Written Communication

http://wcx.sagepub.com/ Public Communication of Science in Blogs: Recontextualizing Scientific Discourse for a Diversified Audience
Mara Jos Luzn Written Communication 2013 30: 428 originally published online 19 June 2013 DOI: 10.1177/0741088313493610 The online version of this article can be found at: http://wcx.sagepub.com/content/30/4/428

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WCX30410.1177/0741088313493610Written CommunicationLuzn

Article

Public Communication of Science in Blogs: Recontextualizing Scientific Discourse for a Diversified Audience
Mara Jos Luzn1

Written Communication 30(4) 428457 2013 SAGE Publications Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0741088313493610 wcx.sagepub.com

Abstract 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. Keywords new media, science blogging, popularization, rhetoric of science, rhetorical strategies, recontextualization
1University

of Zaragoza, Zaragoza, Spain

Corresponding Author: Mara Jos Luzn, University of Zaragoza, Departamento de Filologa Inglesa y Alemana, C/Pedro Cerbuna 12, Zaragoza, 50009, Spain. Email: mjluzon@unizar.es

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New media are having a transformative impact on the public communication of science beyond disciplinary communities, blurring the boundaries between the public and the professional spheres of communication (Trench, 2008). This blending of information for public and specialized audiences in the same space provides support for the claim that there is a diffuse border between different discourses of science. Researchers on public communication of science (e.g., Bucchi, 2008; Fahnestock, 2004; Myers, 2003) reject the view of popularization as a translation of specialized discourse so that it can be understood by a nonspecialist audience, who does not participate in decisions concerning scientific issues. They claim that there is not a clear boundary between specialist and popularized discourses, and that they interact in the process of knowledge construction (Myers, 2003). Popularization is not a matter of simplification or translation, but of recontextualization of scientific discourse into another domain (Calsamiglia & Van Dijk, 2004). The indissociability between science communication for peers and for nonspecialists has become especially noticeable in online genres used for science communication, and particularly in science blogs. Blogs are being used by researchers as platforms to share and discuss information and ideas on disciplinary issues both with peers and with the interested public. Given the increasingly important role of new media as a channel for the public communication of science, we need to understand how scientific knowledge is disseminated, mediated, and constructed in these media, that is, how scientific discourse is recontextualized in online media. Recontextualizing scientific discourse in science blogs means harnessing the affordances of the medium to rewrite specialized knowledge in such a way that the complex audience of these blogs can interpret and integrate it into their existing knowledge and feel involved enough to make informed decisions on a wide range of issues regarding science, their personal life, or civic matters.1 The purpose of this article is to analyze the discursive strategies used by bloggers to communicate and recontextualize scientific discourse in the realm of science blogs and to engage the diverse audience of these blogs with scientific issues. Since this study focuses on science blogs as a tool to communicate and recontextualize science, I consider only posts that are explicitly intended for this purpose: posts used to link to published research related to a disciplinary area and comment on it. I use the term research-commenting posts to refer to these posts.

Science Blogging: Purpose and Audience

Blogs are both spaces that promote the personal and the representation of the self (Myers, 2010) and social media, which include different communication

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features to enable interaction with the audience. Their distinctive technological affordances (i.e., information archiving, opportunities for readers to comment, linking) make science blogs different from other channels for science communication. They can be used as open dynamic spaces for the sharing and discussion of knowledge, where both experts and interested public can participate. Unlike in other types of science communication, on science blogs, people actively engage with the issues at hand, ask questions, express disapproval, while the blogger does not merely pontificate but is confronted with real-life (Blanchard, 2011). They are spaces where the public can contribute to the collective construction of knowledge by discussing, supporting, or challenging claims. Science blogging involves writing about scientific topics, but it is a heterogeneous form of communication, with a variety of producers (e.g., researchers, professors, even scientific journalists), types of content, purposes, and audiences. Science communication in blogs takes many forms, for example, comments on daily news related to science, discussion of disciplinary issues and new scientific findings, comments on recently published papers by other researchers, pedagogical posts. This wide range of forms is related to the variety of purposes for which bloggers write about science (e.g., Blanchard, 2011; Davies & Merchant 2007; Mortensen & Walker 2002). Blogs provide a space to record ones reflections, ideas, and thoughts for future research and bookmark useful or interesting publications in the bloggers discipline. They are also a networking tool: They allow scholars to share their ideas with a broad audience, which may provide feedback. They serve to disseminate information and valuable research, both among peers and the interested public, and to peer review recently published research. Finally, science blogging is often intended to influence others in different ways, for example, to bring the others to the bloggers point of view in a disciplinary issue, but also in political, ethical, or ideological controversial issues. Posting ones commentary or analysis of a published article in a blog has many advantages over sending a letter to the editor of a journal: It is quicker, publication is ensured, it reaches a wider audience, and it enables timely and immediate discussion with anybody interested in the topic, thus facilitating public involvement in science discussions. Science blogs are not intended to be read only by specialists in a discipline but are used to get to and connect with multiple publics with shared interests in complex ways and to create a sense of community that transcends institutional and disciplinary boundaries (Blanchard, 2011). As Blanchard (2011) puts it, Rather than top-down communication which effectively creates a boundary between the expert and the non-expert, blogs offer a blend of voices and views on topics (p. 225). Blogs may be used for informal

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communication with researchers in a discipline, with whom the blogger shares background knowledge, but they also make it possible to communicate with nonexperts, presenting research in an accessible format, not constrained by the conventions and norms of well-established academic genres, and thus provide a unique educational bridge between academia and the public (Batts, Anthis, & Smith, 2008). The public audience for science bloggers is a stratified and heterogeneous one, including the interested public, members of the public with some training in science, and scientists both inside and outside the particular research area. Different members of the blogs audience have different science information needs (Kyvik, 2005, p. 290), and the features of the medium may enable bloggers to address the needs of this diversified audience. Science blogging can help to accommodate science to the audiences daily lives in the same way that technical writing accommodates technology to users (Dobrin, 1983, p. 242). Some bloggers even make an explicit reference to their intention to reach this public audience. The blog RealClimate is presented as a commentary site on climate science for the interested public and journalists. Schmidt, a blogger at RealClimate, considers that blogs are a way for scientists to talk to the public directly, informally, and in depth about controversial topics (Gramling, 2008). Clancy (2011) states that some of her posts are a new form of scholarly writing (postpublication peer review), while others are intended to mentor junior colleagues and still others are addressed at a more general audience. The blogger at Inspiring Science also makes the following interesting reflection:
Communicating with the public is simply not part of the standard scientific education, which creates a gap between research scientists and the rest of society. This blog is my way of trying to help fill that gap. A better understanding of science is important for everyone. Since most scientific research is publicly funded, scientists need the public to understand the value of their work. . . . For non-scientists, a better understanding of science can help make more informed and effective choices [italics added] on both a personal and a social level.

These words show that one of the motivations for science blogging, although admittedly not the only one, is the bloggers wish to become civic scientists, that is, scientist(s) who communicate with general audiences and bring knowledge and expertise into the public arena to increase awareness about science and/or facilitate discussion and decision making on issues of importance to society (Kyvik, 2005, p. 289). Kyvik (2005) draws on Kalleberg (2000) to describe two roles of the civic scientist: (a) the expert, who makes scientific research understandable to lay persons and academics

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outside the discipline; and (b) the public intellectual, who discusses new scientific research publicly in order to influence political, economic, social or cultural issues (Kyvik, 2005, p. 290). Science bloggers sometimes make reference to their wish to situate scientific knowledge in civic life and to their responsibility as public intellectuals. For instance, in a post in Respectful Insolence the blogger attacks the claims in a vaccine paper that is being publicized at several antivaccine websites and concludes the post by saying, I guess we can look forward to a lot more bad science. Oh, well. I guess it will guarantee that Ill have blogging material for years to come. Unfortunately.

Communicating Science to Different Audiences

Scientific discourse is not a unitary phenomenon but a terrain of competing discourses and practices (Myers, 2003, p. 267), involving a wide range of genres, from research papers to science news, through which scientific knowledge is constructed and communicated to a plurality of different publics. As Myers (2003) points out, the success of a scientific claim involves its presentation and discussion in different genres, such as research papers or conference presentations, but it also often involves the claim being cited, included in textbooks or reported in the media. Therefore, sociologists and rhetoricians of science (e.g., Bucchi, 2008; Myers, 2003; Paul, 2004; Whitley, 1985) reject the traditional or diffusionist view of science popularization, according to which there are two clearly defined communities: scientists and the general public. In this perspective, the public is viewed as passive and ignorant, not contributing to decisions affecting the progress of science, science communication as a linear, one-way process in which discourse for specialists and discourse for the lay audience can be sharply separated, and popularization as a translation or simplified version of the research paper (Bucchi, 2008, p. 58). One of the main criticisms leveled against this view is the boundary between expert and lay participants and the linearity of the diffusion of knowledge. First, the readers of scientific popularization vary a great deal in their level of scientific knowledge and their understanding of science has an influence on scientific research (Bucchi, 2008; Myers, 2003; Whitley, 1985). Many members of the public are quite literate on areas of specialist knowledge in which they are interested for diverse reasons (e.g., personal, professional, ethical, ideological). They have their own persuasive devices, based on their values, lived experiences, and local knowledge, to discuss and challenge scientific claims (Myers, 2003), and their opinion can affect policy decisions and therefore influence scientific development. In addition, the scientific community is also heterogeneous, consisting of many different disciplinary communities, varying in epistemological assumptions

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and methodological approaches. Since scientific research has become highly specialized, scientists need to resort to interdisciplinary popularization, to make their work accessible to scientists working in different areas or disciplines. This type of popularization is essential to collaborate with researchers in other fields and to obtain resources from groups of scientists responsible for the allocation of research funds (Whitley, 1985). Current research on public communication of science accepts the continuity model of scientific communication proposed by Clotre and Shinn (1985) and Hilgartner (1990). Clotre and Shinn distinguish four main stages in the process of scientific communication: intraspecialist level (e.g., papers published in specialized scientific journals); interspecialist level, which involves interdisciplinary popularization (e.g., papers published in journals like Nature or Science); pedagogic level (e.g., textbooks); and popular level, or popularization addressed at the general public, mainly done via mass media (e.g., science news in the daily press). In this model popularization is regarded not as a translation or simplification of scientific discourse, but as a discursive recontextualization for a less specialist audience, including scientists in other (sub)disciplines. Calsamiglia and Van Dijk (2004, p. 371) define popularization as a social process involving different genres of communicative events in different media, intended to disseminate scientific knowledge, but also opinions and ideologies of scholars, to the public at large. They point out that popularization involves not only a reformulation, but in particular also a recontextualization of scientific knowledge and discourse that is originally produced in specialized contexts. Similarly, Hyland (2010) points out that popular science does not just report scientific facts to a less specialist audience but represents phenomena in different ways to achieve different purposes (p. 19): While researchers write papers to persuade specialists of the validity of their knowledge claims, this validity is taken for granted in popular science, where the focus is on the relevance and value of this new knowledge for the audience. Likewise, the way science is re-presented in science blog entries will also be determined by the purposes that bloggers intend to achieve. Rhetoricians of science have analyzed the discursive and rhetorical features used to recontextualize scientific knowledge in different popularizing genres (Calsamiglia & Van Dijk, 2004; Fahnestock, 1998, 2004; Hyland, 2010; Myers, 2003). Rather than focusing on popularizations, Hyland (2010) compared how writers of research papers and popular science articles (re) contextualize science. He used the term proximity to refer to a writers strategic use of rhetorical features, which involve responding to the context of the text, particularly the readers who form part of that context. Proximity is concerned with how writers represent not only themselves and their

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readers, but also their material, in ways which are most likely to meet their readers expectations and enables us to explain how writers take their readers likely objections, background knowledge, rhetorical expectations and reading purposes into account (Hyland, 2010, p. 117). Drawing on previous research on scientific discourse and on the analysis of his corpus, Hyland (2010) discusses five ways through which proximity is negotiated: (a) organization: adapting the rhetorical pattern to the audiences expectations and needs; (b) argument structure: shaping material for the audience through different types of appeals (e.g., novelty, newsworthiness) and focusing (centering on the object of the study or on the disciplinary procedures), and framing or tailoring information to the assumed knowledge base of potential readers (e.g., jargon in research paper vs. definitions and clarifications in popularizations); (c) credibility (e.g., showing expertise and knowledge of disciplinary methods in research papers vs. direct quotes from scientists in popularizations); (d) stance: using language to adopt positions and express attitude (e.g., hedges vs. attitude markers); and (e) engagement: markers that acknowledge the presence of the readers and connect to them (e.g., reader pronouns). His analysis shows how the way writers negotiate proximity with readers (i.e., how writers respond to context) varies in different discourses and provides a comprehensive framework that can help to analyze the recontextualization of science in weblogs.

Research Questions
As already stated, science blogs are heterogeneous in terms of producers, purposes, types of content, or audiences. Even if we consider only researchcommenting posts, there is no homogeneity. The audience for these posts is a complex one, and the bloggers assumed roles, authorial orientation, and rhetorical purposes are quite diverse. It is hypothesized here that bloggers write research-commenting posts for different rhetorical purposes, that is, to disseminate research on a subject area, bringing it to the attention of specialized public and making it understandable for the attentive public, to evaluate previous research and claims by others and share and support their own position on scientific and civic issues, to engage the audience (across various publics) in critically evaluating new scientific claims and in attaching meaning to these claims. Therefore, bloggers will need to use diversified strategies to address the needs of diverse audiences and engage them, and thus achieve those different rhetorical purposes. The purpose of this article is to analyze these strategies in order to determine the distinctive rhetorical features of blogs as a space where science is contextualized. More specifically, the article is intended to answer the following questions:

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1. Which rhetorical categories occur in the posts in the corpus, and how do they contribute to achieving specific rhetorical purposes? 2. How do science bloggers tailor information for their readers? Which linguistics choices do they make to meet the information needs of readers with different degrees of expertise? How do they help readers understand specialist knowledge and integrate it with their existing knowledge? 3. Which discursive strategies do bloggers use to engage the reader? Which linguistic choices are used by bloggers to make scientific content less intimidating to readers and more relevant to their lives and to key issues of civic life? 4. Which kind of recontextualization of scientific knowledge do blogs facilitate? How do science bloggers harness the affordances of the media?

Method
The data for this study consisted of 75 blog posts used to highlight and discuss new research (taken from 15 science blogs). All the posts selected made explicit reference to new research (a new paper, a paper just published) and included a link to the publication or a bibliographical reference. Many of the posts analyzed included the researchblogging.org icon, which indicates that the post is a comment on one (or several) peer-reviewed research papers. In order to compile the corpus I looked for blogs in scienceblogs.com, a popular hub for blogs covering a wide range of scientific disciplines, and in the blogrolls (i.e., lists of links to other blogs) of the already selected science blogs. I selected 15 blogs that met the following criteria: They included posts used to comment on published research, they were active at the moment of analysis, and they were frequently updated. Five research-commenting posts, written in 2011 or 2012, were taken from each blog. The corpus was closely examined to determine the strategies used by bloggers to recontextualize scientific knowledge in science blogs. The first step consisted in identifying rhetorical categories in the posts in the corpus and comparing them with rhetorical categories in research papers and popularizations (Fahnestock, 1998, 2004; Nwogu, 1991, 1997; Swales, 1990; Varghese & Abraham, 2004). This step was partly informed by genre analysis, but I followed a grounded theory approach, not starting from preestablished categories. Although the analysis involved the identification of categories that were common in posts (see Table 2 below), I do not consider these posts a genre and therefore I do not use the term move to refer to the categories or intend to establish a one-to-one match between them and moves in scientific genres.

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In the second step the data were analyzed on a coding scheme based on the discursive strategies used in different types of science discourse (in both specialist and nonspecialist settings) to respond to the context of the text. I drew mainly on Hyland (2010), since he in turn draws on previous studies to discuss several strategies, but I also took into account research by other authors (e.g., Calsamiglia & Van Dijk, 2004; Fahnestock, 1998, 2004; Giannoni, 2008). In addition, the coding scheme also includes strategies used in computer-mediated communication, especially in academic blogs, to engage the readers (Luzn, 2011). To design the coding scheme I scanned the corpus looking for evidence of the strategies found in previous research and incorporated any other strategy emerging from the data. The recontextualizing strategies found in the corpus were classified into two types, related to two different but related purposes: (a) strategies to tailor information to the assumed knowledge of potential readers (e.g., explanation of concepts, exemplification, links); (b) strategies to engage the readers, by arousing their interest (e.g., reference to popular culture), by constructing solidarity and engaging in interaction (e.g., features of conversational discourse, inclusive pronouns), and by evaluating scientific content (e.g., expressions of positive or negative evaluation of research). Table 1 lists the different strategies that were coded for. These strategies will be discussed and illustrated in detail in the fifth section. In order to identify the most common strategies in research-commenting posts, I counted the number of posts where each of these strategies occurred, rather than the number of their occurrences in the corpus. The reason is that some posts displayed a high number of occurrences of a strategy (e.g., evaluative markers, questions), while others displayed no occurrence of the same strategy, and thus counting the total frequency could have led to biased results regarding what is common in this type of post.

Results Rhetorical Categories

Since posts used to comment on scientific research may be used for different rhetorical purposes, the content focused on and the way it is rhetorically organized also varies, which makes it impossible to find a common structure for these posts. However, there are some rhetorical categories that are common in many of them. Table 2 shows these categories and the number of posts where each of these categories occurs. This table should not be interpreted as a sequence of a fixed set of categories, since they did not always occur in this order. Table 2 shows that in most cases the posts are intended not merely to

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Table 1. Rhetorical Strategies to Recontextualize Science Information. Strategies to tailor information Explanation of terms and concept (definitions, elaboration of terms) Paraphrases/reformulations Comparisons/metaphors Examples from daily life Links Visuals conveying information Strategies to engage the reader Titles References to popular lore, beliefs Self-disclosure (reference to the bloggers public or personal life) Features of conversational discourse Inclusive pronouns References to reader Questions Humor Positive evaluation of research or findings Negative evaluation of research or findings Personal expression of opinion Expressions of feelings or emotional reactions

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report new findings, but mostly to evaluate and comment on these findings and on their significance. The posts in the corpus were similar to popularizations in that the main claim or contribution to science was typically foregrounded at the beginning, and not toward the end of the paper, as in research papers (Hyland, 2010). In most cases the claim or outcome of the research was presented in the first sentence in the form of a brief statement and then it was elaborated further on. This claim was signaled by means of lexical items that highlight novelty (e.g., a new paper, a new method, today, a paper just published) and readers were usually given fast and easy access to the original article (or to a summary) through hyperlinks. (1) According to a paper just published (but available online since 2010), we havent found any genes for personality (Neuroskeptic) Of the posts, 70.6% began with a brief introduction that set the stage for presenting the new finding. This might involve reminding the audience of

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Table 2. Rhetorical Categories in Research-Commenting Posts. Rhetorical category Contextualizing the research Announcing the new finding or the new contribution to the discipline Describing (and evaluating) method Presenting, explaining (and evaluating) results Adopting a neutral or positive stance toward the findings Questioning some aspects of the results Criticizing the whole research and findings Drawing implications or highlighting the significance of the study Highlighting the significance of the research for science Broader implications (political, ethical, ideological) Implications for peoples lives Implications for involved actors Number of posts where they occur 53 75 43 70 42 12 16 56a 39 12 26 10 % of the posts 70.6 100.0 57.3 93.3 56.0 16.0 21.3 74.6 52.0 16.0 34.7 13.3

a.Some posts presented more than one type of implication.

previous related knowledge or previous posts in the blog, presenting results from a previous related paper, or using an attention-catching strategy, such as pointing out the interest that the paper has aroused, asking a seemingly unrelated question, or telling an anecdote. Example (2) is the beginning of a post on a paper that presents evidence supporting the hypothesis that excessive hygiene early in life can result in allergies later in life: (2) Since moving to Finland, Ive become accustomed to asking guests whether they have any allergies before I prepare dinner. I grew up in the developing world where allergies and asthma seem to be much less common than they are here. (IS) A rhetorical category present in 57.3% of the posts examined was an explanation (and sometimes evaluation) of the method, with varying lengths, and for audiences with different degrees of assumed disciplinary

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knowledge. Posts tended to include not technical accounts of methods, but clear descriptions that made it possible for the readers to share the bloggers evaluation of their validity. Bloggers reported on methods selectively, focusing only on those aspects that would be useful to make their point, as illustrated in Example (3), where the blogger used the description of the method to evaluate it positively and thus bestow reliability on the finding. (3) The researchers made high resolution scans of teeth from more than 40 different multituberculates and then used geographic information system (GIS) software borrowed from the world of cartography to generate a detailed topographical map of the teeth. (IS) Presentation, explanation, and evaluation of results was present in 93.3% of the posts. Bloggers usually reported the researchers explanation of results and also their own interpretations, especially when these differed from those in the original paper. Interpretation of results requires expert knowledge of the topic and is also present in research papers (Brett, 1994; Nwogu, 1997). Bloggers act as experts who critically comment on and analyze new research, helping the audience both to understand it and to make decisions or position themselves regarding the content that is presented. In 56% of the posts the bloggers adopted a positive/neutral stance toward the findings. Some bloggers write research commenting posts because they want to share new research with the public and they even state explicitly that their purpose is to highlight or explain new research. This is the case of the posts in the blog Uncertain Principles, where the blogger provides a detailed explanation of results in a question and answer format in an attempt to make them more understandable for the public. A positive/neutral stance was adopted when bloggers reported results that were related to their own research, that way taking the opportunity to highlight the importance or relevance of this line of research. In other cases, bloggers wanted to refute the findings of the paper (21.3% of the posts) or draw attention and comment on some aspects of research with which they disagreed (16.0% of the posts). To guide readers to their interpretation, bloggers resorted to argument, a mode of discourse that is also prominent in popular science books (Varghese & Abraham, 2004): Bloggers constructed a rational argument, providing evidence and making their reasoning explicit (Example (4)). (4) But I think the better explanation is that what theyre seeing isnt actually autoimmunity. Rather, its probably due to the destruction

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Written Communication 30(4) virus-infected non-tumor cells. . . . Once the mice clear the VSV infection, what happens? If its really autoimmunity, the prostate should continue to be attacked. (WB)

Posts were sometimes used by bloggers to defend their positions on controversial topics (e.g., global warming, the effect of vaccines, evolutionary theory), where scientific development and policies are influenced not only by scientists claims of expertise, but also by the publics opinion and understanding. Blogs provide an expository space to explain publicly and in nontechnical terms why an opposing claim is wrong. They enable bloggers to present arguments supporting a claim in a way that would not be allowed in professional journals (e.g., including speculations, subjective opinions, contingent discourse) and to trigger discussion and debate, where even nonspecialists can take part and bring in their arguments. An example is the post A survey administered by a German anti-vaccine homeopath backfires spectacularly in the blog Respectful Insolence. In the post the blogger provides a detailed argument to invalidate the methodology of the reported research, arguing, sometimes with the use of irony (e.g., (5)), that it does not conform to disciplinary procedures. The ultimate purpose is to show that the claim defended in this article, opposing his own position, is wrong. (5) Lets just say that the construction of this survey demonstrates all the scientific understanding and rigor that I would expect from a homeopath, given that homeopaths believe that magic water cures people. (RI) Bloggers also commented on and evaluated the results of research that supported their viewpoint on a topic, usually with the purpose of engaging the public to make a decision and act on it. This is illustrated in the post Does preschool matter? where the writer presents and explains the results of a study that supports his belief in the importance of preschool for at-risk children, and then he derives some implications (or lessons): the first for upper-class parents, the second, and more important, for the audience in general, who can influence education decisions. (6) For many kids, the most important years of schooling come before they can even read. . . . A new paper in Psychological Science by Elliot Tucker-Drob, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, helps explain why this is the case. [Presentation and explanation of method and of results]

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There are two lessons here. The first lesson is that upper-class parents worry too much. . . . The greatest luxury we can give our children, it turns out, is the luxury of being the type of parent that doesnt matter at all. The second lesson is that stunning developmental inequalities set in almost immediately. . . . And this is why we need good preschools. . . . Early childhood education is still an essential first step toward eliminating the achievement gap. Life is unfair; some kids will always be born into households that have much less. Nevertheless, we have a duty to ensure that every child has a chance to learn what hes capable of. (TFC) The concluding paragraph (last paragraph in Example (6)) clearly reveals the role of the blogger as a civic scientist, who wants to draw the audience to his own standpoint and engage them in civic life issues. This post illustrates how bloggers may comment on research to draw implications beyond the boundaries of science (ethical, cultural, ideological, political) (16% of the posts). Implications for practice and policy making may occur in research papers in different disciplines, but what seems to be distinctive to these posts is that here bloggers sometimes urge the audience to action by appealing to shared responsibility (see Examples (6) and (7)): (7) Durack and colleagues findings are important because they show just how rapidly and drastically the Earth is changing, right before our eyes. This is serious stuff that we can actually do something about, but only if we make scientifically-informed decisions. (LCA) The posts analyzed also displayed implications for the daily life and concerns of people (34.7% of the posts), which makes them more similar to popularization and shows the bloggers in their roles of civic scientist attempting to integrate science in the publics life. Research can show us how to educate our children (see lesson of upper-class parents in Example (6)) or to be wary if our children are diagnosed ADHD (e.g., (8)). (8) This is strong support for the immaturity hypothesisthe idea that some children get a diagnosis of ADHD because theyre younger than their classmates at school. . . . Clearly this is very important, if true. These findings raise concerns about the potential harms of overdiagnosis and overprescribing (Neuroskeptic)

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In 52% of the posts in the corpus bloggers also highlighted the significance of the reported research for the development of science, a category also present in research papers in some disciplines (Nwogu, 1997; Yang & Allison, 2003). (9) But high-resolution, synchrotron CT imaging opens up a whole new world of paleontology, new questions that can be asked. For example, . . . (LCA) Some bloggers even presented implications for how actors involved in disseminating and publishing research should behave (13.3% of the posts). This is interesting because it reveals how the bloggers adopt the role of agents eager to ensure that poor research and unproved claims are not published and accepted as valid knowledge. (10) So everything about that original Tetrahedron paper was wrong; it never should have made it through the review process. . . . Reviewers and editors are supposed to notice when a paper has made very unusual claims, and theyre supposed to ask the authors to back them up. (ITP)

Strategies to Tailor Information to the Assumed Knowledge Base of Potential Readers

When communicating science, writers adapt information to the knowledge and interests of potential readers. This is done differently in research papers and popularizations (Hyland, 2010): Authors of research papers frame information for a target audience of peers through the use of technical terminology, acronyms, or reference to disciplinary practices. When writing popularizations, by contrast, writers cannot assume such a high degree of shared knowledge and use rhetorical strategies to help the readers connect the new knowledge in the text to their existing knowledge, e.g., definition and explanation of new concepts as they are introduced (Hyland, 2010). Bloggers need to frame content for both expert and nonspecialist audiences, although not all bloggers assume the same level of knowledge from the audience, and even within a single blog, different posts may be originally intended for audiences with different degrees of expertise. Table 3 shows the strategies used in the posts in the corpus to meet the information needs of the audience. In order to help nonspecialist audiences integrate specialist knowledge, bloggers used different explanatory elements typical of popularizations, such

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Table 3. Strategies to Tailor Information to the Audiences Needs. Strategy Explanation of terms and concept Paraphrases/reformulations Comparisons/metaphors Examples Links Visuals Number of posts 25 15 16 13 67 28

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% of posts 33.3 20.0 21.3 17.3 89.3 37.3

as comparisons and metaphors, definitions or elaboration of terms, paraphrases, examples (Calsamiglia & Van Dijk, 2004; Giannoni, 2008). However, these strategies were not used by all bloggers (see Table 3). Analogies and metaphors help to reconceptualize an area of knowledge unknown to the reader in terms of a more familiar area (Calsamiglia & Van Dijk, 2004). For instance, in the post Is sleep brain defragmentation?, (Neuroskeptic) the blogger explains new research by drawing on the brain-as-computer metaphor and comparing sleep to hard disk defragmentation. The posts also included explanations of terms, which varied in length from a few words to a paragraph, paraphrases to rephrase the specialist discourse in more understandable language (e.g., (11)) and examples from daily life (e.g., (12)). (11) A new paper in PLoS ONE examines the Y-chromosomal patterns as they partition across ethnic groups in Afghanistan. By this, we mean the direct paternal lineage of Afghan men. (DAB) (12) Its natural to discount rewards that are promised in the future. . . . If I offered you a choice between $4 today and $5 ten years from now, youd be sensible to take the lower amount today. (CV) By far the most frequent strategy used in the corpus to tailor information to the readers is links (present in 89.3% of the posts), a feature that distinguishes blogs from printed popularizations and research papers. Bloggers take advantage of the hypertextual allowances of the medium to explain most concepts through links to other sites, very frequently to Wikipedia. Clarification of potentially unfamiliar concepts through links enables a better adaptation to the audiences needs than glosses or definitions: Links enable lengthy explanations (whole articles in other sites), which are accessed or incorporated into the text only if the reader decides to do so and which are integrated into the syntax of the sentence is such a way that the argument is not disrupted, no matter the number of links. In a single post bloggers may

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link to information intended for general audiences (e.g., Wikipedia entries) and for specialized audiences. Bloggers can therefore provide for readers with different levels of expertise and enhance their texts not only with clarifications for nonexperts but also with specialized information for peers or more knowledgeable readers. The following example, in the post Is sleep brain defragmentation?, illustrates this role of links: (13) Memory formation involves a process called long-term potentiation (LTP) which is essentially the strengthening of synaptic connections between nerve cells. Worse, the synapses that strengthen during memory are primarily glutamate synapses. . . . One possible mechanism is synaptic scaling. When some of the inputs onto a given cell become stronger, all of the synapses on that cell could weaken. This would preserve the relative strength of the different inputs while keeping the total inputs constant. (Neuroskeptic) The links long-term potentiation and glutamate lead to the Wikipedia entries for these concepts. The link synaptic scaling leads to an article in the journal Cell, where this concept is explained for an audience of peers. Since the information in the Cell paper is difficult to understand for nonexperts, the blogger provides an easier one-sentence clarification of the concept in the post itself. The links that bloggers incorporate have different functions. First, they provide not only information on concepts or processes that may help understanding for some readers but also related additional information that may be of interest for some members of the audience. Example (14) is a fragment of a post commenting on research that provides evidence to refute the discovery that neutrinos travel faster that the speed of light: (14) We all knew that when the OPERA experiment announced preliminary evidence that neutrinos were traveling faster than the speed of light (1) the result was so hard to swallow that independent confirmation from other experiments would be necessary before too many people jumped on the bandwagon. In the meantime, a number of theoretical papers pointed out difficulties in accepting the result at face value (probably the cleanest by Cohen and Glashow (2)). And just last month OPERA itself announced that they had located a couple of possible systematic errors (3) in their experiment, without actually backing off the original result. . . .

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Now we have what might be the nail in the coffin: another experiment, ICARUS (4), at the same laboratory in Gran Sasso (5) in Italy, has reported an independent measurement of the neutrino time-offlight from CERN. (The CERN twitter feed (6) points to a frustratingly vague press release; (7) (CV) The links offer a great deal of extra information for the interested public and for peers: links to other posts in the blog, where the blogger comments on the discovery when it was first published (1) and on previous research reporting errors in the experiment (3), thus providing the background for this new post; a link to bibliographical references intended for specialists (2); links to information on another experiment (4) and to the Wikipedia entry for one of the laboratories collaborating in these experiments (5); a link to Twitter (6). This post provides a clear example of how bloggers respond to new publications by constructing interlinked texts which may incorporate other voices and texts, bringing in information that may meet the needs of experts and nonexperts. In addition, it shows how links contribute to providing credibility and strengthening the bloggers position, by linking to texts that help to support their point (Link (2)). Links also provided information on methodology without any need to explain it in the post. Writers of papers in the hard disciplines tend to assume shared knowledge on specific procedures and just make reference to them, without describing them in detail. Writers of blogs cannot assume this shared knowledge of methods or discipline instruments, but they can provide full descriptions through links, as in Example (15), where the blogger links to a Wikipedia article on principle components analysis: (15) Finally, in a principle components analysis of foot bone ratios . . ., humans and gorillas overlap a bit, to the exclusion of chimpanzees and monkeys. (LCA) Finally, links were used as bibliographical references, which provided direct access either to the commented papers or to their abstract in scientific databases (e.g., (16)). These links enable the specialist audience to read the original text and find information that only they may be interested in: (16) A 2004 study by Cupp et.al., also in Alabama, found that mosquitoes carrying EEEV had fed on amphibians and reptiles in addition to birds and mammals. [link to the full paper by Cupp et al.] (Aetiology)

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As the examples above show, bloggers used a variety of anchor texts (i.e., clickable text in a hyperlink) in order to provide clues as to the type of content behind the link (a definition in glutamate, more information on a claim in neutrinos were traveling faster than the speed of light, evidence for the bloggers evaluation in frustratingly vague press release, or the paper commented on in Cupp et al.) and therefore to help the audience decide whether to access that content. Another device that helped to tailor scientific information to the blogs audience was visuals conveying information, present in 37.3% of the posts in the corpus. Nonlinguistic elements have an important role in the communication of scientific knowledge. Scientists in a given discipline or specialty share knowledge that enables them to read off visual-graphical information coded following the discipline conventions and understand a visual language that might be impenetrable to the nonspecialists. Bloggers incorporated visuals requiring different levels of visual knowledge from the audience and that are used for several purposes. They ranged from pictures or graphic images that provide a clear proof of what bloggers are explaining to diagrams requiring some (or much) disciplinary knowledge. In most cases the bloggers used the visuals that occurred in the commented paper. They were used either to provide evidence for the researchers claims (visuals helped the reader follow the researchers argument) or to refute these claims (visuals helped the blogger show that the data/results presented in them did not support the claim). When the bloggers borrowed visuals from the paper, they often provided extratextual explanations so that they could be understood by the reader. Bloggers might guide the reader on how specific components of a graphical image should be interpreted or might offer a clarification of the variables that were coded in the different elements of the visual. Bloggers even modified the graphics in the original paper (e.g., by highlighting/circling parts) to give more visibility to specific information in the visuals. In four of the posts bloggers used informative visuals not present in the original paper to help prove the point they were making. For instance, in the post ALDER paper and software the blogger discussed new software for anthropology research presented in a paper and included a plot produced with this software to support his evaluation of the softwares performance.

Strategies to Engage the Reader

Bloggers used a variety of devices to signal awareness of their audience, engage the readers, and guide them to particular positioning (see Table 4). They engaged the readers by arousing their interest, by constructing a shared

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Table 4. Strategies to Engage the Reader. Strategy Titles References to popular lore, beliefs Self-disclosure Features of conversational discourse Inclusive pronouns References to reader Questions Humor Positive evaluation Negative evaluation Personal expression of opinion Expressions of feelings or emotional reactions Number of posts 75 15 11 39 54 39 46 7 52 31 52 39

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% of posts 100.0 20.0 14.6 52.0 72.0 52.0 61.3 9.3 69.3 41.3 69.3 52.0

floor and using interaction to create intimacy and immediacy, and by evaluating scientific content with the purpose of influencing readers. A strategy borrowed from popularization is changing the title of the original paper to frame the research in a way that may interest the reader. For example, the paper title Microbial Exposure During Early Life Has Persistent Effects on Natural Killer T Cell Function is changed to Excessive hygiene lets the immune system run amok (IS), to make it more attractive, more relevant, and easier to understand by nonspecialist readers. The blogger acts as a civic scientist who uses the title to show readers that the results of scientific research may be relevant for their daily life. Although titles in any type of scientific discourse are formulated to attract the attention of the intended audience, in science blogs this is achieved by using a variety of resources. Some titles present the claim made in the original paper (17a) or the bloggers evaluation of the reported research (17b). In other cases, popularizing devices were used. Titles in (17c/17d), for instance, construct proximity and intimacy with the audience by the use of intertextual references to folklore and pop culture, to the fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood in (17c) and to the song Im Too Sexy in (17d). Other titles present a puzzling statement that piques the readers curiosity (17e) or ask a question, inviting the audience to explore the topic and find an answer (17f). (17) a. No evidence for Neandertal admixture from mtDNA. (DAB) b. The CERN/CLOUD results are surprisingly interesting. . . . (RC)

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Written Communication 30(4) c. What Big Eyes You Have. (Neuroskeptic). d.  Im Too Sexy for Your . . . Virus? Or, Immunity as it Relates to Peacocks. (WB) e. Neanderthals came in all colors. (GE) f. Are emotions prophetic? (TFC)

Bloggers also used several strategies to construct a shared floor, including features typical of informal and private discourse. An example is the references to popular lore and beliefs, pop culture, and common knowledge, present in 20% of the blogs: (18) Short man syndrome? A myth. Rod Stewart was wrong about blondes [Link to Wikipedia entry on Rod Stewarts album Blondes Have More Fun]. Theres no such thing as a fat personality. And so on. (Neuroskeptic) Humor, another feature common in popularizations (Giannoni, 2008), also helps to construct solidarity and reinforce common assumptions. In the corpus it took different forms, including light teasing, irony, and sarcasm. In example (19) the blogger resorts to word play to convey a playful tone. The blogger plays with the idiom toe the line (to conform to a rule or standard) to present a paper where researchers claim to have found the foot of a creature whose big toe makes it different from hominid feet. (19) Researchers announced in Nature today the discovery of a 3.4 million-year-old foot that doesnt toe the hominid line. (LCA) Intimacy was also created through self-disclosure, that is, details about the bloggers academic or personal life (14.6% of the posts). Self-disclosure is frequent in weblogs, especially in personal blogs (Qian & Scott, 2007). (20) Its been a while since I did any ResearchBlogging posts, because it turns out that having an infant and a toddler really cuts into your blogging time. (UP) Bloggers also engaged the readers through devices of dialogic involvement, such as conversational elements, inclusive pronouns, references to the reader, and questions. Informality and immediacy were constructed by adopting discourse practices and linguistic features generally associated with conversational discourse, with 52% of the posts displaying one or more occurrences of these features. These included parenthetical metalinguistic

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cues (e.g., Hmm, Hmr, Wow), oral discourse markers (Anyway, Sorry, trust me, Well, I mean, Now wait, You see) and response forms (Ok, Yep), expletives (heck), vague language (Im kinda surprised, stuff, a large-ish laboratory), slang or informal expressions of oral discourse to convey the sense of immediacy (e.g., Dammit, this sucks, I dont know, dude, awesome), syntactic structures typical of spoken grammar, for example, omission of parts of the sentence (Sounds fun, right?, just me?). Interestingly, Blanchard (2011) points out that, unlike other online forums where it is difficult for newbies to enter, the informal style of blog engages the interested reader to contribute to the discussion. Another strategy to engage the readers is drawing them into the discourse with reader pronouns. Bloggers used both inclusive we (72% of the posts; e.g., (21)), a device prominent in research papers (Hyland, 2010), and second person pronouns (52% of the blogs; e.g., (22)), an engagement device frequent in popularizations (Giannoni, 2008; Hyland, 2010). Explicit references to readers and second person pronouns represent the readers as participants in the interaction and help the blogger guide the reader toward a particular interpretation. (21) For thousands of years, human beings have looked down on their emotions. Weve seen them as primitive passions, the unfortunate legacy of our animal past. (TFC) (22) I was half-tempted just to post the link to the study (which it really isnt, not really) and let you, my readers, have some fun. (RI) Questions were a frequent strategy in the posts in the corpus (61.3% of the posts). They are also common in popularizations and occur with various frequencies in other academic genres, for example, journal editorials, textbooks, or research papers (Giannoni, 2008; Hyland, 2002). Questions were used for a range of different rhetorical functions in the posts in the corpus: to catch the audience attention presenting the readers with a puzzle to solve or with a question whose answer is highly relevant for their life (e.g., (23a)), to challenge the validity of the results, claims, methods, and so on of the reported research, sometimes in combination with irony/sarcasm or with reference to the reader (e.g., (23b)), to organize the text, announcing what is to come next or to create a dialogue where the questions are assumed to be asked by the audience. This is the case of the post Shedding Light on Quantum Gravity (see example (23d)), structured as a dialogic interaction, through which the blogger explains the researchers proposal of a new way to search for quantum gravity.

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(23) a. But what if our emotions know more than we know? What if our feelings are smarter than us? (TFC) b. . . . but seriously, would you conclude from this data that immune response is correlated with attractiveness? (WB) c. OK, so whats the deal with this quantum gravity stuff? Are you telling me they can make a black hole with lasers, now? [answer omitted] Wait, what? What does that even mean? [answer omitted] [more questions and answers omitted] (UP) The last type of strategy used by bloggers to engage the readers is related to the expression of evaluation or stance. Although in most posts there were fragments devoted to commenting on research, evaluation was not restricted to these fragments: Explicit evaluation occurred in any part of the post, even in titles (e.g., The CERN/Cloud results are surprisingly interesting). Previous research has shown that evaluation is a genrebound phenomenon (Hunston, 1993; Hyland, 2010) and that differences in how writers use evaluation in specialized papers and popular texts are related to different ways of establishing objectivity and negotiating proximity (Hyland, 2010). When writing for a specialized audience, scholars use hedges to distance themselves from the claim and avoid attitude markers to convey the idea of objectivity. Explicit negative evaluation, both of the writers own ideas and of other researchers, is also avoided, in order to stress solidarity rather than conflict. Writers of popular texts do make a high use of attitude markers to evaluate aspects of the content, with the goal of encouraging readers to engage with the topic. However, they do not use evaluation to position themselves or express their commitment to claims: They just report others (the experts) opinions without evaluating research, results, or claims. The posts in the corpus displayed a high frequency of evaluative devices, expressing both affective attitude (i.e., evaluation in terms of interest, importance, accuracy, etc.; e.g., This is an immensely exciting finding) and epistemic attitude (i.e., commitment to the truth of a proposition; e.g., Im not sure). Of the posts, 69.3% included positive evaluation of previous research (e.g., these findings are important, intriguing result, a fascinating new paper), usually with a justification of such evaluation (this paper is amazing because . . .). Unlike in research papers and popularizations, there was also a high percentage of posts displaying expressions of explicit negative evaluation of previous research (41.3% of the posts). This negative evaluation helps bloggers to put their ideas forward and

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defend them against competing claims and is therefore an important device for their role as public intellectuals. The following examples show how bloggers used negative evaluation to reject the researchers results, methodology, or claims: (24) a. The original paper in the JAMA was remarkable for its non-publishing of crucial data necessary to validate the claims within it. (DAB) b. Before I come back to the horrendously bad methodology . . . ? (RI) c. In my humble opinion, XX (2011) is a silly paper, making many claims with no support from science. . . . I would not be surprised if rumours about the journals lacking rigour are true. (RC) In the posts analyzed there were several examples of the bloggers using blunt and explicit criticism to debunk what they consider misconceptions about a scientific issue. Example (24c), for instance, is part of the concluding paragraph of a post where the blogger uses different devices (e.g., negative evaluation, argument) to invalidate the methodology and conclusions reached in a paper about climate change. The high incidence of both positive and negative explicit evaluation in these posts suggests their relation to academic genres where evaluation of research plays a prominent role, for example, review articles and editorials (Salager-Meyer, 2001) or peer reviews (Hewings, 2004), and indicates that some of these posts are intended as postpublication peer reviews. A high percentage of posts in the corpus (69.3%) displayed personal expressions of epistemological stance, that is, expressions of stance that include a first person pronoun (I think, I believe, I suspect, Im sure, Im skeptical of, I remain unconvinced that, it is not clear to me), revealing the contingency and informality of this type of discourse. These expressions are uncommon in research papers, since they convey the impression of subjectivity, but also in popularizations, where the validity of the reported research is taken for granted and writers do not resort to expressions of epistemic stance to evaluate it and position themselves regarding the certainty of claims. Another common evaluative element in the posts analyzed (52% of the posts) was the expression of the bloggers feelings or emotional reactions (Im impressed, Im happy, I feel a bit guilty, Ill be pleased if, Im excited, sadly, unfortunately, Im puzzled). In many cases, the bloggers seem to intend to arouse the same feeling or reaction in the readers (e.g., (25)).

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(25) A couple of weeks ago, I was horrified to learn of a new biomed treatment that has been apparently gaining popularity in autism circles. The prominent role of evaluation in these posts can be explained by considering that blogs are both personal and public spaces. The high frequency of personal expressions of evaluation and emotional reaction shows that these posts enable bloggers to discuss and evaluate research in a public forum adopting a personal position, which facilitates the connection with the general public.

Discussion and Conclusions

This study has explored how the content of scientific papers is recontextualized in science blogs. The analysis has revealed that science bloggers deploy a variety of rhetorical strategies to contextualize scientific knowledge for a diverse audience and situate this knowledge in public life, thus helping the public make informed decisions, but also to position themselves regarding the research reported and to persuade the readers of their own interpretation, especially in controversial issues regarding civic life. Research-commenting posts enable bloggers to play different roles when communicating science. They can act as academics who seek to share scientific knowledge with peers and to self-portray themselves as expert reviewers providing a critical analysis of published research; and as civic scientists who understand that communication to a public audience is part of developing science and thus seek to explain science, contribute to the public understanding of science, and prompt the public to make decisions based on this understanding. These identities often get blurred in research-commenting posts, especially in those cases where the reported research is used by bloggers to express their standpoint on a controversial socioscientific issue and bring readers to this position. The strategies employed by bloggers are related to their roles as experts sharing information and as civic scientists (science communicators and public intellectuals): (a) they use discursive strategies to simultaneously adjust to the background knowledge and information needs of diverse audiences (e.g., providing links to definitions in the Wikipedia but also to specialized information); (b) they select only specific information reported in the original paper, foregrounding the main claim and focusing on the explanation and evaluation of results and on their significance (for science development, for the audiences daily life, for policy making); (c) they use explicit positive and negative evaluation and commentary to support or

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refute the validity of others claims, usually providing a one-sided view of scientific issues, especially controversial ones, in an attempt to align the readers interests and perspectives with those of the blogger. When bloggers comment on published research in their blogs, they do not intend to become just passive mediators who bring new research to the attention of their peers and disseminate scientific knowledge to a public audience. They want to be actors in the promotion of the public understanding of science and in the construction of opinions about scientific issues; (d) they use features of conversational discourse and strategies of dialogic involvement in order to construct intimacy and solidarity, and thus encourage the readers to contribute to the discussion and to collaborate in the construction of knowledge; (e) they also engage the public by resorting to the contingent repertoire of scientific discourse (Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984), including personal expressions of opinion or expressions of feelings and emotional reaction. What distinguishes science blogging from other types of scientific discourse is this combination of features. Researchcommenting posts are hybrid discursive spaces that incorporate practices from public and personal/private discourses (self-reference, informality, expression of feelings), from popularized discourse (humor, metaphors, references to reader), and from different genres of specialist discourse: Bloggers adopt strategies from research papers, but also strategies to construe conflict and express criticism, typical of genres like peer reviews, book reviews, or editorials. Some of the strategies above are also shared with other types of computermediated communication and are highly facilitated by the affordances of the medium and the nature of the blog. Two clear examples are the recourse to features of conversational discourse and the use of links to cater to the information needs of the multiplicity of audiences. Similarly, the nature of the blog, an open space where the personal and the public are integrated, facilitates the venting of personal opinions about public issues and promotes evaluation and commentary. To conclude, this study contributes to the discussion of how knowledge is recontextualized within public spaces and to research on the role of online media in the public understanding of science. When commenting on previous research bloggers harness the affordances of new media and combine rhetorical strategies from different discourses to adapt to multiple and complex audiences and achieve various rhetorical purposes: promote the understanding of science, review published research and persuade of its validity and significance or, by contrast, of its lack of validity and deficiencies, and situate science research in public life.

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Appendix List of Blogs From Which Posts to Make Up the Corpus Have Been Taken
Aetiology (http://scienceblogs.com/aetiology/) (Aetiology) Cosmic Variance (http://cosmicvariance.com/) (CV) Dienekes: Anthropology Blog (http://dienekes.blogspot.com/index.html) (DAB) Gene Expression (http://scienceblogs.com/gnxp/2008/10/) (GE) In the Pipeline (http://pipeline.corante.com/) (ITP) Inspiring Science (https://inspiringscience.wordpress.com/) (IS) Laelaps (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/laelaps/) (Laelaps) Lawn Chair Anthropology (http://lawnchairanthropology.blogspot.com.es/) (LCA) Neuroskeptic (http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com.es/) (Neuroskeptic) RealClimate (http://www.realclimate.org/) (RC) Respectful Insolence (http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/) (RI) The Frontal Cortex (http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/) (TFC) Uncertain Principles (http://scienceblogs.com/principles/) (UP) We Beasties (http://scienceblogs.com/webeasties/) (WB) Wired Cosmos (http://wiredcosmos.com/) (WC) Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank the editor, Christina Haas, and the anonymous reviewers for their very useful comments and suggestions.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research for this article has been funded by the project FFI2009-09792 (Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation).

Note
1. The term affordance was coined by Gibson (1979) to refer to the possibilities for action that an environment offers an animal.

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Author Biography
Mara Jos Luzn is Senior Lecturer at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. She has a PhD in English Philology and has published papers on academic and professional discourse and on language teaching and learning in the field of English for Specific Purposes. Her current research interests include the analysis of the discursive and rhetorical features of online academic genres, especially academic weblogs and, more recently, the study of English as a Lingua Franca in written academic discourse.