Experts’ and students’ recontextualisations of scientific research for a more general audience

Abstract

Informing and engaging the public in new scientific findings is becomingincreasingly important. Graduate students are thus encouraged to develop skillin writing for an audience beyond their discipline. This article concerns writingby master’s biology students of an assignment-type modelled on News andViews articles. Published News and Views articles, which are written by experts,summarise and critique a newly published study for the wider scientificcommunity. To be convincing, academic writers must project an authoritativestance towards their topic and developing this ability is important forpostgraduate students. They also need to be skilled at engaging readers, takingaccount of their readers’ prior knowledge and their readers’ need for recognitionas disciplinary members. Using Hyland’s (2018) model of interactionalmetadiscourse, this article compares a corpus of 30 News and Viewsassignments by master’s biology students with 55 biology News and Viewsarticles written by experts. We found that experts were skilled at using stanceresources to project an authoritative identity, while students hesitated toexplicitly include themselves in their writing; students’ use of stance resourcesalso reflected the limited nature of their topic knowledge. Studentsused engagement resources to include readers in the text, butsome misjudged the audience and wrote for a broader, less knowledgeableaudience. Suggestions are made for using these findings to guidestudents in expressing an authoritative stance and engaging their audience.