visualizations that would appeal to non-expert audiences by displaying their work in an annual “special feature” in Science magazine, and each year they present the winning image on the cover of Science as the ultimate reward. Although the NSF advertizes the competition as an attempt to educate non-scientists, the visualizations lack sufficient textual explanation in the Science special feature articles and do not demonstrate clear significance for current issues in science. This article assesses the actual motivations behind the NSF's “Visualization Challenge,” given the lack of accompanying textual information, and it explores the consequences of allowing “scientific” visualizations to float into the public sphere unexplained. It will be shown that the spirit of this competition exemplifies the current shift from “public understanding of science” to “public appreciation of science” in the growing field of Science Communication, particularly through the technique of “framing” devices. This shift in objective, accentuated in the realm of visual communication, reinforces the public's view of science as a mythic authority.

This article provides quantitative data to establish the relative, perceived burden of writing research articles in English as a second language. Previous qualitative research has shown that scientists writing English in a second language face difficulties but has not established parameters for the degree of this difficulty. A total of 141 Mexican, Spanish-speaking scientists from a range of scientific disciplines participated in a survey which directly compared writing scientific research articles in Spanish and English as a second language. The survey questions defined burden in relation to perceived difficulty, dissatisfaction, and anxiety. The results revealed that the experience of writing a scientific research article in English as a second language is significantly different than the experience writing in a first language and that this writing process was perceived as 24% more difficult and generated 11% more dissatisfaction and 21% more anxiety. The findings suggest that the use of English as a second language is the cause of this increased burden.

A study of scholarly research articles from six disciplines provides insights about academic writing that composition instructors can use to prepare students to write across the curriculum.

Driving research questions from the prevailing issues and interests and developing from them new theories, formulas, algorithms, methods, and designs, and linking them to the interests of the larger audience is a vital component of scientific research papers. The present article discusses outlining purposes or stating the nature of the present research, and listing research questions or hypotheses in the introduction of academic papers. This corpus-based genre study focuses particularly on Move 3 of the model “occupying the niche.” The results indicating disciplinary variation show that the writers of Computer Science (CS) research articles, over the years have developed an increased use of outlining purpose/stating the nature of the present research, having the characteristics of purposive, descriptive, extension of the previous work, contrast to the existing work, brevity, complexity, and a description of methodology. It also shows that listing research questions or hypothesis may have distinctively different functions in developing genres as compared to the established ones such as physics.

The authors describe two pedagogical strategies—rhetorical sentence combining and rhetorical pattern practice—that blend once-popular teaching techniques with rhetorical decision making. A literature review identified studies that associated linguistic and rhetorical knowledge with success in engineering writing; this information was used to create exercises teaching technical communication students to write Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRaD) reports. Two pilot studies report promising results: Preliminary findings suggest that students who were taught this method wrote essays that were perceived as significantly higher in quality than those written by students in a control section. At the same time, however, the pilot studies point to some challenges and shortcomings of exercise-oriented pedagogies.

Thanks to the recent developments in the theory of academic discourse analysis, it is now increasingly accepted that negotiation of academic knowledge is intimately related to the social practices of academic communities. To underpin this position and to reveal some of the ways this is achieved, this article analyzes a relatively wide spectrum of academic texts (20 research articles, 20 handbook chapters, 20 scholarly textbook chapters, and 20 introductory textbook chapters) in applied linguistics. The authors show here the importance of establishing social relationships in academic arguments, suggest some of the ways this is achieved, and indicate how the social and institutional differences that underlie production and reception of different academic genres influence the ways metadiscourse is shaped in academic communication.