SALT Virtual Lecture on Reworking Research: Interactions in Articles and Blogs

Academic blogs are becoming increasingly frequent, visible and important in both disciplinary and ‘outreach’ communication, offering a space for scholars to disseminate their work to new and wider audiences of experts and lay people. This digital medium, however, also brings challenges to writers in the form of a relatively unpredictable readership and immediate, public, and potentially hostile criticism. To understand how writers in the social sciences respond to this novel rhetorical situation, in this talk Ken Hyland explores how academics discoursally recontextualize in blogs work which they have previously published in journal articles. Based on two corpora of 30 blog posts and 30 journal articles with the same authors and topics, Hyland examines how researchers carefully construct a different writer persona and relationships with their readers using the stance and engagement framework (Hyland, 2005). In addition to supporting the view that the academic blog is a hybrid genre situated between academic and journalistic writing, this talk shows how writers’ interactional choices help define and distinguish different rhetorical contexts.