Keywords

Anyone who has ever tried to present a rather abstract scientific subject in a popular manner knows the great difficulties of such an attempt. Either heFootnote 1 succeeds in being intelligible by concealing the core of the problem and by offering to the reader only superficial aspects or vague allusions, thus deceiving the reader by arousing in him the deceptive illusion of comprehension; or else he gives an expert account of the problem, but in such a fashion that the untrained reader is unable to follow the exposition and becomes discouraged from reading any further.

If these two categories are omitted from today’s popular scientific literature, surprisingly little remains. But the little that is left is very valuable indeed. It is of great importance that the general public be given an opportunity to experience— consciously and intelligently—the efforts and results of scientific research. It is not sufficient that each result be taken up, elaborated, and applied by a few specialists in the field.

—Albert Einstein (1948, as cited in Barnett, 1968, p. 9)

Every day, new and exciting scientific findings are communicated to the general public, whether it be in the form of news reports, newspaper articles, YouTube videos, TikTok reels, or as part of science entertainment shows like MythBusters. Many people are eager to read up on new discoveries and developments in the academic world, such as the latest advances in the battle against COVID-19, the pictures of deep space shared by the James Webb Space Telescope, or the discovery of bacteria that are large enough to see with the naked eye. This growing corpus of texts and visuals enables us, as the general public, to have a good grasp of the elements that make scientific research interesting, and an idea about what makes certain stories more entertaining than others.

To give an example, in 2021, researchers from the Rosalind Franklin Institute and the University of Reading published their work on nanobodies, antibodies produced by the immune system of llamas that could be used in the treatment of SARS-CoV-2, in the journal Nature Communications (Huo et al., 2021). In newspaper articles that were written about this research, the main focus was not on nanobodies, but instead, Fifi the Llama was introduced. Fifi is a fun, fluffy, and interesting creature that appeals to our imagination and helps us understand the difficult subject matter of immunotherapy that is being discussed:

By vaccinating Fifi with a tiny, non-infectious piece of the viral protein, the scientists stimulated her immune system to make the special molecules. The scientists then carefully picked out and purified the most potent nanobodies in a sample of Fifi's blood; those that matched the viral protein most closely, like the key that best fits a specific lock. (Gill, 2021)

Fifi the Llama enables the writer to draw the abstract information about the method that was used into the realm of the tangible. Fifi moves the story from the academic world of sterile laboratories into the everyday life of an actual animal. The addition of Fifi as a main character in the story of this research is what makes the newspaper article interesting to the reader. In other words, Fifi is the element that ‘sells’ the story.

For scientific findings and innovations to have an impact beyond the ivory tower—that is, to be noteworthy to society and influential on everyday life—they should be presented outside of the specific disciplinary community in which they were produced. To communicate in a way that is comprehensible and engaging to a large audience, findings from the academic world that are presented in academic papers or reports need to be distilled down to their core and presented in an attractive and understandable manner. In other words, re-presentation of academic discourse is needed, with the resulting product being called popularization discourse. When a researcher performs this re-presentation process for their own work, the outcome is called science communication. More commonly, though, a journalist re-presents academic work and by doing so constructs science journalism. Both science communication and science journalism fall under the umbrella of popularization discourse. (See the Glossary at the end of the book for definitions of important terms.)

To achieve the goals of popularization discourse, writers can use textual features; the use of an everyday life example in the form of Fifi the Llama is one of them, but there are many more. Through these textual features, or ‘strategies,’ the distinct genre of popularization discourse is constructed.

Popularization discourse is an important text genre both for the academic world and for the general audience. But why should we improve our understanding of science communication and science journalism? Science communication and science journalism fulfill an indispensable role in translating academic discourse into the realm of society and everyday life, and in bridging the gap between scientific advances at large versus the individual person who is influenced by them. Many scientific topics lead to societal debate or even controversy, which then reflects on how we as a society think and feel about academic research. Controversy surrounding COVID-19 vaccines, artificial intelligence, and climate change are some of the topics that have recently sparked heated debates. As Myers put it: “We cannot understand why there are tensions about genetically modified organisms, vaccinations, or climate change if we assume that science is distinct from the rest of culture, and that the public is, on scientific matters, a blank slate” (2003, p. 274). Although the research fields of science communication and science journalism have existed for several decades, controversy surrounding research findings is one of the reasons why it remains important to discuss the discourse from an academic stance.

1.1 Why This Book?

Many academic studies today are devoted to the theoretical discussion of the nature of popularization, and to research versus society. Yet, only very few studies are devoted to popularization discourse as a text genre. Analysis of popularization discourse could be the first step in assessing and improving it. Still, a theoretically grounded and empirically tested framework to analyze popularization discourse is missing from the literature. A pressing issue is that research about the textual features that make up the genre of popularization discourse is scarce. Although some exceptions to this rule do exist, overall there is a structural lack of development of analytical frameworks that can be used to systematically analyze the use of textual features. This is hampering our academic knowledge about popularization discourse, and consequently, our real-world and lived knowledge too.

This issue became evident when we started our research into the science journalism writing strategies of undergraduate students. We strived to analyze their strategies in the most reliable, objective, and research-informed manner as possible, but we quickly realized that the tool we needed—an analytical framework suitable for our purposes—did not yet exist. In the academic literature, we were able to find a handful of frameworks that describe the genre of popularization discourse, but they were all static results of ad hoc analyses of one specific text form or topic within the genre. In other words, none of these frameworks were meant to be employed in the analysis of other texts. We thus set out to make our own analytical framework that would be usable in a wider context than merely our own specific research interests. The development of our framework was a true learning process; we encountered many hurdles and unknowns. We both have a background in language-related disciplines and have ample experience in mono- and interdisciplinary education, coupled with a keen research interest in research methodology and educational assessment. During the development of the framework, we had stimulating and insightful discussions, not just about the content of the framework itself and its process of development, but also on a more overarching level about text analysis and communication sciences on the one hand, and education, educational sciences, pedagogy, and didactics on the other. “Someone should write about this!” we exclaimed more than once. And thus, the idea of this book was born.

The little insight that exists in the academic literature comes from frameworks or rubrics describing the textual features of popularization discourse, or popularization strategies. Frameworks—analytic codebooks that display textual features and their properties—are developed through text analysis, yet the insights they produce are often contextualized within a subgenre—such as the opinion editorial—and a specific field of study, usually the natural sciences. Rubrics—analytic tables that show assessment criteria and grading points and can be used to assess student performance—are mostly based on literature reviews instead of empirical insights and developed with the aim of assessing popularization discourse in educational settings only. Rubrics offer a text-as-a-whole view, and frameworks a zoomed-in view, on the level of textual strategies. Components from these rubrics and frameworks can provide insight into popularization strategies. However, there is no consensus between sources. On an individual level, none of these existing frameworks or rubrics can give a complete or overarching overview, or are developed with the aim of using them as coding schemes in future studies outside of the specific context for which they were developed or with multiple coders in mind. An analytical framework that overarches academic disciplines, all subgenres of written popularization discourse, and all potential popularization strategies was still missing until now. Ideally a framework should be adaptable to various uses, contexts, and situations, for example usable in the analysis of a corpus of newspaper articles as well as being a learning tool in educational settings across disciplines – and to be able to produce robust results when used by multiple raters.

As far as we know, this book is unique in its combination of the disciplinary perspectives of language and education, and of theory, methods, and applicability. In terms of theory, this is one of the first works to focus on popularization discourse as a discourse type. Existing works focus on science communication as a communicative type or a communicative activity, thereby focusing purely on effectiveness and overlooking the discourse aspect. Regarding methodology, Re-presenting Research is unique because while the literature does contain some studies that offer insight into discourse strategies used in popularization, none of these works presents an analytical framework as a tool to analyze popularization discourse. Our framework is empirically grounded: it is based on the literature and direct observations. With respect to application, this book offers three examples of the applicability of our framework and discusses considerations for readers who want to develop their own framework.

1.2 What the Book Is About

The central focus of this book is the re-presentation of scientific findings in popularization discourse. This book is called Re-presenting Research because popularization discourse fulfills two different roles. One the one hand it represents research in the sense that popularization discourse is used as a ‘spokesperson’ for research in communication to a broad audience. On the other hand, popularization discourse re-presents research; it finds a new context through which to frame the academic findings and does so through remodeled language that is suitable for a broad audience. We specifically focus on the textual features, or strategies, which make up popularization discourse. The re-presentation of academic discourse into popularization discourse involves two processes: recontextualization and reformulation. Recontextualization revolves around reimagining findings within an everyday context. Changes take place on a conceptual level and the focus is on newsworthiness and applicability of scientific findings. Reformulation, on the other hand, has the main aim of heightening engagement with the text and increasing text comprehensibility. Reformulation causes changes on a linguistic and textual level. Together, recontextualization and reformulation remodel academic discourse into newsworthy and understandable popularization discourse.

Popularization discourse broadly consists of science communication and science journalism. Science communication and science journalism are two fields that are in large part centered around the natural sciences and STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math). The terms themselves already provide a clue to this hyperfocus: ‘science’ communication and ‘science’ journalism. It is only more recently that other fields such as the social sciences and humanities (the SSH field) have also been included in popularization efforts. In fact, communication to a broad audience from other fields than the natural sciences has its own term: research communication. Social sciences are often overlooked in these efforts to characterize the different forms of communication about academic results. This might be because they are assumed to be part of the ‘science’ in science communication and science journalism, while in practice social sciences are often not recognized as such from the perspective of communication efforts from the STEM fields (Wilkinson & Weitkamp, 2016). Furthermore, in multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research, insights from different disciplinary fields are integrated to form one comprehensive view of the research problem. For those studies, popularization must include the combination of multiple strategies to effectively communicate about the different disciplinary insights as well as the integrated conclusion (see Sterk, 2023). In Re-presenting Research, we aim to give insight into the textual features of popularization of the entire academic field, not just of the natural sciences. The analytical framework that we will present in this book, therefore, is constructed with the aim of being applicable to all disciplinary as well as multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary specializations.Footnote 2

Re-presenting Research is mainly written for researchers and/or educators looking into the analysis of popularization discourse. The book focuses on the doing and the being of popularization discourse and acts as a guide for those working with or on popularization discourse–whether it is to analyze, write, or learn about it.

1.3 Aims and Scope of the Book

In this book, we focus on the structural and componential analysis of written popularization texts or, in other words, the use of strategies. In doing so we follow the definition by August et al. (2020), who refer to writing strategies as theory-driven communicative goals that consist of lexical to multi-sentence features. Re-presenting Research presents a review of current theories about popularization discourse and existing frameworks describing it. We then elaborate on the construction and validation of a new empirically grounded analytical framework, based on the literature and direct observations, that is:

  1. 1.

    usable in any subgenre of popularization discourse

  2. 2.

    usable in disciplinary but also multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary settings

  3. 3.

    reliable for use with multiple raters

  4. 4.

    easy to apply by offering application remarks and explanations of strategies

We present three examples of how the analytical framework can be used to analyze texts written by authors with various levels of experience. We have included texts from both professional and student writers, to show that the framework can supply valuable insights in the different contexts of both academic and educational settings. Re-presenting Research therefore adds to the methodology of the fields of science communication, discourse analysis, and communication studies.

The book is focused on written popularization discourse and thus does not cover spoken, visual, or interactive science communication or science journalism, because our aim was to produce a brief text acting both as a guide for analyzing science communication and science journalism texts and as an updated review of the literature in a field that is still underexplored from a linguistic point of view. Our guiding principle was for this book to be practical and applicable; therefore, the theoretical chapters have been kept brief and to the point, and readers are referred to additional literature where applicable.

Re-presenting Research is for anyone interested in writing about research for the general public. The main audience we had in mind while writing is that of academics, who can gain knowledge about popularization discourse and find out how to analyze it. Furthermore, students, science communicators, science journalists, and practitioners can use this book. Undergraduate and graduate students can hone their science communication skills by learning how to write in an appealing way to a broad audience about their own research projects. Science communicators and practitioners at universities or academic associations, companies, or governments will learn more about the discourse type, helping them to communicate about scientific findings constructed by others. In education, the book can be used to offer science communication components in undergraduate or graduate thesis writing courses, in any academic field. Re-presenting Research can also be used in graduate programs in science communication or science journalism that train students to become science communicators or science journalists and that typically offer specific writing courses.

1.4 Outline of Chapters

Re-presenting Research is divided into two sections. The first section provides the theoretical and methodological background. The second section consists of three examples of using our framework as an analytical tool. Chapter 2 offers theoretical grounding of the framework for popularization discourse. It presents theoretical background knowledge into popularization discourse, science communication, and science journalism as well as insight on recontextualization and reformulation as textual construction processes, and on challenges in research and practice. Chapter 3 discusses methodological considerations in analyzing popularization discourse. The chapter presents an overview of existing frameworks and rubrics to analyze or assess popularization texts. Chapter 4 introduces our analytical framework for popularization discourse. The development of the framework is discussed. The framework, its five themes (Subject Matter, Tailoring Information to the Reader, Credibility, Stance, and Engagement), and its 34 strategies are reviewed, and we explain how to code the strategies when using the framework. We also refer the reader to additional literature on each strategy. Chapter 5 provides the first example of using the framework as an analytical tool. The chapter shows how the framework can be used to thoroughly analyze one science journalism text and which insights can be gained from the analysis. Chapter 6 presents the second example of how the framework can be used. The framework is applied to a corpus of professional science journalism texts published in popular media. The analysis focused on which of the strategies were used by professional science journalists, with the goal of providing insights into the genre of science journalism. Chapter 7 is the third example of using the framework. In this chapter, the framework is used to analyze a corpus of newspaper articles written by first-year undergraduate liberal education students, to answer questions about how often (quantitative) and how (qualitative) the strategies in the framework are used by these student writers. Chapter 8 brings together the theoretical insights discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3, and the practical and applied insights gained from the use of the framework as an analytic tool in Chaps. 5 through 7. It also discusses the ample opportunities for future research that follow from the contents of this book, and ends with advice for readers wanting to construct their own framework.

Re-presenting Research is best read cover to cover. Readers interested in the theoretical and methodological background of popularization discourse will find that Chaps. 2 and 3 can also be read stand-alone. Readers interested in developing their own analytical framework can start at Chap. 4 and review Chaps. 5 through 7 for applied examples. Readers who are interested in using the analytical framework to analyze or produce popularization texts are best advised to read through all chapters. We wrote the book we would have liked to have read when we started our research into science journalism writing skills in first-year students. Our vision for this work is to encourage the reader to either use our framework to analyze popularized texts or develop their own unique framework.