The present study explores the pragmatic and (meta)discursive resources that scientific communicators and, more specifically, those who act as mediators (journalists and scriptwriters) employ in their online texts to engage their audiences. The pragmatic strategies oriented towards engaging audiences are taken to be
“audience-oriented” strategies (Lorés, 2024b: 9), which “help readers grasp complex information and enable them to engage in a meaningful dialogue with experts”. The salient strategies identified in the corpus under analysis, which do not exhaust the list of potential strategies that mediators may use, are geared towards establishing a horizontal relation between writer and reader, an interaction among equals in which writers address readers as members of a community of interested peers.
The exploration of audience-oriented pragmatic strategies led to the identification of four different strategies used by mediators to present potentially complex issues to lay audiences by introducing those issues in a sufficiently engaging and motivating way.
The pragmatic strategies identified are:
– Hooking the audience’s attention
– Creating an emotional bond with the audience
– Enhancing direct interaction with the audience
– Establishing a common territory of experience
These strategies will be presented together with the (meta)discursive resources that typically realise them, ordered by their frequency.
Writers make use of resources taken from various discursive conventions, thus leading to the adoption of a hybrid type of discourse, partly scientific, partly journalistic. The following features illustrate this point:
Using resources typical of the popular press seems common in
scientific research dissemination discourse. The similarities
between the titles chosen for the feature articles under study and
those appearing in publications as popular as
Three different formulations for titles were identified:
– Type 1. Titles which create expectations on the reader by announcing solutions to health problems and concerns:
(1)
(2)
(3)
The realisation of these titles is typically the “how to”
discursive type. Others make use of evaluating words such as
(4)
– Type 2. Titles that advance research findings by summarising them, following a deductive approach (Moirand, 2003; Luzón, 2013; Hyland and Zou, 2020; Lorés, 2024a), contrary to the inductive approach which characterises the research articles from which these feature articles emerge. The fact that findings are already presented in the title ends with the suspense created by Type 1 but triggers the audience’s interest in other ways, by focusing on the path followed to achieve those results and on their justification.
(5)
(6)
– Type 3. Titles that problematise common beliefs (sometimes formulated as warnings), thus raising the interest of the reader:
(7)
(8)
Questions in titles, which appeal directly to readers, serve various communicative purposes, such as problematising common beliefs, as shown in (8). Other communicative aims include creating expectations about solutions for medical conditions, as seen in (3) above, or expressing doubts that might be in people’s minds, as shown in (9):
(9)
Questions address the reader directly and represent the most obvious strategy for dialogic involvement (Hyland, 2002). Their use in feature article titles underscores their primary “hooking function,” projecting a question/answer structure onto the text and, consequently, suggesting that the text will provide solutions for the problems posed in the title.
The predominance of the first type of title over the others is
shown in
| 6 (18%) | 6 (18%) | 3 (10%) | |
| 12 (36%) | 2 (6%) | 1 (3%) | |
| 18 (54%) | 8 (24%) | 4 (12%) |
As shown by the data, more than half of the titles (54%) obey to type 1 and strategically create expectations that contribute to enticing the readers’ attention so that they end up reading the texts, sometimes even fringing the strategy of clickbaiting, a technique by means of which headlines exaggerate claims with the purpose of enhancing traffic to a particular webpage, as in the following title:
(10)
Assuming the limitation of the corpus, the data seem to point
towards preferences hold by each publication as to the discursive
type of title favoured. Whereas
ii)
There is a significant number of feature articles that start with the narration of a story, which is usually a common citizen’s or a scientist’s:
(11)
This strategy has also been identified in other popularised texts, such as newspaper articles (Moirand, 2003), and research digests (Lorés, 2024a). The writer creates a scenario at the beginning of the text, intending to arouse the audience’s interest and providing a specific contextual setting for the scientific information presented in the article The strategy of opening the text with a narrative also “humanises” the scientist to the point of aligning them with the audience.
iii)
Although feature articles do not appear to exploit multimodality and digital affordances as extensively as other digital forms (e.g., social media), they still benefit from and utilise the chance to incorporate visually appealing elements enhanced by technical improvements. All the digital feature articles analysed include a picture at the top, just below the title, and some of them include other visuals inside the text, mostly pictures, but also, in a few cases, videos, graphs and infographics.
Pictures at the top of the page and the preceding titles give way
to a communicative ensemble which fosters understanding, reinforces
meaning and, mainly, catches the readers’ attention. In their book
(14) Conceptual (Smith11)
The overall use of narrative vs conceptual representations at the
top of the text is clear: 22 narrative pictures out of 30, which
represents 73.3%. This is in line with Mur-Dueñas’s (2024) findings
in her study of non-verbal explanatory strategies in three digital
practices (30 texts from
Visuals are also present in the body of the text, namely, pictures, videos, graphs, and infographics, as well as drawings, sketches. The use of mid-text pictures is not very frequent in the digital feature articles analysed. Only 9 texts (out of 30) include them, with a total of 12 pictures, all of them narrative representations, which points towards the preference of a “telling a story” type of visual. Apart from pictures, other visuals are also found in mid-text position in the corpus under study, although to a much lesser extent. Only 4 feature articles include a video. One of the videos (PopSci1) is a recording of an experiment carried out with monkeys by a scientist in the 50’s. The second one (PopSci4) is an extract from a TED Talk on the topic of the feature article (collective grief); the third one (Smith7) features the promotion of a device to self-detect breast cancer which has been awarded a prize, and, finally, a fourth video (Smith11) shows, in the microscope, how an implant dissolves to relieve pain. These four videos aim to illustrate technical aspects of the issues discussed, with more hands-on demonstrations for advancements in physical health.
Regarding graphs and infographics, there was a noticeable
imbalance between the two publications: while only 1 feature article
included a graph in
Although the data are very limited, they may still point at
certain trends in the use of visuals: 15 articles (50%) did not
contain any visual apart from the header illustration, with 11 of
these in
As shown, the strategy of “hooking the audience’s attention” in mediated scientific opularization relies strongly on conventional journalistic resources, such as opening the text with a narration or using “catchy” titles. The multimodal dimension is also part of the resources used in this strategy, with visuals of different format (pictures, graphs, infographics, videos) that attract the audience’s attention and help to maintain it along the text. On a few occasions, multimodality, already present in offline feature articles, is exploited through affordances of the digital platform, such as incorporating videos, which serve the double purpose of hooking the audience’s attention and enhancing their comprehensibility of the more technical issues.
5.2. Creating an emotional bond with the audience
Appealing to the audience’s emotions is an expected strategy that science journalists may use to engage them in rather technical issues. To fulfill this strategy, a combination of discourse and metadiscourse features has been identified.
i)
Interactional metadiscourse plays a significant role in establishing an emotional bond with the reader. More specifically, attitude markers, used to express the writer’s attitudes to the propositional material they present (Hyland, 2005a: 32) are well represented in the digital scientific feature articles discussed:
(16)
(17) And
By expressing their attitude, the journalists empathise with the possible reaction that the research findings might have on the audience; that is, they act as part of the audience, which helps construct an emotional bond with their readers.
ii)
As the literature on popularised discourse has already shown
(Luzón, 2013; Gotti, 2014; Garzone, 2020; Sterk and van Goch, 2023;
(18)
(19)
A conversational style fosters proximity with the audience and, although unacceptable in more academic registers, it seems to be characteristic of the digital feature articles analysed, probably enhanced by digital media and consistent with the less formal style prevalent in popular science.
iii)
One way journalists have to engage audiences is to make them visualise scientists not (or not only) as experts in possession of the almost unreachable good of knowledge but also, and mainly, as individuals, offering a human dimension that may allow the audience to see them as members of the same community. This is clearly the case of the scientists who are not only introduced by name and affiliation but also through a link to their personal page, which usually offers a picture, taking advantage of the technical affordances facilitated by the digital platforms, on which scientific feature articles are nowadays disseminated. Presenting the scientist as a “real persona” fosters both their credibility as an expert in the field and a bond with the audience. The use of this strategy is illustrated in the following examples, where the names of the scientists are hyperlinked to their pages:
(20)
(21)
Blurring the identity barriers between scientists, journalists and audience allows them all to enact other roles, and transit in both directions the bridges which connect expert sources, mediators and readers.
iv)
As part of the engagement strategy of creating a bond with the audience, journalists and mediators may seek the empathy of their audience by sharing personal stories and hardships related to the topic of the feature articles, sometimes their own stories (see examples 22 and 23 below). This resource, which might be called “personalisation”, has been identified in previous analyses of popularised science (Myers, 1991; Giannoni, 2008). Unlike the strategy of using a narrative style at the beginning of the article (see section 5.1 above), whose purpose is to offer a specific contextual setting for the scientific information presented in the text, the purpose of the strategy discussed here is to foster the audience empathy towards the problem, situation, or experience narrated. The different discursive positions of these strategies within the text also highlight their distinct communicative purposes. Given the personal nature of the topic of the feature articles included in the corpus (i.e. physical and mental conditions) this strategy may contribute to building trust and rapport between the writer and their audience:
(22)
(23)
v)
The role played by humour and irony in human interaction has been widely explored from a linguistic and pragmatic perspective (Raskin, 1985; Attardo, 1994; Yus, 2016). The scientific feature articles, as instances of popularised discourse, are not devoid of it. Examples 24 and 25 illustrate some of the cases in the corpus:
(24)
(25)
In the texts analysed, humour emerges as the result of unexpected comparisons or exaggerations of ordinary actions and experiences. The examples show that writers use humour to grab the audience’s attention and make complex topics more understandable. Also, humour helps create a bond by sharing common experiences, thus enhancing the accessibility and, therefore, impact of the scientific information presented.
The strategy of “creating an emotional bond with the audience” is, as shown, a productive resource which exploits linguistic registers (combining conversational styles with a standard written style), metadiscourse features (attitude markers) and pragmatic resources (humour and irony as a way of establishing a bond with the audience). Moreover, this strategy leverages the affordances of digital media through hyperlinks, enabling scientists to adopt a more personal identity as individuals and citizens, thus fostering audience rapport.
Audiences are directly addressed by writers as a way to make them feel part of the same group of interested people in the scientific issue under discussion. In this interaction, readers are perceived as individuals with whom the writer interacts at a one-to-one level. This direct appeal of writers to readers is a form of engagement that points to how writers recognise their readers’ active participation, capture their attention, and address their concerns (Hyland, 2005a). In the texts analysed, this is done through three metadiscursive features, categorised in Hyland’s (2005a) model as markers of engagement: questions, second-person pronouns and directives.
i)
Although questions were previously addressed in section 5.1 regarding their role in hooking readers’ attention as a recurrent structural element in titles, they are revisited here as strategic ways of fostering direct interaction with the audience when they appear within the text, suggesting potentially divergent or additional communicative purposes based on their discursive position. Examples 26 and 27 illustrate these uses:
(26)
(27)
ii)
Hyland (2005b: 133) states that second-person pronouns “function to elicit reader involvement and promote group solidarity”. However, he notes that in academic writing in English, authors are generally advised to avoid these pronouns, as they are considered “inappropriately informal and conversational”.
But what may be deemed inappropriate in one communicative
context, such as academic discourse, can be entirely suitable in
another (i.e. popularised discourse). Thus, the use of second person
forms (
(28)
The normalised frequency of second-person pronouns in the corpus
is 4.43 per thousand words. However, when examining each publication
individually, this frequency varies significantly, with 8.58 in
iii)
Directives “instruct the reader to perform an action or to see things in a way determined by the writer” (Hyland, 2005a: 184). These direct appeals to the reader seem to be a popularising feature identified also in other texts, such as journal editorials (Giannoni, 2008), and research digests (Lorés, 2023, 2024a, 2024b), their main function being “to link up with the readership and audience and to get it involved dialogically” (Giannoni, 2008: 225). These actions might be physical (29) or cognitive (30):
(29)
(30)
Enhancing direct interaction with the audience seems to be a rather “metadiscursive” pragmatic strategy, due to its heavy reliance on engagement markers as described in the metadiscourse model.
To create a common ground of experience seems to be another
pragmatic strategy used by scientific mediators to encourage their
audience to step into a territory of new knowledge. This strategy
has been identified in the metadiscourse framework as “appeals to
shared knowledge”, that is, markers that explicitly indicate that
the reader should “recognize something as familiar or accepted”
(Hyland 2005a: 184). In the metadiscourse model, typical engagement
markers indicating appeals to shared knowledge are the use of the
inclusive pronoun
i)
Apart from the use of the lexicogrammar, writers resort to other discursive devices which also contribute to the pragmatic strategy of establishing a common territory of experience, such as the explicit presentation of applications to real-life problems or situations, as in example 31:
(31)
Thus, the appeal and comprehension of specialised knowledge are enhanced by relating it to everyday experience, shown in the following:
(32)
ii)
As Hyland (2005a: 182) indicates, the use of the inclusive
pronoun
(33)
(34)
Some quantitative data of the use of inclusive
| 7 (0.39) | 16 (0.88) | 34 (1.88) | 57 (3.16) | |
| 32 (1.05) | 4 (0.13) | 26 (0.85) | 62 (2.03) | |
| 39 (0.8) | 20 (0.41) | 60 (1.24) | 119 (2.45) |
Apart from the general use of inclusive
iii)
The final discursive resource to be discussed is the journalists’ appeal to popular culture, as a way to create a common ground with their audience. This strategy, also used in other popularising practices such as the research digest (Lorés, 2023, 2024a, 2024b), is a form of intertextuality. As defined by Bazerman (2004:86), intertextuality points at “the explicit and implicit relations that a text or utterance has to prior, contemporary and potential future texts”, weaving other voices into the discourse (Kristeva, 1986; Fairclough, 1992). However, the effectiveness of this intertextual strategy lies on the writers’ careful assessment of the audience’s familiarity with the popular culture references. A lack of recognition can be counterproductive, potentially widening the gap it is intended to bridge. Examples 35 and 36 below illustrate the use of this resource in the digital practices under study:
(35)
(36)
The analysis of engagement strategies that foster a common ground of experience in popularised science writing reveals the importance of establishing a common territory of experience to connect with readers. This approach, exemplified by the use of inclusive pronouns, real-life applications, and references to popular culture, plays a significant role in bridging the gap between scientific knowledge and everyday understanding.