A fully updated and expanded second edition of this flagship work, which introduces methodological techniques to carry out analyses of text varieties, and provides descriptions of the most important text varieties in English. Part I introduces an analytical framework for studying registers, genre conventions, and styles, while Part II provides more detailed corpus-based descriptions of text varieties in English, including spoken interpersonal varieties, general and professional written varieties and emerging electronic varieties. Part III introduces more advanced analytical approaches and deals with larger theoretical concerns, such as the relationship between register studies and other sub-disciplines of linguistics, and practical applications of register analysis. A new chapter on EAP and ESP has been added, with new sections on the important differences between academic writing in the humanities and sciences, and a case study on engineering reports as an ESP register and genre. Coverage of new electronic registers has been updated, and a new analysis of hybrid registers has been added.

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Register, Genre, and Style

IN connexion with Dr. Wightman's article in Nature of Oct. 7, p. 23, on the relationship between the Royal Society and the Philosophical Transactions in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and his emphasis on the unofficial character of the Transactions, it may be interesting to note that the abridgement of these up to the year 1700, prepared by John Lowthorp, appears to have been officially sponsored by the Society. The fly-leaf of the third edition, printed in 1722 after the publication in the preceding year of a further abridgement of the Transactions for the years 1701–20 by Benjamin Motte, carried the following advertisement : “May 5, 1703. At a meeting of the Royal Society, Sir John Hoskyns, V.P. in the chair, Mr. Lowthrop Presented a Proposal for printing an Abridgement of the Philosophical Transactions. This Design was Approved by the Society and He was Desir'd to proceed therein.”

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Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

Recent trends in cognitive science have not made scientific literacy easier to attain, but they have made the practices through which educators meet its challenges more interpretable. Traditionally, cognitive scientists viewed knowledge as a set of propositions comprised of classical concepts, thought as logical inference and language as a literal representation of the world. They attributed the same denotative characteristics to cognition as to science text. In contrast, many contemporary cognitive scientists view knowledge as comprised of fuzzy and contextual concepts, thought as perceptually rather than formally grounded, and language as largely metaphorical and narrative. In this view the expressive characteristics of cognitive representations differ from the relatively denotative characteristics of science texts. Science literacy education bridges this difference through practices that help students: build classical concepts on a fuzzy cognitive architecture, achieve formally valid reasoning using pe...

The Challenges of Scientific Literacy: From the viewpoint of second‐generation cognitive science

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 d...

Public Communication of Science in Blogs Recontextualizing Scientific Discourse for a Diversified Audience

Register, genre, and style: Second edition

Drawing on existing work on popularizations, this investigation of book-length scholarly essays by practicing scientists across three disciplines reveals a hybrid genre that is neither popularization nor research report. The study utilizes both textual analysis and personal commentary from the writer-researchers to achieve a three-way comparison between the popularization, research article, and the book-length scholarly essay that clarifies how these essays contribute to the authors’ academic agendas. Writing for both a general audience and a jury of their peers, these academics employ an argumentative generic structure. Such argumentation develops a rhetoric of rational inquiry, where understanding how answers to perplexing problems are arrived at is just as important as the answers themselves. This genre also suggests the possible resurfacing of the essayist tradition in the sciences, as these practicing researchers engage with wider audiences in theoretical and philosophical speculation.

https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1652&context=lkcsb_research

Book-Length Scholarly Essays as a Hybrid Genre in Science

This paper makes the case for combining IoT technologies and persuasive interventions, such as behavioral insights, to bring about healthy behavior change. Approaches like Gamification, Aggregation and Personalization can applied and combined in the IoT context to help change and reinforce desired behaviors. Two examples from the Health Promotion Board (HPB) in Singapore will be shared to illustrate how this can be done, at local and national levels.

Susheela Abraham Varghese

Papers

Book-Length Scholarly Essays as a Hybrid Genre in Science

IoT-Enabled Health Promotion