Re-presenting Research

A Guide to Analyzing
Popularization Strategies
in Science Journalism and
Science Communication

Florentine Marnel Sterk

Merel M. van Goch
Re-presenting Research
 Florentine Marnel Sterk  
Merel M. van Goch

Re-presenting
Research
A Guide to Analyzing Popularization Strategies
in Science Journalism and Science Communication
Florentine Marnel Sterk Merel M. van Goch
Institute for Language Sciences Institute for Cultural Inquiry
Utrecht University Utrecht University
Utrecht, The Netherlands Utrecht, The Netherlands

ISBN 978-3-031-28173-0    ISBN 978-3-031-28174-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28174-7

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 Acknowledgments

We want to thank the Open Access Fund of Utrecht University’s Library,

our research institutes, Institute for Language Sciences and Institute for
Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University, and our home base Liberal Arts
and Sciences for contributing to the opportunity to publish this work
open access.
We want to thank the members of the research groups Subjects in
Interdisciplinary Learning & Teaching at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry
(Utrecht University), and Language & Communication and Language &
Education at the Institute for Language Sciences (Utrecht University), as
well as members of the Science Communication Unit (University of West
England Bristol) and the Interuniversity Centre for Educational Sciences
for the fruitful discussions we have shared about popularization discourse.
We are particularly grateful to Cathy Scott for her amazing support and
editorial assistance. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their gen-
erous and enthusiastic feedback.
We thank Iris van der Tuin and Michael Burke for their valuable
feedback.
Most of all, we thank the students who took part in our research. It is
because of your newspaper articles that we were inspired to write this book.

v
 Contents

1 Introduction:
 The Re-Presentation of Research in
Popularization Discourse  1

2 Theoretical
 Considerations: Recontextualization and
Reformulation in Popularization Discourse 13

3 Methodological Considerations: Frameworks and Rubrics 25

4 Construction
 and Application: Introduction of the
Analytical Framework for Popularization Discourse 45

5 Text
 Example: Using an Analytical Framework to Code a
Professional Science Journalism Text 65

6 Corpus
 Example: Using an Analytical Framework to
Explore Professional Writing in Science Journalism 83

7 Corpus
 Example: Using an Analytical Framework to
Characterize First-Year Undergraduate Newspaper Article
Writing 99

vii
viii Contents

8 Framing
 Frameworks: Final Considerations about
Framework Development125

Glossary135

Index137
 About the Authors

Florentine Marnel Sterk is Junior Assistant Professor at the interdisci-

plinary undergraduate program Liberal Arts and Sciences at Utrecht
University, The Netherlands. She explores how popularization writing
skills can best be taught in interdisciplinary university programs, to enable
students to communicate effectively outside of their own academic niche
and in interdisciplinary research settings. Furthermore, she aims to offer
insights into effective popularization about research from interdisciplinary
research settings. She also teaches courses on academic skills, writing skills,
and interdisciplinary research methodology.
Merel M. van Goch is Assistant Professor at the interdisciplinary under-
graduate program Liberal Arts and Sciences at Utrecht University, The
Netherlands. Her work is driven by the motivation to provide people with
the optimal circumstances to explore and foster their talents and interests.
She is interested in how and what students and researchers learn, especially
in interdisciplinary contexts, because interdisciplinarity magnifies the
potential for learning. She studies metacognition, creativity, and other
competences relevant to higher education, and her teaching is character-
ized by fostering students’ self-directed learning.

ix
 List of Tables

Table 3.1 Overview of popularization strategies mentioned

in the literature 30
Table 3.2 Overview of assessment items in popularization rubrics 37
Table 4.1 The framework of analysis for popularization discourse 52
Table 5.1 Overview of strategies in “Baby Poop Is Loaded With
Microplastics”76
Table 6.1 Quantitative results from the corpus analysis of professional
science journalism texts 86
Table 6.2 Qualitative results from the corpus analysis of professional
science journalism texts 87
Table 7.1 Results for describing the method102
Table 7.2 Results for applied implications105
Table 7.3 Results for mention of statistics110
Table 7.4 Results for stance markers115
Table 7.5 Results for references to the reader118

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Re-Presentation

of Research in Popularization Discourse

Abstract In this chapter, we introduce our book, Re-presenting Research.

In this book, the focus is firmly on textual popularization discourse as a
form of communication to re-present academic insights to a larger, non-­
expert audience in an understandable and engaging manner. Our own
research into science journalism writing skills in undergraduate university
students serves as a starting point for the exploration of popularization
discourse as a genre. The book gives an exposition of current theories,
employed methodologies, and existing frameworks and rubrics that cover
popularization discourse. We focus on the conceptual and textual features
of popularization discourse, which are called ‘strategies’ in this book. In
this introduction, we establish the need for this book and introduce what it
is about, the topics it will cover, and the example analyses that are provided.

Keywords Popularization discourse • Science communication • Science

journalism • Textual features • Strategies • Re-presentation

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 he1
succeeds in being intelligible by concealing the core of the problem and by

1
In this book, we have used inclusive language. Note that in example texts or cited texts
that are presented in this book, ‘he’ or ‘she’ might be used; in these cases we have not edited
the original text.

© The Author(s) 2023 1

F. M. Sterk, M. M. van Goch, Re-presenting Research,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28174-7_1
2 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

offering to the reader only superficial aspects or vague allusions, thus deceiv-
ing 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 dis-
couraged from reading any further.
If these two categories are omitted from today’s popular scientific litera-
ture, 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 oppor-
tunity to experience—consciously and intelligently—the efforts and results
of scientific research. It is not sufficient that each result be taken up, elabo-
rated, 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 arti-
cles, YouTube videos, TikTok reels, or as part of science entertainment
shows like MythBusters. Many people are eager to read up on new discov-
eries 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 nanobod-
ies, 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 writ-
ten 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 sub-
ject 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)
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE RE-PRESENTATION OF RESEARCH… 3

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 every-
day life—they should be presented outside of the specific disciplinary com-
munity in which they were produced. To communicate in a way that is
comprehensible and engaging to a large audience, findings from the aca-
demic world that are presented in academic papers or reports need to be
distilled down to their core and presented in an attractive and understand-
able 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 aca-
demic 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
4 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

distinct from the rest of culture, and that the public is, on scientific mat-
ters, 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 improv-
ing 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 sci-
ence 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 frame-
works 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
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE RE-PRESENTATION OF RESEARCH… 5

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 perfor-
mance—are mostly based on literature reviews instead of empirical insights
and developed with the aim of assessing popularization discourse in edu-
cational settings only. Rubrics offer a text-as-a-whole view, and frame-
works 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 indi-
vidual level, none of these existing frameworks or rubrics can give a com-
plete 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 cor-
pus 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 disciplin-
ary 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.
6 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

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 audi-
ence. 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’ communica-
tion 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 aca-
demic results. This might be because they are assumed to be part of the
‘science’ in science communication and science journalism, while in
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE RE-PRESENTATION OF RESEARCH… 7

practice social sciences are often not recognized as such from the perspec-
tive 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, popu-
larization must include the combination of multiple strategies to effec-
tively 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 interdis-
ciplinary specializations.2
Re-presenting Research is mainly written for researchers and/or educa-
tors 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 writ-
ten 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 cur-
rent theories about popularization discourse and existing frameworks
describing it. We then elaborate on the construction and validation of a

2
In this book, we use the term ‘research’ to denote the entire field of academic discovery,
which includes the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. We will use ‘sciences’ or
‘natural sciences’ to refer to the STEM field specifically. Likewise, we use ‘researcher’ as an
all-encompassing term for those academics who perform research in all academic fields. Note
that ‘scientist’ is used in some of the cited texts that are presented in this book; in these cases
we have not edited the original text. The discourse of the academic world is referred to as
‘academic discourse,’ but still appears as ‘scientific discourse’ in cited sources. Even though
science communication and science journalism often refer specifically to communication
about the natural sciences, in this book we use them as all-encompassing terms to mean com-
munication about all the disciplinary fields as well as multidisciplinary and interdisciplin-
ary fields.
8 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

new empirically grounded analytical framework, based on the literature

and direct observations, that is:

1. usable in any subgenre of popularization discourse

2. usable in disciplinary but also multidisciplinary and interdisciplin-
ary settings
3. reliable for use with multiple raters
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 underex-
plored 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 addi-
tional 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 dis-
course 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 communica-
tion skills by learning how to write in an appealing way to a broad audi-
ence about their own research projects. Science communicators and
practitioners at universities or academic associations, companies, or gov-
ernments will learn more about the discourse type, helping them to com-
municate about scientific findings constructed by others. In education, the
book can be used to offer science communication components in
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE RE-PRESENTATION OF RESEARCH… 9

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 sci-
ence 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 pro-
vides 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 populariza-
tion discourse. It presents theoretical background knowledge into popu-
larization discourse, science communication, and science journalism as
well as insight on recontextualization and reformulation as textual con-
struction processes, and on challenges in research and practice. Chapter 3
discusses methodological considerations in analyzing popularization dis-
course. 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
10 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

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 dis-
cusses the ample opportunities for future research that follow from the
contents of this book, and ends with advice for readers wanting to con-
struct their own framework.
Re-presenting Research is best read cover to cover. Readers interested in
the theoretical and methodological background of popularization dis-
course 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 popu-
larization 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.

References
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science communication: Data and computational analysis. Proceedings of the
2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing,
5327–5344. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-­main.429
Barnett, L. (1978). The universe and dr. Einstein (Rev. ed.). Bantam Books.
Gill, V. (2021, September 22). Covid: Immune therapy from llamas shows prom-
ise. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-­environment-­58628689
Huo, J., Mikolajek, H., Le Bas, A., Clark, J. J., Sharma, P., Kipar, A., & Owens,
R. J. (2021). A potent SARS-CoV-2 neutralising nanobody shows therapeutic
efficacy in the Syrian golden hamster model of COVID-19. Nature
Communications, 12(5469). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-­021-­25480-­z
Myers, G. (2003). Discourse studies of scientific popularization: Questioning the
boundaries. Discourse Studies, 5(2), 265–279. https://doi.org/10.1177/
1461445603005002006
Sterk, F. M. (2023). Wetenschapscommunicatie van interdisciplinaire onderzoek-
sprojecten [Popularization of interdisciplinary research projects]. Tijdschrift
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and practice. Manchester University Press.
 1 INTRODUCTION: THE RE-PRESENTATION OF RESEARCH… 11

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 CHAPTER 2

Theoretical Considerations:
Recontextualization and Reformulation
in Popularization Discourse

Abstract This chapter establishes popularization discourse as a genre. In

doing so, a distinction can be made between the act of popularization
itself and the resulting product of popularization discourse in the form of
texts. Popularization draws academic findings into the realm of society and
everyday life, which means the focus shifts from the researched phenom-
enon itself to claims about newsworthiness and the application of findings.
The chapter also discusses the two main subgenres of science communica-
tion and science journalism, which differ mostly in terms of who produces
the discourse, that is, a researcher versus a journalist. The positionality of
academic discourse versus popularization discourse is discussed, as the two
discourses used to be seen as distinct genres but should be considered as
different points on a continuum. The focus is on reformulation and recon-
textualization as the two main processes in the textual construction of
popularization discourse.

Keywords Popularization discourse • Science communication • Science

journalism • Reformulation • Recontextualization

2.1   Introduction
In this first chapter, background information is provided to offer insight
into the context in which our framework for popularization discourse is
situated. It discusses popularization discourse, science communication

© The Author(s) 2023 13

F. M. Sterk, M. M. van Goch, Re-presenting Research,
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14 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

and science journalism, older and current models, recontextualization and

reformulation as textual construction processes, and the challenges that
are faced within the research field and practical field.

2.2   Popularization Discourse

Popularization is a concept with two meanings; it is both a verb and a
noun. On the one hand, it can refer to the act of giving insight into aca-
demic findings in an understandable and engaging way for a non-academic
or non-expert audience, that is, the act of transformation (Calsamiglia &
Van Dijk, 2004). On the other hand, it can refer to the discourse that is
produced because of that act, which can include multiple discursive-­
semiotic practices and a multitude of media forms (Calsamiglia & Van
Dijk, 2004). To avoid confusion, in this book we use the verb ‘populariza-
tion’ to mean the act, and the noun ‘popularization discourse’ to denote
the product.
In the academic literature, popularization is discussed from multiple
research perspectives: applied linguistics, rhetoric, communication sci-
ences, media studies, history, and science (Myers, 2003). In the field of
discourse analysis, multiple views of popularization can be distinguished:
as a translation or reformulation of academic discourse into a second dis-
course, as a discursive genre, as recontextualization, as dependent on pro-
cesses in the media, or as a form of dialogic relationship between the
scientific context and other contexts (Grillo et al., 2016). Popularization
discourse is characterized primarily through the context and social situa-
tion in which it is constructed. What matters most are the actors, their role
in the communication, their knowledge, purposes, and beliefs, and the
applicability of their knowledge in everyday life (Calsamiglia & Van Dijk,
2004). According to Calsamiglia (2003), “these days the scientific disci-
plines express themselves in what for the non-specialist is an unknown,
hermetic and difficult language” (p. 141). Through popularization,
knowledge produced in these academic and specialized practices is trans-
formed into knowledge for a lay audience: the resulting discourse con-
nects to everyday life and is written in understandable language (Calsamiglia
& Van Dijk, 2004; Gotti, 2014). Or, as Hyland framed it:

This [popular science] is a discourse related to the academy, its work, and its
forms of communication but stripped of its more forbidding rhetorical fea-
tures. While attempting to wield the authority of science, both scientific
 2 THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS: RECONTEXTUALIZATION… 15

facts and the argument forms of professional science are transformed in the
process. (Hyland, 2010, p. 118)

In this quote, Hyland placed the focus on the adaption of rhetorical fea-
tures in the process of popularization. At the same time, tension exists
between the discourse of research and discourse of public communication,
as Baram-Tsabari and Lewenstein pointed out: “Unfortunately, the two
discourses are sometimes in tension: One rewards jargon, the other penal-
izes it; one rewards precision, the other accepts approximation; one
rewards quantification, the other rewards storytelling and anecdotes”
(Baram-Tsabari & Lewenstein, 2013, p. 80).
Even though popularization discourse is based on academic discourse,
it is often defined by its differences to or adaptations from it. Popularization
discourse brings the worlds of research and of society and everyday life
closer together. Yet the different regard academic discourse and popular-
ization discourse possess for scientific objects forms an obstacle in the
‘translation’ of academic findings from one discourse to the other:

[F]or the former (the scientists) the object has an immanent value in scien-
tific and specialist contexts. For the latter (the public) the value is external to
all the theories and methods: what is important is its application, its utility,
and the consequences of its use in people’s lives. (Calsamiglia, 2003, p. 140)

This difference in positionality leads to one of the main themes in the

process of constructing popularization discourse: the genre shift from sci-
entific reports, which establish the validity of the observations, to science
journalism texts, which celebrate academic research and underpin its sig-
nificance. This is what Myers described in the following way:

The professional articles create what I call a narrative of science; they follow
the argument of the scientist, arrange time into a parallel series of simultane-
ous events all supporting their claim, and emphasize in their syntax and
vocabulary the conceptual structure of the discipline. The popularizing
articles, on the other hand, present a sequential narrative of nature in which
the plant or animal, not the scientific activity, is the subject, the narrative is
chronological, and the syntax and vocabulary emphasize the externality of
nature to scientific practices. (1990, p. 142 as quoted in Giannoni, 2008)

Myers positioned academic texts with a focus on the researcher and

research, whereas popularized texts focus on the phenomenon itself.
16 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

Fahnestock talked about the same phenomenon and described the two
main rhetorical arguments in science journalism to be those of ‘the won-
der’ and ‘the application.’ Concurrently, the rhetorical life of scientific
observations cycles from the nature of a phenomenon toward its values
and consequences in everyday life (Fahnestock, 1986). Scientific findings
travel along a ‘communicative path’ that moves from the intraspecialistic
(disciplinary) stage to the interspecialistic (academic, non-disciplinary)
stage to the pedagogical and finally the popular stage. In each of these
stages, details and meaning are removed and findings are solidified as (sim-
ple) facts (Bucchi, 2008). The presented information therefore changes:
uncertainty is removed and direct quotes from authors are added
(Fahnestock, 1986). In this process, scientific research that is conducted
to gain more understanding of a phenomenon (‘the wonder’) is trans-
formed and re-presented in a way that connects with society and everyday
life (‘the application’), while the focus shifts from the producer of the
knowledge (the researcher) in the academic discourse back to the phe-
nomenon as it appears in nature in the popularization discourse. These
changes are made in order to make the presented information interesting
and usable for a broad audience.

2.3  Science Communication versus

Science Journalism
Popularization discourse consists of two main subgenres: science commu-
nication and science journalism. In science communication, researchers
communicate about findings from their own research. Although in some
settings this is assumed to be one-way communication, other definitions
assume a broader spectrum of communicative activities (Bultitude, 2011).
An example is the definition from Burns et al., who viewed science com-
munication as a culmination of four types of expertise: the use of appropri-
ate skills, media, activities, and dialogue. Science communication may also
be practiced by practitioners, mediators, and members of the general pub-
lic. The aim of science communication is to elicit a personal response to
research in the form of awareness, enjoyment, interest, opinion, or under-
standing (Burns et al., 2003, p. 191). Effective science communication is
also defined as a means to inform the public to facilitate decision making
(Fischhoff, 2013). Science communication includes, but is not the equiva-
lent of, public awareness of science, public understanding of science,
 2 THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS: RECONTEXTUALIZATION… 17

scientific literacy, and scientific culture (Burns et al., 2003). Science com-
munication can be found on an institutional level, where motivations
mostly lie on a utilitarian, economic, cultural, and democratic level, or on
the individual level of the researcher, who can use science communication
to boost their career or network, to develop new skills, or to obtain addi-
tional funding (Bultitude, 2011). Apart from written science communica-
tion, there are also plenty of spoken and interactive science communication
options, such as lectures, science cafes, and festivals—although we will not
specifically address these in this book.
In science journalism, a journalist—who has usually received extensive
academic training—communicates about academic insights published by
researchers in a clear and appealing way (Molek-Kozakowska, 2015). In
the nineteenth century, popularization used to be part of a researcher’s
job, but this changed in the twentieth century when ongoing demarcation
of science away from society meant that pursuing popularization activities
could destroy a researcher’s career. Mass media, on the other hand, had an
unwavering interest in stories about academic research (although they
were not always considered as such, specifically), which meant that jour-
nalists took on the popularization function. Even nowadays, when popu-
larization is once again a popular activity for researchers, science journalists
are still responsible for a large number of the stories about academic
advancements (Dunwoody, 2014).
Science journalism is a mixed discourse of informative and explanatory
elements. It explains research findings but also places them in the frame-
work of public concern (Gotti, 2014). Its interdiscursivity is formed
through three types of discourse: academic discourse, journalistic dis-
course, and pedagogical discourse. The latter is used as a learning tool, to
provide scaffolding for readers to grasp new scientific information (Motta-­
Roth & Scherer, 2016). Science journalism, therefore, means not only a
recontextualization of the research presented but also a framing and inter-
pretation through which the public understanding is influenced (Molek-­
Kozakowska, 2015). Furthermore, features from both journalism and
science communication are used. This combining of discourses poses some
difficulties, as they do not share the exact same goal: where science com-
munication primarily tries to offer a credible presentation of the research,
journalism includes a double appeal of both remarkable science and
appealing news stories (Molek-Kozakowska, 2015).
Another complicating factor is that although professional journalists
are responsible for the re-presentation of research, they, in turn, are part
18 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

of and dependent on the institutional organization of the media (Gotti,

2014). Newsworthy stories are more likely to be profitable, which means
stories that score well on timeliness, impact, and proximity are more likely
to be picked up (Molek-Kozakowska, 2015, 2017). It is exactly this pur-
suit of newsworthiness that might put the focus too much on infotain-
ment and hamper the understanding of the actual research
(Molek-Kozakowska, 2017). This also explains why science journalism
faces criticism of “inaccuracy, sensationalism, oversimplifications and fail-
ing to engage audiences in meaningful debate about scientific issues”—
although these claims are also contested (Secko et al., 2013, p. 62).

2.4  Views and Models of Popularization Discourse

Across time, different views and models have existed about popularization
discourse. One of the earliest views on popularization was the culturally
dominant or canonical view, in which popularization discourse only
included texts for non-specialists (Myers, 2003). Popularizations were
seen as a simplified and often degraded version of scientific knowledge,
and were presented in stark contrast with “pure, genuine scientific knowl-
edge” (Hilgartner, 1990, p. 519). Myers explained the canonical view in
the following way: “Popularization includes only texts about science that
are not addressed to other specialist scientists, with the assumption that
the texts that are addressed to other specialists are something else, some-
thing much better: scientific discourse” (Myers, 2003, p. 265).
This way of thinking of popularization discourse as a less worthy, toned
down version of academic discourse creates a divide between the two dis-
courses. Consequently, it also leads to a gap between the academic and
non-academic world. Indeed, the canonical view was politicalized to
demarcate research as only accessible for academic experts and to give
those experts authority (Hilgartner, 1990). In doing so, a chasm was cre-
ated between experts and lay people. Connected to the culturally domi-
nant view of popularization are dissemination models, the most well
known of which is the deficit model, which has been heavily critiqued
since. The deficit model assumes that lay people (or ‘the public’) show
skepticism or resistance to academic research because of a lack of knowl-
edge. Information is the solution to this problem, which researchers can
provide in a unilateral way. Popularization is very much seen as a peda-
gogical function in this model (Besley & Tanner, 2011; Miller, 2001;
Trench, 2008).
 2 THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS: RECONTEXTUALIZATION… 19

Newer views do not position popularization discourse and academic

discourse as distinct discourses (Myers, 2003). Academic discourse and
popularization discourse are rather seen as genres on a continuum, with
many different variances in between: “Only from the outside, and from a
great distance, does scientific discourse seem to employ a single unified
register” (Myers, 2003, p. 270). Or, to put it differently: “Popularization
is a matter of degree” (Hilgartner, 1990, p. 528). This means that there is
no one set form or mode of popularization discourse, and that there is no
clear demarcation of where academic discourse ends and popularization
discourse begins. Newer views see popularization discourse as more
broadly applicable than just as a way of conveying information; it also gives
center stage to persons, identities, experiences, and interaction. Therefore,
popularization discourse also raises questions about the actors, institu-
tions, and forms of authority involved (Myers, 2003). Hyland introduced
the idea of proximity to explain “… the ways writers manage their display
of expertise and interactions with readers through rhetorical choices that
contextually construct both the writer and reader as people with similar
understandings and goals” (Hyland, 2010, p. 116).
In doing so, the divide between the writer as ‘expert’ and reader as
‘layperson’ is fading, with both parties forming an integral part in the
communication. The focus of popularization discourse, then, moves away
from the pedagogical function and onto explaining the social stakes of
issues involved (Moirand, 2003). Models connected to this view are those
of dialogue and conversation. In dialogue models, different target audi-
ences with their own background, information, and needs are taken into
consideration. Communication based on these models is often still a one-­
way process, but the aim is to create two-way communication between
researchers and their audience, and interaction plays a bigger role (Trench,
2008). Conversation models operate on the idea that researchers and the
audience can work together to shape the communication, and non-­
academic voices and information are taken into consideration. In doing
so, a three-way form of communication is created (Besley & Tanner, 2011;
Miller, 2001; Trench, 2008).
In the early 2000s, ideas about popularization discourse became more
centered on social representation of scientific knowledge, which in turn
became largely mediated by the news media (Calsamiglia, 2003).
Journalists recreate the original discourse within a new situation, which
means actors and institutions involved in research get a different degree of
authoritativeness assigned to them. Consequently, mass media become an
20 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

active creator in the production of knowledge, insights, and opinions

about research (Gotti, 2014). The media also show the influence of
research on everyday life, its social or human side, and ways in which it can
be (ab)used within society (Calsamiglia & Van Dijk, 2004).
Since the early 2000s, the landscape in which science communicators
and science journalists operate has changed dramatically. With the move
toward online media, audiences read and write about academic advances
on (science) blogs and online media outlets. Researchers can directly com-
municate with audiences through Twitter (Brossard & Scheufele, 2013).
Search engine algorithms create a latent bias in results, determining which
information a user is able to find (Van Dijck, 2010). Online social net-
works further determine the information users are presented (Brossard,
2013; Brossard & Scheufele, 2013). The mainstream media used gate-
keeping to judge what to present as news, yet online citizen journalists
now use gatewatching to identify which news stories can be republished or
reinterpreted, adding perspective to the story, and expanding coverage
(Bruns, 2018). These changes no doubt call into question the changing
power dynamics between researchers, the media, and the public. Bruns
also noted that more recently, ideas have started appearing around filter
bubbles and echo chambers “... that are each subject to their own internal
‘groupthink’, and no longer find the common communicative ground to
sustain broader public debate and deliberation” (Bruns, 2018, p. 325).
This shows that the media landscape in which science communicators and
science journalists now operate is vastly different from 20 or even 10
years ago.

2.5  Reformulation and Recontextualization

As described above, the main characteristics that ultimately form popular-
ization discourse are the social properties of its communicative context
(Calsamiglia & Van Dijk, 2004), and the focus on application and conse-
quences (Fahnestock, 1986). Two processes that are responsible for the
textual construction of popularization discourse are reformulation and
recontextualization (Bondi et al., 2013; Calsamiglia & Van Dijk, 2004;
Ciapuscio, 2003; Gotti, 2014).
In recontextualization, part of the discourse is taken from one commu-
nicative context and re-presented in another one. For scientific facts, this
 2 THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS: RECONTEXTUALIZATION… 21

means a move from an expert context to a lay context (Bondi et al., 2013).
Recontextualization, then, entails presenting specialized knowledge in
such a way that non-specialized readers can construct and integrate it into
their frame of reference (Calsamiglia & Van Dijk, 2004). It might occur
on an intratextual, intertextual, or interdiscursive level and can include
changes in meaning or content (Bondi et al., 2013). The recontextualiza-
tion of knowledge works on the level of changes in the cognitive dimen-
sion (established versus new knowledge), the situational dimension
(interests, intentions, and purposes of writer and reader), and the social
dimension (that is, the research process translated into a journalistic genre)
(Calsamiglia, 2003). As Hall et al. defined it: “... recontextualization
amounts to putting something in a different context and, by doing so,
creating a new context for it” (1999 as cited in Ciapuscio, 2003, p. 210).
Recontextualization thus enables non-specialized readers to construct a
non-specialist version of the specialized knowledge and integrate it into
their frame of reference. For a writer, recontextualization helps to adapt to
the constraints of the communicative events in which the popularization
discourse appears (Calsamiglia & Van Dijk, 2004). Recontextualization
strategies include forms of explanation such as definition, examples, and
metaphors to link new knowledge to the reader’s existing knowledge
(Calsamiglia & Van Dijk, 2004), narratives, imagery, and specific expres-
sive functions such as example, definition, denomination, description,
exemplification, generalization, paraphrase or reformulation (Gotti,
2014), simplification or condensation, refocusing, expansion, and elabora-
tion (Bondi et al., 2013). Differences between academic texts and popu-
larized texts can be found in textual form, sentence subjects, grammatical
voice, verb choices, modality, hedging, and rhetorical structure (Gotti,
2014). Through recontextualization, researchers are presented as actors in
a “discovery event,” that is, in a direct meeting between researcher and
nature (Hyland, 2010, p. 126).
On the other hand, reformulation is a process that does not alter the
content or context of the message but does remodel the language to a new
target audience by using strategies like metaphor, simile, and figurative
language. It is a process that is similar to intralinguistic translation, that is,
translation within the same language. Reformulation is often assumed to
be the only process in popularization, meaning the language of academic
discourse would be adapted but the content would not. This is an assump-
tion that fails to take recontextualization into consideration (Gotti, 2014).
22 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

What You Have Learned in This Chapter

• Popularization discourse used to be seen as separate from and
less worthy than academic discourse, but in fact both are part
of the same discourse.
• Popularization is a re-presentation process in which the focus
shifts from ‘the wonder’ about nature to ‘the application’
of findings.
• Science communication is constructed by researchers, while
science journalism is a hybrid discourse constructed by (knowl-
edgeable) science journalists.
• Views and models about popularization have shifted over time,
away from deficit models toward participation models.
• Recontextualization (creating a new context for the informa-
tion) and reformulation (remodeling on a textual level) are the
two main processes through which popularization discourse is
constructed.

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 CHAPTER 3

Methodological Considerations:
Frameworks and Rubrics

Abstract This chapter reviews the diverse ways in which popularization

discourse is analyzed in the current academic literature. First, it discusses
goals and formats of text analysis in general. We specifically focus on quan-
titative text analysis as a way to produce data matrices and qualitative text
analysis to categorize data into themes. In the literature, popularization
discourse is analyzed either through frameworks or rubrics. Frameworks
give insight into textual components, or strategies, whereas rubrics con-
tain assessment criteria. In this chapter, the main insight is that although
current frameworks and rubrics do provide insight into popularization dis-
course as a genre, it is impossible to produce one overarching framework
of strategies that make up popularization discourse purely from these
frameworks/rubrics. This gap also points to bigger methodological issues
in the current academic literature, which are also discussed in this chapter.

Keywords Quantitative text analysis • Qualitative text analysis •

Rubrics • Frameworks • Assessment • Text analysis

3.1   Introduction
This chapter focuses on the analysis of popularization discourse. Before we
introduce our own analytical framework in Chap. 4, we take a step back to
give an overview of current frameworks for popularization discourse and

© The Author(s) 2023 25

F. M. Sterk, M. M. van Goch, Re-presenting Research,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28174-7_3
26 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

to critically discuss their usefulness and applicability. The chapter contains

an overview of methodological considerations that are relevant when con-
structing frameworks, and an overview of the academic literature on cur-
rent frameworks and rubrics to analyze and assess popularized texts.

3.2  Text Analysis: Goals and Formats

While the previous chapter discussed how scientific data and insights can
be communicated to the general public through texts, we will now turn to
those texts themselves. In other words, we will look at those popularized
texts as research objects or as generators of academic data and insights.
Often, analytical frameworks are used for this cause, also sometimes called
coding schemes. Frameworks and coding schemes ideally provide a way to
analyze texts objectively, reliably, and in collaboration with multiple
researchers or analysts.
The overarching aim of text analysis is to reconceptualize text as data to
be analyzed. In other words, by treating text as a research object, text
analysis can provide insight, either qualitative or quantitative, about it.
Multiple research traditions have their own forms of text analysis, such as
linguistics, computer sciences, and social sciences. In this book, we will
focus solely on the linguistic tradition, where the main aim of text analysis
is to describe text structure (Roberts, 2000). Broadly seen, there are two
types of linguistic text analysis: qualitative (Kuckartz, 2014, 2019) and
quantitative (Roberts, 2000). Quantitative text analysis is either represen-
tational (researchers classify the intention of the writer) or instrumental
(researchers apply a theory to interpret the text). Quantitative analysis
always produces a data matrix, which can then be used in statistical analy-
sis. Options for quantitative text analysis are thematic text analysis (occur-
rence of themes), semantic text analysis (relations among themes), and
network text analysis (networks of interrelated themes) (Roberts, 2000).
Qualitative text analysis, on the other hand, is defined through the use of
categories. The aim is to reduce complexity through classification based
on characteristics, which can be derived from theory (Kuckartz, 2014).
Research that uses qualitative text analysis uses categories (or codes) to
develop a category system or coding scheme. Categories can be developed
in a construct-driven (deductive) or data-driven (inductive) way, or as a
mix of these two options. These categories can be factual, thematic, evalu-
ative, analytical, theoretical, natural, or formal (Kuckartz, 2019). The spe-
cific interpretation of what a category is, or how a category can be
 3 METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS: FRAMEWORKS AND RUBRICS 27

described or analyzed, often remains implicit—which is a problem that we

time and time again encountered during our own research. This sentiment
is reflected by Kuckartz:

The question of what exactly a category represents in empirical research is

hardly addressed in literature on research methods, even in textbooks that
focus on methods of qualitative data analysis, it is more or less assumed that
people already know what a category is, based on common sense. Instead of
a definition, you often find a collection of category attributes, particularly in
textbooks about qualitative data analysis. There it can be read, for example,
that categories should be ‘rich’, ‘meaningful’, ‘distinguishable’, or ‘disjunc-
tive’. (Kuckartz, 2014, p. 39)

In the academic literature, presented strategies or categories often lack

meaningful descriptions or explanations. Yet analytical frameworks are
used because they allow for objective, reliable, and shared analysis. In this
book, we have therefore added extensive notes on the strategy (that is,
category) level to give a rich description of what each category in the ana-
lytical framework means, as such avoiding the pitfall that was discussed in
the above quote by Kuckartz. We are proposing a framework that can be
used both quantitatively and instrumentally (to score the occurrence of
categories) or qualitatively and representationally (to explain the specific
use of each category). But before we delve deeper into our framework, let
us explore existing frameworks and coding schemes that are used to ana-
lyze popularization discourse.

3.3  Text Analysis of Popularization Discourse

In the current literature, popularization discourse is analyzed in multiple
ways. Analysis can focus on the achievement of communicative goals (see
Metcalfe, 2019), on content analysis (see Kessler, 2019; Shea, 2015), on
a specific textual feature (see Rakedzon et al., 2017; Sharon & Baram-­
Tsabari, 2014 for the analysis of jargon; Riesch, 2015 for the analysis of
humor), on componential analysis (August et al., 2020; Giannoni, 2008;
Hyland, 2010; Luzón, 2013; Motta-Roth & Lovato, 2009; Nwogu,
1991), or on assessment of popularization discourse in educational set-
tings (Moni et al., 2007; Poronnik & Moni, 2006; Rakedzon & Baram-­
Tsabari, 2017a, 2017b; Yuen & Sawatdeenarunat, 2020). In this chapter,
we focus on two forms of analysis of popularization discourse, as they
28 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

come closest to providing an overview of the textual features in the genre:

componential analysis through frameworks and assessment in educational
settings through rubrics. Frameworks can take many different forms,
ranging from a list of components to an overview of scoring criteria.
Rubrics, on the other hand, often follow a strict template. They are pre-
sented in the form of a table, with the assessment criteria (the skills that are
graded through the rubric) on one axis and the grades on the other. At
each criteria/grade intersection, the table provides an explanation of the
assessment point, thus forming a guideline for teachers in their grading
(Stevens et al., 2012). The following sections will first cover frameworks
that describe popularization strategies, followed by an overview of rubrics
that deal with the assessment of popularization discourse.

3.4   Frameworks for Popularization Strategies

Currently, structural or textual models of popularization discourse are
scarce, and an overarching analytical framework—a framework that spans
across text types and academic disciplines— is non-existent. Only a hand-
ful of researchers have analyzed the use of popularization discourse on the
level of structural components, that is, textual strategies or structural cat-
egories (August et al., 2020; Giannoni, 2008; Hyland, 2010; Luzón,
2013; Motta-Roth & Lovato, 2009; Nwogu, 1991). We will briefly
describe the set-up of each of these studies.
Nwogu (1991) analyzed 15 journalistic reported versions of medical
texts to explore their discourse structure. Swales’ genre analysis model was
used as a theoretical framework. The study resulted in an overview of eight
moves and constituent elements. These moves are presented chronologi-
cally, that is to say, in a text they always appear in the same order. Giannoni
(2008) studied popularization features in 40 journal editorials from medi-
cine and applied linguistics and found seven popularization features.
Motta-Roth and Lovato (2009) focused on the rhetorical organization of
30 popularization news articles. They used Nwogu’s (1991) framework as
a basis and created a new list of six moves that occur in a specific order,
combined with two types of discursive elements that can occur through-
out the text. Hyland (2010) analyzed the use of proximity in 120 research
articles versus popular science articles and found five thematic strategies.
Luzón (2013) used an a priori coding scheme from the literature and then
employed grounded theory to analyze 75 science blog posts. The research
yielded a framework with three themes and 23 strategies. August et al.
 3 METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS: FRAMEWORKS AND RUBRICS 29

(2020) used manual coding of 337 sample articles and computational

analysis to analyze the use of ten popularization strategies in a corpus of
128,000 documents.
The structural components, or strategies, that each of these studies
delineated can be found in Table 3.1. Because the frameworks from
Motta-Roth and Lovato (2009) and Nwogu (1991) work (partly) with a
specific order of strategies, they are presented specifically as ‘moves.’ Two
other studies worth mentioning are Nisbet et al. (2003) and Calsamiglia
and Van Dijk (2004), but because their focus was on a specific topic (stem
cells and the genome), the framing is too narrow to compare them with
the other sources.

3.5  Discussion of Current Frameworks

In this section we discuss similarities and differences between the frame-
works, as well as critically analyzing their construction and the insights
they generate. There are multiple similarities between the structural com-
ponents of the frameworks. All frameworks mention the strategy of includ-
ing main findings. Analogy/metaphor and describing the method are
mentioned in four out of six frameworks; impact/implication and explana-
tion of terms in three; and personalization, question, humor, reader
engagement, opinion, and contextualization in two. Dissimilarities
between frameworks also exist, with many textual components, such as the
addition of a title or inclusive pronouns, being mentioned just once.
Furthermore, mismatches are visible between the levels at which compo-
nents are mentioned, for example as a main-level strategy versus a sub-­
strategy. Reference to the authors is mentioned as a sub-strategy of
presenting new research and describing the data collection procedure in
Nwogu’s (1991) framework, yet in Motta-Roth and Lovato’s (2009) it is
part of presentation of the research and voice switching. Another aspect to
keep in mind is the order of linguistic moves; only the frameworks by
Nwogu (1991) and Motta-Roth and Lovato (2009) presume a spe-
cific order.
It thus becomes clear that although these frameworks are connected to
the same research problem and show common delineators, there is no real
consensus about which strategies or structural components appear in pop-
ularization discourse. The studies described are mostly isolated projects—
the exception here is the study by Motta-Roth and Lovato (2009) that
used the Nwogu (1991) study as a point of departure. This also points to
 30

Table 3.1 Overview of popularization strategies mentioned in the literature

Author Main strategies Sub-strategies Lower-level strategies

August et al. • Lede

(2020, p. 5328) • Main (findings)
• Impact
F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

• Explanation
• Analogy
• Story
• Personal
• Jargon
• Active
• Present

Giannoni (2008, • Questions

p. 216) • Metaphors
• Marked lexis
• Humor
• Personalization
• Appeals to reader
• Contingency

Hyland (2010, • Organization

pp. 119, 122, • Argument structures
123, 125) • Credibility
• Stance
• Reader engagement
Author Main strategies Sub-strategies Lower-level strategies

Luzón (2013, Rhetorical category Contextualizing the research

pp. 437, 438) Announcing the new finding or the new contribution
to the discipline
Describing (and evaluating) method
3

Presenting, explaining (and evaluating) results • Adopting a neutral or positive stance
toward the findings
• Questioning some aspects of the
results
• Criticizing the whole research and
findings

Drawing implications or highlighting the significance • Highlighting the significance of the
of the study research for science
• Broader implications (political,
ethical, ideological)
• Implications for people’s lives
• Implications for involved actors
Strategies to tailor information  Explanation of terms and concept
•
• Paraphrases/ reformulations
• Comparisons/metaphors
• Examples from daily life
• Links
• Visuals conveying information

Strategies to engage the reader • Titles

• References to popular lore, beliefs
• Self-­disclosure
• Features of conversational discourse
• Inclusive pronouns
• References to reader
• Questions
• Humor
• Positive evaluation
• Negative evaluation
METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS: FRAMEWORKS AND RUBRICS

• Personal expression of opinion

• Expressions of feelings or emotional reactions
31

(continued)
Table 3.1 (continued)
32

Author Main strategies Sub-strategies Lower-level strategies

Motta-Roth and Move 1: Lede/Conclusion of the research

Lovato (2009, (forecast)
p. 246; translated Move 2: Presentation of the research by  Identification of researchers (or)
•
from Portuguese) • Detailing the results (and)
• Reference to the research objective (or)
• Allusion to the published scientific article (or the
thesis/dissertation)

Move 3: Reference to previous knowledge  Reference to established knowledge in the area

•
(contextualization) by • Emphasis on the social perspective
• Allusion to previous research
• Indication of limitations in the established knowledge
F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

Move 4: Description of methodology by  Identification of the experimental procedure

•
• Reference to data (source, range, date, location,
category)

Move 5: Explanation of the results of the Exposure of the results

search by Comparison of current and previous research in • Established knowledge
terms of: • Methodology used
• Results obtained

Move 6: Recommendation of the research  Mention of research implications

•
conclusions by • Suggestion for future research
• Emphasis on the local perspective
• Indication of research limitations

Voice switching (for more positive or  The researcher (or metaphorically of the study)
•
negative comments and opinions) which • Colleague/technician/ institution
may include, in addition to the journalist’s • Government
own voice that underlies all popularization • Public
of science news, the voice of:
Explanation of principles and concepts
(through rewriting as stance, glosses, and
metaphor)
Author Main strategies Sub-strategies Lower-level strategies

Nwogu (1991, Move 1: Presenting background  By reference to established knowledge in the field
•
pp. 115–116) information • By reference to main research problem
• By stressing the local angle
3

• By explaining principles and concepts

Move 2: Highlighting overall research • By reference to main research results

outcome
Move 3: Reviewing related research  By reference to previous research
•
• By reference to limitations of previous research

Move 4: Presenting new research  By reference to authors

•
• By reference to research purpose

Move 5: Indicating consistent observations  By stating important results

•
• By reference to specific observations

Move 6: Describing data collection  By reference to authors

•
procedure • By reference to source of data
• By reference to data size

Move 7: Describing experimental procedure • By recounting main experimental processes

Move 8: Explaining research outcome  By stating a specific outcome

•
• By explaining principles and concepts
• By indicating comments and views
• By indicating significance of main research outcome
• By contrasting present and previous outcomes

Move 9: Stating research conclusions  By indicating implications of the research

•
• By promoting further research
• By stressing the local angle
METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS: FRAMEWORKS AND RUBRICS
33
34 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

a larger issue: the use of popularization strategies does not appear to be a

standardized research topic and therefore there is no chronology in rea-
soning or projects building from one another.
Another important issue with the aforementioned studies has to do
with their construction and validity. Datasets are generally (very) small,
ranging from 15 to 120 texts, except for the research by August et al.
(2020) in which a 128,000-document corpus was used. It should be noted
though that this corpus was analyzed using computational analysis, with
human coders hand-coding a sample of only 337 articles. This shows the
boundaries of human coding in linguistics, with computational analysis
offering a chance at coding corpora many times the size of what is usually
achievable in hand-coded research. More generally, it is questionable how
reliable the frameworks are when they are based on a small dataset, often
consisting of texts from a specific subtype of popularization discourse or a
single academic field/couple of academic fields. For a framework to be
reliable and all-encompassing, it should be based on the analysis of mul-
tiple subtypes of popularization and draw sources from multiple disciplin-
ary fields.
Half of the sources do not explain the methodological steps that were
taken in the construction of their presented framework. Although Nwogu
(1991) mentioned that a genre analysis model was used, no information
was given on data analysis or construction of the framework. Likewise,
Giannoni (2008) and Hyland (2010) provided little information on meth-
odological steps taken. The other three sources do provide more detail.
Luzón (2013) described how grounded theory was used in combination
with an a priori framework based on literature. August et al. (2020)
showed in detail how writing strategies were chosen, the computational
analysis was conducted, and a subset of texts was hand-coded on a sen-
tence level. Motta-Roth and Lovato (2009) explained how three rounds
of analysis consisted of individual analysis, cross-analysis, and identification
of linguistic components. Because not every source offers an equally clear
explanation of the methodological steps that have been taken in the con-
struction, this poses issues for the reproducibility of the research. It also
means that it is difficult to estimate the reliability and overall applicability
of the frameworks.
Most of these studies are single-author papers, meaning the analysis was
also conducted by a single author, or, if multiple people worked on the
analysis, this was never mentioned (Giannoni, 2008; Hyland, 2010;
Luzón, 2013; Nwogu, 1991). Motta-Roth and Lovato (2009) did use
 3 METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS: FRAMEWORKS AND RUBRICS 35

multiple raters and checked for consensus in their analyses, although there
is no report on inter-rater reliability. The exception is August et al. (2020)
who used Krippendorff’s α to measure inter-rater agreement for the man-
ual coding of annotations and reported findings on a strategy level. Ideally,
a framework should be used consistently by different raters. By not using
multiple raters to construct or evaluate the framework, no knowledge is
available about inter-rater reliability, or in other words, the consistency of
coding across raters (Holton, 2007; Hallgren, 2012; Kuckartz, 2014). A
lack of data on inter-rater reliability hampers the usability of these frame-
works, as there is no assurance that the findings that are produced through
them are reliable across users.
The biggest issue that surfaces through the analysis of current frame-
works is that none of these studies factually presents a framework for anal-
ysis, in the sense that they report solely on results of text analysis. These
results are presented as a list of strategies, and in some papers examples are
provided. Whether the strategies that are found in one subgenre of popu-
larization or in sources from one discipline can be generalized to other
texts or subgenres within popularization discourse remains unclear. In the
same vein, these lists do not (or cannot) provide any information on how
they should be used in other analytic studies; that is to say, no meta-text,
coding information, size of coding, or coding manual is presented in any
of these studies. Consequently, there is a lack of validation of strategies in
all discussed studies. An exception here is August et al. (2020), who speci-
fied their coding to be on the sentence level and reported the accuracy of
the computational analysis on a strategy level. Generally speaking, the lack
of explicit insight into the methodological choices made in these studies
makes it impossible for these lists of strategies to be used as analytical
frameworks in follow up studies into popularization discourse.

3.6  Rubrics for Popularization Discourse

Apart from the frameworks discussed above, the structural components of
popularization discourse can also be captured in rubrics, which are used in
education for assessment purposes. The literature about the assessment of
popularization discourse stems from the research field of science commu-
nication. Some studies focus on the learning goals that should be imple-
mented in science communication courses (see Baram-Tsabari &
Lewenstein, 2013, 2017a, 2017b; Bray et al., 2012; Mercer-Mapstone &
Kuchel, 2015). Alternatively, studies focus on the assessment of
36 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

popularization skills acquired in those courses, which is often conducted

using rubrics (Moni et al., 2007; Poronnik & Moni, 2006; Rakedzon &
Baram-­Tsabari, 2017a, 2017b; Yuen & Sawatdeenarunat, 2020). The
research field also includes rubrics that primarily consider speaking skills
(see Alias & Osman, 2015; Sevian & Gonsalves, 2008; Murdock, 2017),
but these were left out of the current overview, to retain the focus on writ-
ing skills.
We compared rubrics from five studies. Two studies focused on rubric
construction (Rakedzon & Baram-Tsabari, 2017b; Yuen &
Sawatdeenarunat, 2020), whereas the other three used a rubric as an
assessment tool for learning outcomes of explicit instruction in an educa-
tional setting (Moni et al., 2007; Poronnik & Moni, 2006; Rakedzon &
Baram-Tsabari, 2017a). Moni et al. (2007) used an opinion editorial
rubric to assess learning outcomes for science communication skills in
final-year physiology and pharmacology students. Poronnik and Moni
(2006) used an opinion editorial rubric for peer review and to assess learn-
ing outcomes in undergraduate physiology students. Rakedzon and
Baram-Tsabari (2017b) constructed and evaluated a rubric to assess L2
(non-native) STEM graduate students’ popularized writing, which was
then used in a pretest-posttest intervention study by Rakedzon and Baram-­
Tsabari (2017a) to assess popularization skills in L2 science and engineer-
ing graduate students. Yuen and Sawatdeenarunat (2020) used popular
news articles written by science undergraduate students in a rubric devel-
opment cycle to construct a science communication rubric. Table 3.2
gives an overview of the assessment items mentioned in these rubrics.

3.7  Discussion of Current Rubrics

Some similarities exist in the content of these rubrics. The rubrics by Moni
et al. (2007) and Poronnik and Moni (2006) are very similar; these papers
are in large part written by the same authors. The same goes for the two
identical rubrics by Rakedzon and Baram-Tsabari (2017a, 2017b). Overall,
more differences than similarities are visible between rubrics. Each can
explain part of the picture of popularization discourse assessment, but the
dissimilarities between the rubrics signify that none can give an overarch-
ing view (that is, spanning across text forms and academic disciplines).
Rubric operationalization is largely the same in all studies; rubrics com-
prise an assessment grid with scoring options for a range of grades for each
assessment criterion from 1 to 8% (Moni et al., 2007), 1–2% to 9–10%
Table 3.2 Overview of assessment items in popularization rubrics
Author Main strategies Sub-strategies Lower-level strategies
3

Moni et al. (2007, Content  Key facts and ideas clearly stated
•
p. 170) • Sufficient background is provided,
enables understanding of key ideas
• Key ideas are plausible/innovative
Genre requirements • Argument flows in cohesive/logical
manner
• Argument conforms to structure/
length of opinion editorial
• Argument addresses needs of the
audience
• Argument is consistent throughout
Quality of writing • Grammar, syntax, and spelling are of
a publishable standard
(continued)
METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS: FRAMEWORKS AND RUBRICS
37
 38

Table 3.2 (continued)

Author Main strategies Sub-strategies Lower-level strategies

Poronnik and Moni Content  Key facts and ideas clearly stated
•
(2006, p. 75) • Sufficient background is provided,
enables clear understanding of key
ideas
• Presentation flows in cohesive/
logical manner
• Presentation demonstrates broader
F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

knowledge
Genre requirements • Conforms to structure/length of
opinion editorial
• Addresses needs intended audience
• Is consistent throughout
Quality of writing • Grammar/syntax/spelling are
publishable quality
Rakedzon and Baram-­ • Title
Tsabari (2017a, • Use of active voice
Appendix 2/2017b, • Inverted pyramid (bottom line
Appendix E) then background) format
• Journalistic format—six Wh
questions (what, who, when,
where, why, how)
• Definition/explanation
• Readability
Author Main strategies Sub-strategies Lower-level strategies

Yuen and Clarity Accessibility • Explanation key finding

Sawatdeenarunat (2020, • Selection of material
p. 56) • Grammar/syntax
3

Organization of ideas  Position of the moves

•
• Macro-­organization
• Micro-­organization
Color Significance of key findings • Implication of key finding
for science and the public
• Rationale of the study
• Significance of key finding
Language strategies to appeal and • Use of appeals to entice
engage readers readers
• Writing style/tone
• Use of evaluative language
METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS: FRAMEWORKS AND RUBRICS
39
40 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

(Poronnik & Moni, 2006), 1 to 4 (Rakedzon & Baram-Tsabari, 2017a,

2017b), or 1 to 8 (Yuen & Sawatdeenarunat, 2020). Because of these dif-
ferences in rating scale, the rubrics are not easily comparable. The rubrics
by Moni et al. (2007) and Poronnik and Moni (2006) are specifically
constructed for one text type, the opinion editorial. This makes them less
broadly applicable and more difficult to compare to other rubrics. More
generally, and this is true for all rubrics to some degree, the rating of a
certain criterion is (partly) dependent upon a subjective assessment by
the rater.
Rubric construction and validation are only discussed in three studies.
Rakedzon and Baram-Tsabari (2017b) constructed their rubric in a five-­
stage model that included developing course goals, choosing assessment
tasks, setting their standard, developing assessment criteria, and rating val-
ues for scoring. Its validation was conducted by checking scoring consis-
tency with two raters. In Rakedzon and Baram-Tsabari (2017a), the rubric
was constructed based on course materials and previous research. It was
piloted in two rounds, after which empirically developed descriptors were
added. Yuen and Sawatdeenarunat (2020) developed quality definitions in
their rubric through the analysis of science-related newspaper articles.
Student ability, rater severity, item difficulty, and quality of the rating scale
were calibrated using a Many-facet Rasch Model. Raters were asked to also
mark sample scripts and were interviewed about their marking. A survey
was used to measure student perception of the rubric. In these studies,
underlying methodologies differ greatly, which hampers the compatibility
of rubrics—in other words, it is difficult to construct one overarching
insight in assessment criteria. In Moni et al. (2007) and Poronnik and
Moni (2006), the construction of the rubric is not discussed explicitly.
These rubrics suffer from a methodological gap; it is unclear how sound
their construction and how valid their use in practice is.
Just as is the case with the frameworks that were described in the previ-
ous two paragraphs, there seems to be no overarching line in academic
advancement of rubrics, with researchers working independently and proj-
ects not being used for follow-up studies (the exceptions here are the stud-
ies conducted by mostly the same authors). This is a pity as it means that
there is no clear academic advancement of insights, and each research team
that is working on the topic seems to be reinventing a slightly differ-
ent wheel.
 3 METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS: FRAMEWORKS AND RUBRICS 41

What You Have Learned in This Chapter

• Text analysis sees texts as research objects and turns them into
data either through quantitative or qualitative analysis.
• In the current literature, popularization discourse is either ana-
lyzed through frameworks or assessed through rubrics. The
results from these methods show a whole range of structural
components, strategies, or assessment criteria in populariza-
tion discourse.
• It is impossible to produce one overarching overview of strate-
gies because of differences in subtypes of popularization dis-
course and disciplines from which source materials are gathered.
• There is a lack of explanation of methodological steps under-
taken in some of these studies, which points to a bigger meth-
odological issue in the research field.
• There is a need for an analytical framework, or in other words,
a coding scheme, for popularization discourse.

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 CHAPTER 4

Construction and Application: Introduction

of the Analytical Framework
for Popularization Discourse

Abstract In this chapter, we introduce our own analytical framework for

popularization discourse. The framework had to comply with four aims:
be usable in any subgenre of popularization discourse, be usable in disci-
plinary and multidisciplinary/interdisciplinary settings, be reliable with
multiple raters, and be easy to apply by offering application remarks and
explanations of strategies. The analytical framework is produced through
a construction and validation step. It consists of 34 strategies that are cap-
tured under five themes: Subject Matter, Tailoring Information to the
Reader, Credibility, Stance, and Engagement. This chapter offers insight
into these themes as well as into each individual strategy, for which appli-
cation remarks and further reading suggestions are also offered. Lastly, the
analytical framework is compared to existing frameworks and rubrics that
were proposed in the academic literature.

Keywords Framework • Coding scheme • Themes • Strategies • Text

analysis

© The Author(s) 2023 45

F. M. Sterk, M. M. van Goch, Re-presenting Research,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28174-7_4
46 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

4.1   Introduction
In this chapter we present our analytical framework for popularization
discourse. First, we discuss the main aims that our framework should
comply with. Then, we offer insight into the development of the frame-
work. The framework consists of five themes, which are explained, and 34
strategies, which are elaborated upon by offering an explanation and
application remarks, as well as suggestions for further reading. Lastly, the
analytical framework is compared to existing frameworks and rubrics in
the academic literature.

4.2  Considerations in Setting Up the Framework

In Chap. 3, we discussed existing insights into textual features, or strat-
egies, in popularization discourse. The discussion covered frameworks
(August et al., 2020; Giannoni, 2008; Hyland, 2010; Luzón, 2013;
Motta-Roth & Lovato, 2009; Nwogu, 1991) as well as rubrics (Moni
et al., 2007; Poronnik & Moni, 2006; Rakedzon & Baram-Tsabari,
2017a, 2017b; Yuen & Sawatdeenarunat, 2020). The discussion showed
issues in the reliability and usability of these frameworks and rubrics;
they do not show a clear line in the strategies that are presented, they
are not compatible among each other, they are not validated or con-
structed with the use of multiple raters in mind, they often consist of
results from text analysis and as such do not present a coding scheme,
and they mostly cover subgenres of popularization within specific disci-
plinary settings. Therefore, an overarching framework that is usable in
the analysis of popularization discourse is still missing from the aca-
demic literature and, perhaps more importantly, from practice. Such a
framework should ideally comply with four aims. An analytical frame-
work for popularization discourse is:

1. usable in any subgenre of popularization discourse

2. usable in disciplinary but also multidisciplinary and interdisciplin-
ary settings
3. reliable for use with multiple raters
4. easy to apply by offering application remarks and explanations of
strategies
 4 CONSTRUCTION AND APPLICATION: INTRODUCTION OF THE ANALYTICAL… 47

4.3  Methodology
In this section we will present a brief overview of the methodology and
set-up of our analytical framework.
The methodology consisted of a construction step and a validation
step. The aim of the construction step was to gather a corpus of newspa-
per articles based on a single academic source text. This would ensure
that texts and strategies presented in them are easily comparable to each
other and to the academic source material. To achieve this aim, 140 first-
year undergraduate liberal education students were asked to write a news-
paper article based on the source text “#Sleepyteens: Social media use in
adolescence is associated with poor sleep quality, anxiety, depression and
low self-esteem” (Woods & Scott, 2016). Participants were asked to read
this publication before class. In class, they were asked to write a text
about it that would be suitable to publish in the science section of a qual-
ity Dutch newspaper. The text had to be within a 400-word limit. The
target audience of the newspaper article consisted of a general audience
that was interested in science but did not necessarily receive higher edu-
cation training.
This corpus of newspaper articles was then analyzed for the occur-
rence of popularization strategies. We worked in test rounds, analyzing
10 randomly selected texts from the corpus in each round. The strate-
gies from Luzón’s (2013) research into science blogs were used as a list
of a priori codes in the first round, after which descriptive coding was
used (Saldaña, 2015) to indicate if each of the strategies was used.
Simultaneous coding was allowed, meaning text could be coded for
multiple strategies. We used consensual coding (Schmidt, 2004): we
compared coding and discussed difficulties and uncertainties. This pro-
cess of coding and adapting the framework was an iterative process in
which, during each round, the a priori code list was adapted according
to the insights that were generated through deliberation about the cod-
ing, by splitting, merging, deleting, and adding codes. In each new
round, the adapted list was used as an a priori list. This process contin-
ued until code saturation was reached after six rounds. In a seventh and
final round, 10 texts that led to the most discrepancies earlier on were
re-analyzed. Throughout the coding rounds, many adaptations were
made to the list of codes; some were added or deleted, others split or
48 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

merged. On the resulting list of 34 codes, pattern coding was used as a

second-cycle coding technique to thematize strategies (Saldaña, 2015).
Luzón’s (2013) framework had originally contained three themes; rhe-
torical category, strategies to tailor information, and strategies to engage
the reader. These themes were reworded into Subject Matter, Tailoring
Information to the Reader, and Engagement. Furthermore, the themes
Credibility and Stance were introduced—which are also used in Hyland’s
(2010) framework—to thematize the strategies that fell outside of the
scope of the existing three themes.
The inter-rater reliability was checked after each round by using both
percent agreement and Cohen’s kappa with 95% confidence intervals.
Cohen’s kappa is used for inter-rater reliability between two raters and
controls for agreement because of random guesses. Scores can range
between 0 and 1 and include 95% confidence intervals as kappa is an esti-
mate of inter-rater reliability (see McHugh, 2012). In the first round, the
inter-rater reliability for our analytical framework was 0.55 (0.46–0.65
confidence intervals), showing a weak level of agreement. In the next
rounds, the reliability increased and ultimately reached a kappa of 0.90
(0.86–0.95 confidence intervals) in the seventh and final round, denoting
an almost perfect level of agreement.
The aim of the validation step was to check the framework against a
corpus of texts from multiple different subgenres of popularization dis-
course, written by professionals, and containing multiple topics and source
texts. This validation step was needed because all texts in the construction
round were based on a single source text from a single academic field, thus
creating the possibility that some strategies could not be employed.
Furthermore, the corpus in the construction phase was written by stu-
dents, not professional writers, thus creating the possibility that some
strategies were not used. This second corpus consisted of 38 science jour-
nalism articles written by a range of professional media outlets that were
chosen according to Berezow’s (2017) infographic on quality of science
reporting. The two axes of this infographic present the compellingness of
the content and the degree of evidence-based reporting of different media
outlets. This creates a three-by-three grid ranging from ‘evidence-based
reporting’ with ‘almost always compelling science content,’ to
 4 CONSTRUCTION AND APPLICATION: INTRODUCTION OF THE ANALYTICAL… 49

‘ideologically driven reporting/poor reporting’ with ‘no compelling sci-

ence content.’ The corpus contained texts from all represented quadrants
of science reporting (for example, the option ‘always compelling science
content’ with ‘ideologically driven/poor reporting’ was not represented
by any outlets), apart from the quadrant of ‘not usually compelling science
content’ with ‘ideologically driven/poor reporting,’ as this is seen as poor
science reporting overall. The corpus contained many different topics
(and thus disciplinary fields) and multiple subtypes of popularization such
as news articles and overview articles. The reader can find more about this
corpus in Chap. 6. The corpus was checked against the analytical frame-
work with the particular aim of analyzing how often strategies were used
and to check if any previously undiscovered strategies could be found. In
this round, one strategy was deleted and five additional strategies were
added to the already constructed themes. The final framework contains 34
strategies captured under five themes and will be explained in the next two
sections.

4.4  Themes
In this section we describe the five themes that comprise the framework:
Subject Matter, Tailoring Information to the Reader, Credibility, Stance,
and Engagement.
Subject Matter includes strategies concerning content from the original
scientific publication. Although it is impossible to construct one single
organizational structure of popularization texts, several rhetorical strate-
gies usually appear in them (Luzón, 2013). Instead of a “narrative of sci-
ence,” popularization texts provide a “narrative of nature” (Hyland, 2010,
pp. 120–121). By moving the main claim to the first paragraph, the focus
shifts to novelty and importance. The object studied becomes more
important than the methodological steps taken (Hyland, 2010).
Uncertainties that would be discussed in the academic text are removed
and the focus is on results (Fahnestock, 1986).
Tailoring Information to the Reader contains recontextualization
strategies that remodel academic findings to an everyday-life and under-
standable setting. In academic texts a shared base of knowledge is
50 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

assumed between writer and reader, yet this is not the case in populariza-
tions (Hyland, 2010). Therefore, popularizations need to be recontex-
tualized from the academic context to that of the lay audience and need
to be perceived as suitable within the new context (Gotti, 2014).
Information is tailored to readers by connecting to what they (are pre-
sumed to) already know, through explanations or connections to every-
day life (Hyland, 2010). In part, this recontextualization takes place by
focusing on the application and consequences of a phenomenon
(Fahnestock, 1986).
Credibility is created in academic texts when authors position them-
selves in relation to other researchers and publications. For popularization
texts, it is assumed that readers do not possess disciplinary knowledge or
cross-disciplinary expertise, so credibility of the source is emphasized
instead. Researchers important to the topic under discussion are men-
tioned and credibility is constructed through their academic position.
Furthermore, quotes underline the credibility of the presented material.
In academic texts, credibility increases through depersonalization as it
suggests objectivity. The opposite is true for popularized texts, in which
personalization strategies are used (Hyland, 2010).
In popularization discourse, Stance on the topic under discussion can
also be communicated. The media contribute to opinions that are
formed about research and researchers (Calsamiglia & Van Dijk, 2004).
Furthermore, personal attitude and the expression of stance play a big
part in constructing proximity. In academic texts, hedges are used to
indicate that researchers are careful in their statements, but these are
removed in popularized texts to create more impact for academic find-
ings. Instead, the popularization writer uses stance and opinions to
comment on the research or the publication to engage the reader
(Hyland, 2010).
Engagement is used to connect to readers; writers use it to signal their
awareness of the audience’s presence. Engagement strategies use discourse
that is informal and geared toward the reader to get their attention, create
a shared understanding, include them as participants in the discourse, and
influence them (Hyland, 2010; Luzón, 2013). Many strategies that are
part of this theme play an active role in reformulation.
 4 CONSTRUCTION AND APPLICATION: INTRODUCTION OF THE ANALYTICAL… 51

4.5  Strategies
The five themes together contain 34 strategies. Table 4.1 provides an
overview of each strategy in the analytical framework. Each strategy con-
tains an explanation that is based on literature and application remarks
that are based on our experience from working with the framework. The
‘further reading’ column presents additional sources that cover each strat-
egy—the interested reader can explore each strategy further using these
sources.

4.6  The Framework versus the Literature

We established that, ideally, an analytical framework should be compliant
with four aims. Our framework is usable in any subgenre of popularization
because in its construction and validation phase, multiple subforms of
popularization were taken into consideration. The framework can be used
in any disciplinary, multidisciplinary, or interdisciplinary field because texts
from the validation phase represented a range of disciplinary fields, none
of which led to any issues in coding, and the student writing was produced
as part of an interdisciplinary undergraduate program. Furthermore, there
is no disciplinary bias in any of the themes or strategies in the framework.
The framework is reliably usable by multiple raters because we worked
with multiple raters during the construction phase and this collaboration
produced a reliable kappa. In fact, we would advise anyone working with
this framework to analyze texts in duos and thoroughly discuss differences
of opinion, as this process is very insightful for learning how the analytical
framework works, as well as generating insight into your own frame of
reference. Lastly, the framework is easy to use because we offer application
remarks and an explanation of each strategy.
As was mentioned in Chap. 3, it is difficult to make one single overview
of all popularization strategies from the available frameworks. Still, it is
possible to relate the framework that we just presented to the existing lit-
erature. First, the connection to previous sources can be seen in the ‘fur-
ther reading’ column in Table 4.1, which shows other sources in which a
particular strategy is also presented (it should be noted though that not all
sources mentioned in this column present an explicit framework). Except
for link to the academic publication, all the strategies in our framework
are mentioned in at least one of these sources. Some features are men-
tioned in multiple frameworks, such as main findings (in our framework:
Table 4.1 The framework of analysis for popularization discourse
52

Theme Strategy Explanation Application remarks Further reading

Subject Lede A lede is a short, introductory section used to • Often typographically distinct, for example presented in boldface. August et al. (2020)
Matter establish the most important findings. Its goal is to • Only code when presented between the title and first paragraph of the main body. and Motta-Roth and
attract the attention of the reader. • Usually used only once. Lovato (2009)
• Length is between one and a couple of sentences.
Contextua­ Contextualization is an organizational strategy • Constructed through strategies such as novelty, examples from daily life, Gotti (2014), Hyland
lization used to introduce the research or the topic. In questions, and imagery. Also mark these strategies when used in contextualization. (2010), and Luzón
contextualization, a scenario is created that is • Contextualization is possible without announcing the new finding or new (2013)
supposed to attract the attention of the reader and contribution to the discipline.
present the topic in an everyday-life context. The • Often in the first paragraph of the text.
main claim can be presented at the end of the • Usually used only once.
contextualization as a lead-up to newsworthiness. • Length is between a sentence and a paragraph.
Announcing Announcements focus on the news value or • Code even when only the announcement claim or only the newsworthiness claim Hyland (2010) and
the new finding ‘newness’ of research. They are used to underpin is presented. Luzón (2013)
or new validation for the production of a text. For readers, • Often presented in the first or second paragraph.
F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

contribution announcements underpin a text’s readability. • Used only once in single-source popularizations, used multiple times in overview
to the Announcing the new finding or new contribution texts about a topic.
discipline to the discipline consists of an announcement claim • Length is between one and a couple of sentences.
that states research has been conducted and a
newsworthiness claim that focuses on the new results.
Novelty Novelty shows the motivation for doing research by • Code even when only an overview of previously known knowledge or a gap in Hyland (2010),
giving an overview of previously known knowledge, knowledge or the necessity of research is presented. Molek-Kozakowska
showing a knowledge gap, or pointing out why • Often presented in the first or second paragraph. (2017), Motta-Roth
research is necessary. Popularization texts use • Usually used only once. and Lovato (2009),
novelty to achieve newsworthiness. • Length is between one and a couple of sentences. and Nwogu (1991)
Describing the The method is often presented in non-technical • Code any remark (either abstract or concrete) about the methods used or about Hyland (2010),
method terms, so that it appeals to readers with different the design of the study. Luzón (2013),
levels of disciplinary knowledge. Methods can be • Can be presented in any paragraph, usually not in the first or last. Motta-Roth and
described either on an abstract and design-level • Length is between a couple of words and a couple of sentences. Lovato (2009), and
(hypothesis/goal/ topic) or a practical/applied Nwogu (1991)
level (measures and methods used).
Presenting Presenting results/conclusions entails showing • An often-used strategy and a strategy that often takes up a large percentage of the text. August et al. (2020),
results/ the new information and conclusions from • Be aware that as part of presenting results/conclusions, many other strategies Hyland (2010),
conclusions academic research. They are presented as new can appear that should also be coded. Luzón (2013),
insights and sometimes explained further. • Be aware that the boundary between presenting results/conclusions and Motta-Roth and
showing applied implications can be vague. Lovato (2009), and
• Similarly, presenting results/conclusions can be part of other strategies, such as Nwogu (1991)
title, lede, and announcing the new finding or new contribution to the discipline.
• Can be presented in any paragraph, often all paragraphs between
contextualization and the final paragraph.
• Length is between a couple of words and multiple paragraphs.
Tailoring Applied Applied implications recontextualize knowledge • Be aware that academic implications or implications for actors in the academic August et al. (2020),
Information implications beyond the scope of research, to show their world are another strategy as part of Credibility. Only implications beyond the Calsamiglia (2003),
to the application in everyday life and everyday terms. scope of research should be coded as applied implications. Giannoni (2008),
Reader Applied implications can include ethical, cultural, • When readers are urged to take action, usually they are referenced through Gotti (2014), Luzón
ideological, and political implications. In some references to the reader or inclusive pronouns, and an imperative verb is used. (2013), Molek-
cases, readers are urged to take action. • Usually presented in the final paragraph. Kozakowska (2017),
• Usually used only once. Motta-Roth and
• Length is between one and a couple of sentences. Lovato (2009), and
Nwogu (1991)
Explanations Explanations are used to elaborate upon a term or • Code any type of explanatory statement. August et al. (2020),
idea. They consist of paraphrases, reformulations •D isciplinary or specialist discourse from the original publication is at the core of Gotti (2014), Hyland
in which specialist discourse is presented into more this strategy. When presented verbatim, also code for direct quote from the (2007, 2010), Luzón
understandable language, explanations of academic publication. (2013), Motta-Roth
definitions, or elaborations of terms and concepts. • Presented in any part of the text. and Lovato (2009),
• Length is between a few words and a paragraph. and Nwogu (1991)
Imagery Imagery is used to help readers integrate new • Code any type of imagery. August et al. (2020),
knowledge; it lets readers relate new knowledge to • Presented in any part of the text. Calsamiglia and Van
existing knowledge. Imagery consists of all types of • Length is between a few words and a paragraph. Analogy and metaphor are Dijk (2004), Giannoni
explanatory elements that use figurative language usually not longer than a couple of words. (2008), Luzón
such as metaphor, analogy, comparison, and (2013), and
idioms. Motta-Roth and
Lovato (2009)
Examples from Examples from daily life create a scenario to draw • Often accompanied by references to the reader, inclusive pronouns, and Gotti (2014), Hyland
daily life information into an everyday context, in order to features of conversational discourse. (2010), and Luzón
explain it. This can include definitions, • This strategy excludes self-disclosure of the author’s public or personal life; (2013)
explanations, facts, and concepts as long as they this is coded as a separate strategy.
are part of the everyday example. • Presented in any part of the text.
• Length is between a few words and a couple of sentences.
Hyperlinks Hyperlinks link to online sources that contain • Typographically distinct; usually printed in blue and/or underlined. Luzón (2009, 2013)
explanations and additional information, or to • Medium dependent; will be non-clickable without an internet connection, will
related stories. not be used in print media.
• Presented in any part of the text.
• Length is between one and a few words.
Visuals Visuals attract attention or are used as visual • Visuals can include captions and credits; also code these as part of the visual. Hyland (2010) and
explanatory elements. They can be presented in The caption might contain other strategies (for example, presenting Luzón (2013)
the form of pictures, graphics, and diagrams. results/conclusions); code these separately.
4 CONSTRUCTION AND APPLICATION: INTRODUCTION OF THE ANALYTICAL…

• Medium dependent: might not be used in non-digitized texts.

• Presented in any part of the text. Pictures are often used to attract attention and
presented at the top of the text.
53

(continued)
Table 4.1 (continued)
54

Theme Strategy Explanation Application remarks Further reading

Credibility Academic Academic implications present the implications • Be aware that implications beyond the scope of research, for example ethical, Luzón (2013) and
implications for actors involved in disseminating and publishing cultural, ideological, and political implications, are a different strategy and should Nwogu (1991)
research. The implications might already be be coded as applied implications.
presented as part of the original academic text. In • Usually presented toward the end of the text.
popularizations they are used to underpin the • Usually used only once.
quality of the research. • Length is between one and a couple of sentences.
Mentioning Mentioning more research is necessary/next • Code even when only the signaling claim or only the argumentative claim about Motta-Roth and
more research step in research consists of two parts: a signaling content is presented. Lovato (2009) and
is mention that more research is necessary, and an • Presented toward the end of the text. Nwogu (1991)
necessary/next argumentative part about what the content of the • Usually used only once.
step in research research/the next step in research should be. • Length is between one and a couple of sentences.
Contribution The contribution to research is presented as • Be aware that newsworthiness is also constructed in terms of the contribution to Hyland (2010) and
to research part of the transformation of academic findings everyday life, but these are separate strategies (see applied implications and Nwogu (1991)
into newsworthy claims. New information is examples from daily life).
F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

presented as a scientific breakthrough by • Presented toward the end of the text.

highlighting the significance of the results for the • Usually used only once.
scientific community and for the development of • Length is between one and a couple of sentences.
the academic field.
Mention of Statistics in popularizations are based on the • Percentages can be presented either as a percent mark (‘33%’) or in words (‘a third’). Hijmans et al. (2003)
statistics statistical analysis in academic papers but presented • Presented in any part of the text. and Hyland (2010)
in a more comprehensible way. They are often • Length of a single word or two words.
simple statistical terms (means, percentages).
Statistics are used to underpin the credibility of
the research and give insight into the research
results.
Giving the Giving the researcher an active voice is • Often, but not always, presented in quotation marks. Gotti (2014), Hyland
researcher an especially important in constructing credibility. • Often introduced through a marker such as ‘the researcher says….’ (2010), Motta-Roth
active Because new information cannot be embedded • Be aware that quotes from anyone other than the researchers are coded as giving and Lovato (2009),
voice/direct within a discipline and its knowledge base, non-researchers an active voice. and Nwogu (1991)
quotes from credibility is constructed through explanations • Presented in any part of the text.
the researcher from researchers themselves. • Length is between a couple of words and a couple of sentences.
Lexical Lexical mentions are used to construct credibility • Lexical mentions can include researchers’ names, researchers’ academic Hyland (2010),
mention of the of the source, for example through the position of positions, university, title of the research, and journal where the research is Luzón (2013),
original the researcher in an academic institution. published. Motta-Roth and
research • Presented in any part of the text. Lovato (2009), and
• Length is between a single word and a couple of words. Nwogu (1991)
 Additional Additional sources are used to add information • Sometimes accompanied by a hyperlink. Hijmans et al. (2003)
sources or underpin findings from a different perspective. • Presented in any part of the text. and Hyland (2010)
They are the popularized counterpart of the way • Length is between one and a couple of sentences.
sources are cited in academic texts to position new
claims versus already established knowledge.
Link to the A link to the academic publication is either • When a hyperlink is used to link to the academic publication, code under Luzón (2009)
academic presented as an in-text hyperlink or in a separate hyperlink too.
publication sentence. The credibility is constructed through • Usually presented either in the first paragraph as an in-text hyperlink or at the
showing the original source of the new end of the text in a separate sentence.
information. • Medium dependent; will be non-clickable without an internet connection, will
not be used in print media.
• Usually used only once.
• Length is between one word and a sentence.
Direct quote A direct quote from the academic publication • The fact that the quote is lifted from the academic publication is explicitly stated. Nwogu (1991)
from the consists of part of the academic text that is • Presented in quotation marks.
academic re-presented as a quote. • Presented in any part of the text.
publication • Length is between a couple of words and a couple of sentences.
In-text In-text specification of a source consists of an • Linguistic markers include ‘… has told the publication through email…’ or Nwogu (1991)
specification of explicit remark about the origins of information. ‘stated in a new press release….’
a source • Presented in any part of the text though always connected to giving the
researcher an active voice or giving the non-researcher an active voice.
• Length is a couple of words.
Stance Opinion Opinions consist of any evaluative remark. They • Code any evaluative remark, whether positive or negative. Luzón (2013),
can be positive or negative, for example to praise • Any participant in the discourse can contribute an opinion; this means that Molek-Kozakowska
research, to express criticism about research, or to opinions in quotes also count. (2017), and
highlight its importance. • Presented in any part of the text. Motta-Roth and
• Length is between one and a couple of sentences. Lovato (2009)
Stance markers Stance markers are used to convey attitudes, • Stance markers might be difficult to analyze as their interpretation is also Aull and Lancaster
emotions, and evaluations. Epistemic stance dependent upon a shared understanding between the writer and reader. Take the (2014), Biber
comments on certainty, doubt, reliability, context and target audience into consideration. (2006), Conrad and
limitations, and the reality or actuality of a • All types of stance markers are captured under one strategy: stance markers. Biber (1999),
proposition. Attitudinal stance is used to convey • Stance markers are often used as part of opinions. Giannoni (2008),
attitudes, feelings, or value judgments. Style stance • Presented in any part of the text. and Gray and Biber
comments on the way information is being given • Usually used multiple times. (2014)
or should be understood. • Length is one word or sometimes two words.
4 CONSTRUCTION AND APPLICATION: INTRODUCTION OF THE ANALYTICAL…

(continued)
55
Table 4.1 (continued)
56

Theme Strategy Explanation Application remarks Further reading

Engagement Titles/ Titles and subheadings attract the attention of the • Often typographically distinct from the rest of the text, such as in a bigger font Luzón (2013)
subheadings reader, for example by presenting (part of) the or boldface.
main claim of the academic text or connecting • Strategies used in titles/subheadings are marked separately.
results to everyday life. • Titles are presented at the top of the text; subheadings are presented in any part
of the text.
• Title used once, subheadings used multiple times.
• Length is between a couple of words and one sentence.
References to References to popular lore and beliefs, and • Might be dependent upon the cultural context and frame of reference of the Gamson 1988 as
popular lore popular culture work by creating a familiar analyst. Take the context and target audience into consideration. cited in Lievrouw
and beliefs, and mental landscape of existing understanding of • Presented in any part of the text. (1990), Luzón
popular topics in which a connection can be made to new • Length is between a couple of words and a couple of sentences. (2013), and Zehr
culture information from research. (2014)
Self-disclosure Self-disclosure of the author’s public or personal • Be aware that the examples must be connected to the personal life of the author. August et al. (2020),
of the author’s life is used to add details about the author’s personal Otherwise, code under examples from daily life. Giannoni (2008),
F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

public or or professional life. The defining element of this • Presented in any part of the text. and Luzón (2013)
personal life strategy is the personal connection. Self-disclosure • Length is between a couple of words and a couple of sentences.
of the author’s public or personal life consists of
examples of the daily and personal life of the author.
Inclusive Inclusive pronouns create a shared group between • Plural first-person pronouns. Hyland (2010) and
pronouns reader and writer in which both parties share the • Be aware that in science communication, authors might write from the plural Luzón (2013)
same point of view, or a taken-for-granted view is first-person perspective. In this case, the pronouns are not inclusive as they only
presented. Note that the term ‘inclusive pronouns’ refer to the researchers.
is often used to refer to gender neutral or gender • Presented in any part of the text.
inclusive pronouns, but in this strategy inclusive • Usually used multiple times.
pronouns refers to plural first-person pronouns • Length is a single word.
(we, us, ours) that are applied to recognize the
reader and the writer as one group.
References to References to the reader are second-person • Singular/plural second-person pronouns. Hyland (2010),
the reader pronouns used to represent the readers as actors in the • Presented in any part of the text. Luzón (2013), and
interaction. They are employed to acknowledge the • Usually used multiple times. Molek-Kozakowska
readers’ presence and draw them into the discourse. • Length is a single word. (2017)
Giving the Where giving the researcher an active voice is • Often, but not always, presented in quotation marks. Botelho et al. (2016)
non-researcher employed for credibility, giving the non-researcher • Often introduced through a marker such as ‘person X says…’. and Motta-Roth and
an active an active voice constructs engagement. Quotes • Be aware that quotes from researchers are coded as giving the researcher an Lovato (2009)
voice/direct from non-academic experts, journalists, and people active voice.
quotes with personal experience about a topic are used to • Presented in any part of the text.
include multiple perspectives, to make a connection • Length is between a couple of words and a couple of sentences.
to the perspective from everyday life, and to gear the
text toward different audiences.
Features of Features of conversational discourse consist of • Inclusive pronouns, references to the reader, questions, and stance markers Luzón (2013) and
conversational any type of everyday-life language use, and are may also be coded as features of conversational discourse when they Molek-Kozakowska
discourse used to give the feeling of informality. contribute to the feeling of colloquial language. (2017)
• Presented in any part of the text.
• Usually used multiple times.
• Length is between a single word and multiple paragraphs (the latter in the case of
informal language use).
Questions Questions are used to catch the attention of the • Typographically distinct through the use of a question mark. Giannoni (2008),
reader, to create dialogic involvement, to make • Questions are often used as part of other strategies, such as titles/subheadings. Hyland (2010),
readers think about a topic, as an organizational • Presented in any part of the text. Luzón (2013), and
tool, to challenge existing views, and as an • Length is usually one sentence. Nwogu (1991)
explanatory tool.
Humor Humor is used to build solidarity with the reader, • Might be dependent upon the cultural context and frame of reference of the Giannoni (2008),
to reinforce assumptions, and to entertain. It can analyst. Take the context and target audience into consideration. Luzón (2013), and
include light teasing, irony, and sarcasm. • Presented in any part of the text. Riesch (2015)
• Length is between a single word and a couple of sentences.
Explicit Explicit self-reference is used to make a • Singular and plural first-person pronouns. Biber (2006),
self-reference connection with the reader, to express the • Be aware that singular and plural first-person pronouns might also be used to Giannoni (2008),
authority of the writer, or to let a writer express refer to the researcher(s) or other actors in the text; count only as explicit Hyland (2002), and
their identity. The writer makes their presence self-reference if they refer to the author of the popularization. Luzón (2013)
known within the text. • Presented in any part of the text.
• Length is a single word.
4 CONSTRUCTION AND APPLICATION: INTRODUCTION OF THE ANALYTICAL…
57
58 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

presenting results/conclusions), analogy/metaphor (in our framework:

imagery), describing the method, applied implications, explanations,
questions, humor, opinion, and contextualization. Other features are
mentioned once, such as hyperlinks, additional sources, and giving the
researcher an active voice. On the other hand, our framework is not
simply an aggregation of these sources, and not all strategies mentioned in
them have become part of the analytical framework.
Furthermore, there are several key differences between earlier frame-
works and the framework presented in this book. Examples of strategies
that are mentioned in other frameworks that are not part of our frame-
work are story (storytelling/narrative) and active (active voice) (August
et al., 2020), contingency (the effect of personal experiences on work or
beliefs) (Giannoni, 2008), argument structures (Hyland, 2010), and
expressions of feelings or emotional reactions (Luzón, 2013). Because our
aim was to construct a framework that was evidence-based and these strat-
egies were not found in our text analyses, and because we did not want to
make an aggregation of all strategies that were discussed in the literature,
they are not included in our framework. Another difference is that some
of these sources might present strategies on a different level, for example
as sub-strategies or aggregated into one. This led to issues of incompatibil-
ity between existing frameworks. Our framework does not contain sub-
strategies, which ensures all strategies are presented on the same level of
importance. Furthermore, our framework does not presume a specific
order of linguistic moves, like Motta-Roth and Lovato’s (2009) and
Nwogu’s (1991) frameworks do, as we want to enable coders to make
inferences based upon their own analyses. However, we do recognize that
in the data we used for our research, some moves are often seen in a spe-
cific order (contextualization, novelty, announcing the new finding
or new contribution to the discipline), or appear together (examples
from daily life with inclusive pronouns or references to the reader).
Similarly, none of the popularization rubrics discussed in Chap. 3
can give an overarching insight into popularization discourse, but some
of the strategies (or assessment criteria) mentioned in them are also
presented in our framework. They are key facts (in our framework:
presenting results/conclusions), background (in our framework: con­
textualization, novelty) (Moni et al., 2007; Poronnik & Moni, 2006),
titles (Rakedzon & Baram-Tsabari, 2017a, 2017b), academic implica­
tions and applied implications (Yuen & Sawatdeenarunat, 2020), and
 4 CONSTRUCTION AND APPLICATION: INTRODUCTION OF THE ANALYTICAL… 59

explanations (Rakedzon & Baram-Tsabari, 2017a, 2017b; Yuen &

Sawatdeenarunat, 2020).
These rubrics also explain processes that are needed to construct effec-
tive popularization texts, such as the use of active voice (Rakedzon &
Baram-Tsabari, 2017a, 2017b) or the use of language strategies to appeal
to and engage readers (Yuen & Sawatdeenarunat, 2020). These processes
are more about actions a writer should take that ultimately will lead to
certain textual elements than they are about those textual elements directly,
which is why they are not part of our framework.
In Chap. 2 we discussed the two main textual processes that construct
popularization discourse, and through them form popularization strate-
gies: recontextualization and reformulation (Bondi et al., 2013; Calsamiglia
& Van Dijk, 2004; Ciapuscio, 2003; Gotti, 2014). Recontextualization
entails moving scientific facts from the expert context to the layperson
context and, in doing so, presenting specialized knowledge in a way that
non-specialized readers can understand (Bondi et al., 2013; Calsamiglia &
Van Dijk, 2004). Many strategies in our framework are a form of recon-
textualization: lede, contextualization, announcing the new finding
or new contribution to the discipline, novelty, describing the method,
presenting results/conclusions, applied implications, hyperlinks, visu­
als, academic implications, mentioning more research is necessary/next
step in research, contribution to research, mention of statistics, lexi­
cal mention of the original research, additional sources, link to the
academic publication, direct quote from the academic publication, in-
text specification of a source, opinion, titles/subheadings, references
to popular lore and beliefs, and popular culture, self-disclosure of
the author’s public or personal life, and humor. Reformulation remod-
els the language that is used to the new target audience (Gotti, 2014).
Reformulation occurs in the strategies explanations, imagery, stance
markers, inclusive pronouns, references to the reader, features of
conversational discourse, questions, and explicit self-reference. Some
strategies are a combination of reformulation and recontextualization ele-
ments: giving the researcher an active voice, giving the non-researcher
an active voice, and examples from daily life. These strategies recontex-
tualize the content of the academic text, but they also rephrase it into
colloquial language. Our framework also shows that it is possible to
construct other goals or themes through recontextualization and refor-
mulation processes. An example here is the theme Credibility, which is
entirely made up of recontextualization strategies.
60 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

What You Have Learned in This Chapter

• In this chapter, an analytical framework for popularization dis-
course is presented that is usable in any subgenre of popular-
ization discourse, usable in disciplinary or multidisciplinary/in
terdisciplinary settings, workable and reliable with multiple
raters, and easy to apply.
• The framework consists of five themes (Subject Matter, Tailor-
ing Information to the Reader, Credibility, Stance, and
Engagement) and 34 strategies that are explained and sup-
ported by further readings and application remarks.
• There are points of overlap between this analytical framework
and existing frameworks from the literature, but also key dif-
ferences; this framework is not an aggregation of existing
efforts and aims to improve upon existing work.

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 CHAPTER 5

Text Example: Using an Analytical

Framework to Code a Professional Science
Journalism Text

Abstract In this chapter, the analytical framework for popularization dis-

course is used to code the science journalism text “Baby Poop Is Loaded
With Microplastics.” The chapter shows the kinds of insights that can be
produced on the level of the individual text. Furthermore, presenting the
in-depth analysis of a single text allows us to share what coding using our
framework looks like on the level of the strategy.

Keywords Science journalism • Text analysis • Text example •

Analytical framework • Strategies

5.1   Introduction
In this chapter we present an example of using our framework as an ana-
lytic tool. One professional science journalism text is analyzed using the
framework. The goal of this analysis is to assess which strategies a profes-
sional science journalist uses, at the textual level, to communicate research

© The Author(s) 2023 65

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66 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

findings to the general public. Thus, the question driving the analysis was
which of the 34 strategies in our framework were discernible in the profes-
sional text. Therefore, this analysis is quantitative and instrumental. The
goal of the chapter is to show what results to expect when using the frame-
work to analyze one individual text at the strategy level.

5.2  Corpus Construction
This chapter presents the analysis of a single text: “Baby Poop Is Loaded
With Microplastics,” written by Matt Simon and published on the web-
site of Wired in September 2021 (Simon, 2021). Wired is a journalism
platform (including a magazine and website) that focuses on the impact
of new technology on everyday life. The text details new published
research that shows microplastics have been found in newborn babies’
first feces; it offers information about the research as well as drawing
those insights into the bigger realm of everyday life to show what this
discovery about microplastics might mean for us on a daily and individ-
ual level. The text was part of the corpus of science journalism texts that
was used in the validation step of the construction of our framework (see
Chaps. 4 and 6). We chose the text because it uses the most strategies
out of any text in the corpus of professional science journalism writing:
27 out of 34. Here, we show the outcomes of using the framework on
the level of a single text.

5.3   Analysis
In this section, we show the analysis of the text “Baby Poop is Loaded
With Microplastics”. We have underlined and coded each strategy. Some
codes are used more than once, others not at all. To signal codes that run
beyond a single line of text, we added a raised edge to the underline.
Codes that run beyond multiple lines of text are coded with a vertical line.
The underlining is color coded per theme: Subject matter is coded in
purple, Tailoring Information to the Reader in blue, Credibility in green,
Stance in orange, and Engagement in pink.
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68 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH
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74 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH
 5 TEXT EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK TO CODE… 75

5.4  Overview of Strategies
Through the analysis of the text “Baby Poop Is Loaded With Microplastics,”
it becomes clear that 27 out of 34 possible strategies were used in this text.
In Table 5.1, examples of the use of each strategy are provided.

5.5   Interpretation
After using the framework to analyze the text “Baby Poop Is Loaded With
Microplastics,” the following insights can be drawn. Our inter-rater reli-
ability was 0.84 with 95% confidence intervals of 0.63 to 1.00.
Overall, it could be said that the text adheres to the genre demands of
science journalism. The focus of the text is mainly on the results of the
research and on how these new insights impact our daily life on an indi-
vidual level. The use of popularization strategies is dense, with all text in
the article coded for at least one strategy and often for multiple strategies.
This also means that a lot of overlap is visible in strategy use. Some strate-
gies are coded for longer passages of text, often for a length of multiple
sentences, such as contextualization, presenting results/conclusions,
Table 5.1 Overview of strategies in “Baby Poop Is Loaded With Microplastics”
76

Theme Strategy Examples of strategy use

Subject Lede An alarming new study finds that infant feces contain 10 times more polyethylene terephthalate (aka
Matter polyester) than an adult’s.
Contextualization Whenever a plastic bag or bottle degrades, it breaks into ever smaller pieces that work their way into nooks
in the environment. When you wash synthetic fabrics, tiny plastic fibers break loose and flow out to sea.
When you drive, plastic bits fly off your tires and brakes. That’s why literally everywhere scientists look,
they’re finding microplastics—specks of synthetic material that measure less than 5 millimeters long.
They’re on the most remote mountaintops and in the deepest oceans. They’re blowing vast distances in
the wind to sully once pristine regions like the Arctic. In 11 protected areas in the western US, the
equivalent of 120 million ground-up plastic bottles are falling out of the sky each year. And now,
microplastics are coming out of babies.
F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

Announcing the new An alarming new study finds that infant feces contain 10 times more polyethylene terephthalate (aka
finding or new polyester) than an adult’s.
contribution to the
discipline

Novelty The finding comes a year after another team of researchers calculated that preparing hot formula in plastic
bottles severely erodes the material, which could dose babies with several million microplastics a day, and
perhaps nearly a billion particles a year.
Describing the The researchers did their tally by collecting dirty diapers from six 1-year-olds and running the feces
method through a filter to collect the microplastics. They did the same with three samples of meconium—a
newborn’s first feces—and stool samples from 10 adults. In addition to analyzing the samples for PET,
they also looked for polycarbonate plastic, which is used as a lightweight alternative to glass, for instance in
eyeglass lenses. To make sure that they only counted the microplastics that came from the infants’ guts,
and not from their diapers, they ruled out the plastic that the diapers were made of: polypropylene, a
polymer that’s distinct from polycarbonate and PET.
Presenting All told, PET concentrations were 10 times higher in infants than in adults, while polycarbonate levels
results/conclusions were more even between the two groups. The researchers found smaller amounts of both polymers in the
meconium, suggesting that babies are born with plastics already in their systems.
Tailoring Applied implications In the meantime, microplastics researchers say you can limit children’s contact with particles. Do not prepare
Information infant formula with hot water in a plastic bottle—use a glass bottle and transfer it over to the plastic one once
to the the liquid reaches room temperature. Vacuum and sweep to keep floors clear of microfibers. Avoid plastic
Reader wrappers and containers when possible. Microplastics have contaminated every aspect of our lives, so while
you’ll never get rid of them, you can at least reduce your family’s exposure.
Explanations … they ruled out the plastic that the diapers were made of: polypropylene, a polymer that’s distinct from
polycarbonate and PET.
Imagery Indoor dust is also emerging as a major route of microplastic exposure, especially for infants.
Examples from daily When you drive, plastic bits fly off your tires and brakes.
life

Hyperlinks When you wash synthetic fabrics, tiny plastic fibers break loose and flow out to sea. When you drive,
plastic bits fly off your tires and brakes.

Visuals

David Gee / Alamy Stock Photo

5 TEXT EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK TO CODE…

(continued)
77
Table 5.1 (continued)
78

Theme Strategy Examples of strategy use

Credibility Academic “We need to look at everything a child is exposed to, not just their bottles and toys.”
implications

Mentioning more But that was done with very high concentrations of particles, and in an entirely different species. While
research is scientists know that EDCs are bad news, they don’t yet know what level of microplastic exposure it would
necessary/next step take to cause problems in the human body. “We need many more studies to confirm the doses and types
in research of chemicals in microplastics that lead to adverse outcomes,” says Flaws.
Contribution to This new research adds to a growing body of evidence that babies are highly exposed to microplastic.
research

Mention of Different varieties of plastic can contain any of at least 10,000 different chemicals, a quarter of which are
statistics of concern for people, according to a recent study from researchers at ETH​​ Zürich in Switzerland.
F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

Giving the “Unfortunately, with the modern lifestyle, babies are exposed to so many different things for which we
researcher an active don't know what kind of effect they can have later in their life,” says Kurunthachalam Kannan…
voice/direct quotes
from the researcher

Lexical mention of … says Kurunthachalam Kannan, an environmental health scientist at New York University School of Medicine
the original research and coauthor of the new paper, which appears in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters.
Additional sources This echoes previous studies that have found microplastics in human placentas and meconium.
Link to the In a pilot study published today, scientists describe sifting through infants’ dirty diapers and finding an
academic publication average of 36,000 nanograms of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) per gram of feces, 10 times the amount
they found in adult feces.
Direct quote from N/A
the academic
publication

In-text specification N/A

of a source
Stance Opinion “I strongly believe that these chemicals do affect early life stages,” says Kannan. “That's a vulnerable period.”
Stance markers This new research adds to a growing body of evidence that babies are highly exposed to microplastic.
“This is a very interesting paper with some very worrying numbers.”
Engagement Titles/subheadings Baby Poop Is Loaded With Microplastics
References to N/A
popular lore and
beliefs, and popular
culture

Self-disclosure of N/A
the author’s public
or personal life

Inclusive pronouns Microplastics have contaminated every aspect of our lives, so while you’ll never get rid of them, you can at
least reduce your family’s exposure.
References to the Microplastics have contaminated every aspect of our lives, so while you’ll never get rid of them, you can at
reader least reduce your family’s exposure.
Giving the non- N/A
researcher an active
voice/direct quotes
from the
non-researcher

Features of Infants spend a significant amount of their time crawling through the stuff, agitating the settled fibers and
conversational kicking them up into the air.
discourse

Questions N/A
Humor (In general, indoor air is absolutely lousy with them; each year you could be inhaling tens of thousands of
5 TEXT EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK TO CODE…

particles.)
Explicit N/A
79

self-reference
80 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

novelty, describing the method, contribution to research, applied

implications, and mentioning more research is necessary—these strate-
gies are from the themes Subject Matter, Tailoring Information to the
Reader, and Credibility. These strategies never overlap with one another,
but rather alternate. Alternatively, strategies that are coded for shorter pas-
sages of text, on the level of individual or multiple words, often appear on
top of or together with one of the bigger codes. These are stance markers,
explanations, examples from daily life, references to the reader, fea-
tures of conversational discourse, imagery, hyperlinks, additional
sources, humor, lexical mention of the original research, link to the
academic publication, mention of statistics, giving the researcher an
active voice, giving the non-researcher an active voice, opinion, and
inclusive pronouns. These strategies are mainly from the themes Stance
and Engagement. Some strategies are employed throughout the entire
text, such as stance markers, inclusive pronouns, references to the
reader, and imagery, while others such as announcing the new finding
or new contribution to the discipline (start), contextualization (start),
applied implications (end), and mentioning more research is necessary
(end) only appear in specific spots in the text. Applied implications are
used twice in this text in two different locations, and novelty is used mul-
tiple times toward the end of the text instead of at the start, which is
something we have not seen happen often in other texts we analyzed.
This example also shows that text analysis includes interpretation to
some degree. The text includes the sentence “We need to look at every-
thing a child is exposed to, not just their bottles and toys,” a quote from
a researcher who was not involved in the study under discussion. This
sentence can be construed as an academic implication, that is, a call to
action for researchers to further investigate exposure to microplastics.
Alternatively, this sentence can be interpreted to be an applied implica-
tion, that is, a call to action for the audience to pay more attention to all
sources of (micro)plastic that their children are exposed to. In most cases,
if a statement is unclear, the meaning can still be gleaned from the con-
text—which in this case has led us to code the statement as an academic
implication—but this is not always a possibility. The choice to code as an
academic implication has consequences for further coding too; ‘we’ now
includes the quoted researcher and other researchers, but not the public,
and can therefore not be coded as an inclusive pronoun. Had the state-
ment been coded as an applied implication, ‘we’ would have referred to
the researcher and readers, and therefore would be coded as an inclusive
pronoun.
 5 TEXT EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK TO CODE… 81

This text also shows two uses of ‘strategies’ which we had not seen
before in our corpus analysis, both of which are contained in the following
sentence: “‘I strongly believe that these chemicals do affect early life
stages,’ says Kannan.” This example includes a quote by a researcher who
is not involved in the research under discussion—which is a textual feature
that does not really fit under either giving the researcher an active voice
or giving the non-researcher an active voice. The second textual feature
is the use of reference within a quote; in this case it is not explicit self-­
reference to the writer, but to another actor and voice within the text.
These two discoveries show that a framework is never truly finished (see
also Chap. 8).

What You Have Learned in This Chapter

• In this chapter an example analysis of one science journalism text,
“Baby Poop Is Loaded With Microplastics,” was presented.
• The chapter provides insights into what the application of the
analytical framework looks like on the level of codes that are
produced for a single text.
• On the level of coding, a significant insight that is produced is
that some strategies are coded on the level of multiple sen-
tences, and hardly ever overlap one another, while other strate-
gies are coded on the single-word or multi-word level and are
overlapping over longer codes.
• Some strategies are employed throughout the entire text, while
others are only found in specific spots. Some strategies (nov-
elty, applied implications) are used differently to what might
be expected following the analytical framework.
• The use of quotes from other researchers that are not involved in
the study and the use of self-reference within a quote does not
comply with any strategy currently in the analytical framework.

Reference
Simon, M. (2021, September 22). Baby poop is loaded with microplastics. Wired.
https://www.wired.com/story/baby-­poop-­is-­loaded-­with-­microplastics/
82 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and
indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to
the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence
and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the
permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copy-
right holder.
 CHAPTER 6

Corpus Example: Using an Analytical

Framework to Explore Professional Writing
in Science Journalism

Abstract This chapter presents the analysis of a corpus of 38 professional

science journalism articles. The analysis is quantitative, that is, it shows
how often each strategy is used in the corpus, and instrumental, which
means that an interpretation of the texts is offered through the application
of the analytical framework for popularization discourse. In this chapter,
we include the percentage of use and an example of the use of each strat-
egy. The median of strategy use is 20 (out of a possible 34), with a high
score of 27 strategies and a low score of 10 strategies. Some strategies are
used in (nearly) every text, such as presenting results/conclusions or
hyperlinks, whereas other strategies are used hardly at all, such as refer-
ences to popular lore and beliefs, and popular culture. Overall, strate-
gies in the themes Subject Matter, Tailoring Information to the Reader,
and Stance are used most, with the aggregated scores for the themes
Credibility and Engagement being much lower. This analysis provides
insights into how popularization strategies are used in a corpus of science
journalism writing as a whole.

Keywords Science journalism • Corpus • Theme • Strategy •

Quantitative text analysis

© The Author(s) 2023 83

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84 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

6.1  Introduction
This chapter presents the results of using the analytical framework for pop-
ularization discourse to analyze a corpus of professional science journal-
isms texts. The analysis is quantitative and instrumental. It investigates
how often each strategy is used in the texts, aiming to provide insights into
the broader genre of science journalism (instead of at the level of the indi-
vidual text, such as in Chap. 5), to answer questions about how profes-
sional science journalists communicate research findings to lay audiences.
The goal of the chapter is to show what kinds of results are generated
when analyzing a corpus of texts using the framework in this manner. The
chapter also includes examples from the professional texts for each strategy.

6.2  Corpus Construction
This corpus consists of 38 science journalism texts. These texts are written
by professional science journalists and published online. The texts cover a
range of topics, from immunotherapy in llamas and bioengineered catnip
to digital dementia and COVID-19 vaccines, and a range of disciplinary
fields, such as biology, archeology, musicology, and technology. They also
present a range of popularization subtypes: some articles presented insights
from one academic publication, while others took multiple studies into
consideration, showed an overview of current knowledge, or presented
science news. This corpus was constructed for the validation phase of the
development of our framework, using Berezow’s (Berezow, 2017) info-
graphic on the quality of science reporting (see Chap. 4). This infographic
arranges science reporting on the axes of evidence-based reporting and
compellingness of content. For this corpus, texts were used from outlets
from all represented quadrants except the quadrant that scores poor on
both criteria.
We visited the websites of each of the outlets and downloaded the most
recent article from the science section, or if there was none, the general
website. In some cases, the most recent article was not an article about
research findings, but, for example, an interview. In that case, we down-
loaded the five most recent articles and chose the one that was most com-
pliant with the genre of science journalism. All texts in the corpus are
written by science journalists, bar one text about holograms, which is writ-
ten by the researchers themselves and therefore technically seen as a form
of science communication (see Dahiya, 2021).
 6 CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK TO EXPLORE… 85

6.3  Analysis
We analyzed this corpus using our analytical framework. For each text, we
performed an analysis such as the one that was shown in Chap. 5. We then
tallied scores for each of the 34 strategies and for each text. In Fig. 6.1, we
present a quantitative overview of the number of strategies that are used
in each text. The figure shows that although all texts used a variety of
strategies, none use (near) all of them.
In Table 6.1, for all 34 strategies, we present the percentage of texts
using each strategy. We also show, for all five themes, an aggregated per-
centage for the number of strategies that are used per theme. In Table 6.2
we present one or multiple examples for the use of each strategy. We fur-
thermore included an overview of additional strategies that are also used
in the example shown (since, as discussed in Chap. 5, multiple strategies
can be used within one phrase or sentence), to illustrate the complexity of
the texts in the corpus and, therefore, the complexity of their analysis. If
context is added for the example to make sense, the strategy under discus-
sion is underlined. Hyperlinks are displayed in blue.

Fig. 6.1 Number of strategies (out of 34 strategies) used per text in a corpus of
professional science journalism texts
86 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

Table 6.1 Quantitative results from the corpus analysis of professional science
journalism texts
Theme Aggregated Strategy Percentage of
percentage of texts using the
strategies strategy

Subject 75.9% Lede 65.8%

Matter Contextualization 81.6%
Announcing the new finding or new 89.5%
contribution to the discipline
Novelty 47.4%
Describing the method 71.1%
Presenting results/conclusions 100%
Tailoring 80.3% Applied implications 71.1%
Information Explanations 71.1%
to the Reader Imagery 92.1%
Examples from daily life 47.4%
Hyperlinks 100%
Visuals 100%
Credibility 42.8% Academic implications 28.9%
Mentioning more research is 42.1%
necessary/next step in research
Contribution to research 39.5%
Mention of statistics 42.1%
Giving the researcher an active 84.2%
voice/direct quotes from the researcher
Lexical mention of the original research 78.9%
Additional sources 71.1%
Link to the academic publication 60.5%
Direct quote from the academic 7.9%
publication
In-text specification of a source 15.8%
Stance 81.6% Opinion 63.2%
Stance markers 100%
Engagement 36.6% Titles/subheadings 100%
References to popular lore and beliefs, 7.9%
and popular culture
Self-disclosure of the author’s public or 5.3%
personal life
Inclusive pronouns 71.1%
References to the reader 39.5%
Giving the non-researcher an active 23.7%
voice/direct quotes from the
non-researcher
Features of conversational discourse 42.1%
Questions 44.7%
Humor 10.5%
Explicit self-reference 21.1%
Table 6.2 Qualitative results from the corpus analysis of professional science journalism texts
Theme Strategy Examples of strategy use Other strategies also used in the example
6

Subject Lede New music download patterns appear to closely resemble epidemic curves for infectious disease, Presenting results/conclusions, stance
Matter study finds (Geddes, 2021). markers, imagery, announcing the new finding
or new contribution to the discipline

Boeing’s Starliner astronaut taxi may not get off the ground this year after all (Wall, 2021). Stance markers, presenting results/conclusions
Contextualization We’re used to grabbing sodas from vending machines, but what about steaks? Imagine if a vending Inclusive pronouns, questions, examples from
machine could deliver fresh produce and other food the way that a conventional grocery store or daily life, imagery, reference to the reader,
bodega does. That way, you could quickly grab the one specific item you need without going stance markers
indoors or interacting with other people during the pandemic (Hu, 2021).
For half a billion years or so, our ancestors sprouted tails. As fish, they used their tails to swim Features of conversational discourse,
through the Cambrian seas. Much later, when they evolved into primates, their tails helped them inclusive pronouns, imagery, hyperlink, stance
stay balanced as they raced from branch to branch through Eocene jungles. But then, roughly 25 markers
million years ago, the tails disappeared (Zimmer, 2021).
Announcing the new Flowers can sense when a bumblebee is nearby and release a burst of perfume in order to attract Presenting results/conclusions, imagery,
finding or new more insects, scientists have found (Pinkstone, 2021). stance markers
contribution to the
discipline

Novelty Previous research had identified two ancestor groups: hunter-gatherers who lived in Japan 15,000 Stance markers, additional sources, hyperlinks
years ago (and possibly much earlier) and farmers who migrated from East Asia starting around 900
B.C.E., reports Harry Baker for Live Science (Gershon, 2021).
Describing the method To see what effect this shortened protein might have, Xia and his colleagues used the gene editor Stance markers, lexical mentions
CRISPR to make mice with a shortened version of TBXT (Vogel, 2021).
To avoid damaging local ecosystems, Rogers and his colleagues fabricated microfliers from Lexical mentions, imagery
environmentally friendly polymers, conductors and circuit chips that degrade over time. After
collecting and transmitting data about their landing zone, the fallen fliers disintegrate and melt into
goo, which then washes away. This is better for the environment—and more convenient for
researchers (Ogasa, 2021).
Presenting results/ The new modeling shows a 3% chance that Lake Powell, which is located on the Colorado River Stance markers, mention of statistics
conclusions from northern Arizona to southern Utah, could drop below the minimum level needed to allow the
lake’s Glen Canyon Dam to generate hydroelectricity next year. In 2023, the chance of a shutdown
grows to 34%, according to the projection (Kann, 2021).
CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK TO EXPLORE…

The researchers found that the builders of the ancient city did plenty of excavating—even quarrying Mention of statistics
bedrock for other construction sites in town—and that 65% of today’s urban features are built on
87

the same alignments as Teotihuacán. The team also found that 205 features from the ancient city
have been destroyed by mining operations since 2015 (Schultz, 2021).

(continued)
Table 6.2 (continued)
88

Theme Strategy Examples of strategy use Other strategies also used in the example

Tailoring Applied implications Combined, these decisions will likely put a hard cap on the number of coal plants built and N/A
Informa significantly limit the future export market for coal (Timmer, 2021).
tion to the To avoid the negative impacts of technology, many choose to reassess their relationship with it and Hyperlinks, imagery, explanations
Reader gradually reduce the time they spend using electronic devices. This awareness of living
tech-dependent lifestyles and intention for better tech-life balances encourage people to undergo a
“digital detox,” the voluntary and intentional abstinence from technology use (Delgado, 2021).
Explanations The other explanation points to stellar explosions called supernovas. When large stars run out of Imagery, stance markers, novelty, hyperlinks
fuel and erupt in these violent supernovas, they can send nearby particles blasting away at near-light
speed. These highly energetic particles, called cosmic rays, may then collide with other particles
sprinkled through the gassy hinterland between stars, producing gamma-rays (Specktor, 2021).
Imagery Next to other airway-loving viruses, such as the ones that cause the flu and common colds, SARS-CoV-2 Presenting results/conclusions, stance
can be a bit of an oddball. It lopes almost indiscriminately throughout the body, invading a plethora of markers, hyperlinks
F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

tissues; it winds up certain immune responses, while dialing others down, sparking bouts of inflammation
that can afflict everything from brain to toe. COVID symptom lists that at first focused on the virus’s
ground zero—the respiratory tract—eventually ballooned to include nausea, vomiting, changes in mental
status, and chest pain (Wu, 2021).
Examples from daily What runs through your mind when you’re deciding which toilet paper to buy? Sale price, roll size, Imagery, references to the reader, questions,
life pitiful single-ply or luxurious triple? Climate change might not make your list of considerations, but stance markers, contextualization
it should: … (Stuart-Ulin, 2021).
Hyperlinks COVID-19 vaccines are still largely keeping people out of the hospital in the United States, studies Presenting results/conclusions
show (Garcia de Jesús, 2021).
The studies that have tackled the task of measuring real-world vaccine effectiveness against all Describing the method, explicit self-
symptomatic disease may not always count the same COVID-19 symptoms, experts told me, reference, in-text specification of a source,
potentially inflating or deflating numbers (Wu, 2021). stance markers
 Visuals Describing the method

This is one of the visuals of Fifi the Llama used in the text about immune therapy on llamas (Gill, 2021).
Image credit: University of Reading.
Credibility Academic implications Automated tools likely still won’t be used in the Decadal Surveys for some years to come. But if the N/A
survey committee does decide to integrate AI into its process, that will represent a new way for
scientists to reach agreement on their own goals (Woodall, 2021).
Mentioning more “[I]t’s an exciting field of research, though still in its infancy,” writes Kleinewietfeld, adding “more Stance markers, lexical mention, giving the
research is studies [are] needed to understand the complex interactions of nutrition, microbiome and researcher an active voice, applied implication
necessary/next step in immunity in the context of cancer. Thus, future studies will show if new findings could indeed lead
research to novel treatment options for patients” (Fessi, 2021).
Contribution to “We’ve been able to see these clouds for decades, but we never knew their true shape, depth, or Lexical mention, hyperlink, in-text
research thickness,” Zucker, the lead author on a separate study that detailed the work set to be published in specification of a source, stance markers,
the Astrophysical Journal, said in the press release. “We also were unsure how far away the clouds mention of statistics
were. Now we know where they lie with only 1 percent uncertainty, allowing us to discern this void
between them” (Lea, 2021).
Mention of statistics A previous, eye-popping ambition to grab 1% of emissions by 2025 is no longer on the cards Imagery, presenting results/conclusions
(Removing carbon dioxide , 2021).
6 CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK TO EXPLORE…

Overall, 80% of bird species studied showed changes in their counts in urban areas in the 2020 time Presenting results/conclusions
frame–with most of them increasing on the order of 10% or 20% (Neuman, 2021).
89

(continued)
Table 6.2 (continued)
90

Theme Strategy Examples of strategy use Other strategies also used in the example

Giving the researcher They will also need to look at whether nepetalactone acts as a cat attractant as well as an insect mentioning more research is necessary,
an active voice/direct repellent. “If you are walking around with this molecule on you, will there be no mosquitoes, but reference to the reader, example from daily
quotes from the all the neighbourhood cats chasing you around? To be honest, I don’t know,” says Martin. “That’s life, questions, lexical mention, stance
researcher certainly something we’re going to have to investigate” (Le Page, 2021). markers. [I and we in this example refer to the
researcher(s) and therefore are not coded as
explicit self-reference or inclusive
pronouns]

Lexical mention of the “So, you have this reserve,” says John Wherry, an immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania Giving the researcher an active voice,
original research Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia, who led the study. “Circulating antibodies may be references to the reader, presenting
declining, but your immune system is capable of jumping into action once again” (Dolgin, 2021). results/conclusions

Additional sources Earlier this month, she was part of a team of researchers that examined breakthrough infections Hyperlink, stance markers, imagery
among health-care workers in San Diego. They noted that the drop in vaccine effectiveness from
F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

June to July was likely caused by waning immunity and the emergence of the Delta variant
(McKeever, 2021).
Link to the academic The new laser is detailed in Nature Nanotechnology (Dumé, 2021). Hyperlink
publication
S-E Kim et al, Nat. Mater., 2021, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-­021-­01075-­3 (Addison, Hyperlink
2021).
Direct quote from the Past studies have shown that rodents display strong neurophysiological responses to LSD: They Novelty, stance markers
academic publication tend to move less and start rapidly twitching their heads, which is a “behavioral signature of a
hallucination-like state in rodents,” the researchers noted (Johnson, 2021).
In-text specification of “Potassium is a moderately volatile element (mimicking the behavior of highly volatile elements), Giving the researcher an active voice,
a source but it is not too volatile to get completely lost,” wrote Kun Wang, a planetary scientist at explanation, stance markers, lexical mention
Washington University and one of the authors of the study, in an email to TIME (Kluger, 2021).
Stance Opinion In August, this evidence prompted the FDA to approve use of a booster dose for certain Hyperlink, stance markers, example from daily
immunocompromised populations. “To the extent that a third shot gets them a little bit closer to life, mention of statistics, giving the
what we see in healthy people after their second shot, I think that’s worth doing,” Bhattacharya researcher an active voice, lexical mention.
says. “That’s the easy one” (McKeever, 2021). [We and I refer to the researcher(s) and
therefore are not coded as inclusive pronouns
or explicit self-reference]
Stance markers China in theory could develop an orbital nuclear weapon that could dodge America’s mainly Imagery, presenting results/conclusions
north-facing strategic radars (Axe, 2021).
Forests are, of course, good for the planet (Jones, 2021). Applied implication
Engagement Titles/subheadings We can now bio-engineer catnip instead of extracting it from plants (Le Page, 2021). Inclusive pronouns, presenting
results/conclusions

Birds thrived where humans feared to tread during the pandemic, scientists say (Neuman, 2021). Presenting results/conclusions, stance marker
References to popular While we don’t expect to be delivering a full Star Trek holodeck experience in the near future, we’re mentioning more research is necessary, stance
lore and beliefs, and already boldly going in new directions to add additional functions to the system (Dahiya, 2021). markers. [This article is written by researchers;
popular culture therefore ‘we’ refers to the researchers and is not
coded as an inclusive pronoun]
Self-disclosure of the For me, the pandemic anxiety that dominated much of 2020 is slow to fade, and the idea of getting Imagery
author’s public or COVID-19 still feels far worse than getting the flu, even if the symptoms were identical (Wu, 2021).
personal life

Inclusive pronouns Pizza with leftover olive leaves. Bread doctored with rice waste. Banana peels turned into snacks. These Contextualization, examples from daily life,
are examples of a trend called upcycled food — and soon they are coming to our plates (Zaraska, 2021). imagery, hyperlink

References to the Pop music is often described as catchy, but it seems you really can infect friends with your music Example from daily life, contextualization,
reader taste (Geddes, 2021). presenting results/conclusions, stance
markers

Giving the Young climate activists said feelings of anxiety over the climate were now widespread among today’s Examples from daily life, imagery, stance
non-researcher an youth. Mitzi Tan, 23, from the Philippines, said: “I grew up being afraid of drowning in my own markers, inclusive pronouns, applied
active voice/direct bedroom. Society tells me that this anxiety is an irrational fear that needs to be overcome, one that implication. [I is a reference to the active voice,
quotes from the meditation and healthy coping mechanisms will ‘fix’. At its root, our climate anxiety comes from not to the writer, and is therefore not coded as
non-researcher this deep-set feeling of betrayal because of government inaction. To truly address our growing an explicit self-reference]
climate anxiety, we need justice” (Harvey, 2021).
Features of To understand that interaction, researchers had to, unfortunately, wait for a decent number of Presenting results/conclusions, stance
conversational people to get sick–to observe the virus screwing with us in real time (Wu, 2021). markers, inclusive pronouns, imagery
discourse But it’s not as easy as snapping your fingers and having everything work out (Koerth, 2021). Reference to the reader
Questions For example, why did large rocks tend to create tables while smaller rocks simply sunk down into Contextualization, stance markers
the ice below? (Gammon, 2021).
Disgusting? Not necessarily (Zaraska, 2021). Features of conversational discourse
Humor Dino-mite find! Bizarre armoured spike fossil belongs to a new specifies of dinosaur that lives in Title, stance markers, presenting
Africa 168 MILLION years ago and was ‘unlike anything else in the animal kingdom’ (Morrison, results/conclusions, features of conversational
2021). discourse, giving the researcher an active voice

Explicit self-reference My colleagues and I working in the University of Glasgow’s bendable electronics and sensing Lexical mention, hyperlink, link to the
6 CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK TO EXPLORE…

technologies research group have now developed a system of holograms of people using academic publication, announcing the new
“aerohaptics”, creating feelings of touch with jets of air (Dahiya, 2021). finding or new contribution to the discipline,
presenting results/conclusions, explanation
91

As I’ve previously reported, grasslands store vast amounts of carbon — most of which is below Hyperlink, stance markers, presenting
ground — and provide homes for countless species (Jones, 2021). results/conclusions
92 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

6.4  Interpretation
After using the framework to analyze these 38 science journalism texts, the
following insights can be gathered about the corpus. The average number
of strategies that was used is 18.7 strategies per text, and the median is 20
strategies with the lowest score of 10 strategies and the highest of 27 strat-
egies. This also means that no single text uses all available strategies.
Several strategies appear in every single text in the corpus (100%): pre-
senting results/conclusions, hyperlinks, visuals, stance markers, and
titles/subheadings. Other strategies are used in almost all texts (75–99%):
contextualization, announcing the new finding or new contribution
to the discipline, and imagery. In most texts (50–75%), the following
strategies are used: lede, describing the method, applied implications,
explanations, giving the researcher an active voice, lexical mention of
the original research, additional sources, and inclusive pronouns. A
few strategies are only used in some texts (25–50%): novelty, examples
from daily life, academic implications, mentioning more research is
necessary/next step in research, contribution to research, mention of
statistics, link to the academic publication, opinion, references to the
reader, features of conversational discourse, and questions. And lastly,
some strategies are hardly used at all (0–25%): direct quote from the
academic publication, in-text specification of a source, references to
popular lore and beliefs, and popular culture, self-disclosure of the
author’s public or personal life, giving the non-researcher an active
voice, humor, and explicit self-reference.
Looking at the use of strategies per theme, the themes Subject Matter
(75.9%), Tailoring Information to the Reader (80.3%), and Stance (81.6%)
are used most. Or, to explain it differently, the theme Subject Matter con-
tains six strategies that could be used across 38 texts, which means that the
corpus enables 228 ‘options’ to use Subject Matter strategies, of which 173,
or 75.9%, are in fact used. The aggregated scores for Credibility (42.8%)
and Engagement (36.6%) are much lower. These aggregated results per
theme of course do gloss over differences on the level of strategies. To give
an example, for the theme Stance, stance markers are used in 100% of the
texts but opinions are used in ‘only’ 63.2% of the texts—which then leads to
an aggregated score of 81.6%. Especially in the themes Credibility and
Engagement, there are big differences in the use of strategies, with some
strategies being used across all texts (titles) while others are used hardly to
not at all (self-disclosure of the author’s public or personal life).
Although we did not undertake this analysis to contrast professional
journalism writing with student science journalism writing, anecdotally we
 6 CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK TO EXPLORE… 93

can share that the use of strategies by professionals is much denser than is
the case in the corpus that liberal education students wrote, which is dis-
cussed in Chap. 7. This might imply that professional writers have a better
grasp on language use and are better equipped to utilize the options pro-
vided in the form of different strategies. The use of strategies also shows
much more overlap, that is, multiple strategies being used at the same
time. A visual representation of this overlap in strategies and richness in
the use of strategies can be seen in the text that is discussed in Chap. 5,
which was also part of the corpus discussed in this chapter.
When comparing the results of the analysis with Berezow’s (2017)
infographic on quality of science reporting, we see that those texts that are
part of the quadrant from ‘evidence-based reporting’/‘almost always
compelling science content’ are more academic in register—especially the
texts from the websites of Nature and Science—which is particularly visi-
ble through generally lower scores on the theme Engagement.
Furthermore, many differences are visible between individual texts such as
the length of texts, the number of strategies used within them, and the
themes that are used the most.
A next step, which was not performed for this corpus, would be to
analyze the specific use of each strategy. In other words, if a writer uses, for
example, the strategy reference to the reader, what does that look like
in the text? This step is performed for the corpus of student writing that is
discussed in Chap. 7.

What You Have Learned in This Chapter

• This chapter presented the analysis of a corpus of science jour-
nalism texts written by professional science journalists.
• Science journalism articles from a whole range of science jour-
nalism outlets (based on a scale of being evidence-based and
showing compelling science content) and from a spectrum of
different topics/research fields were used.
• The analysis was quantitative and instrumental, meaning the
focus was on how often each strategy is used in the text.
• Information is given about the overall number of strategies
that were used in texts, on the percentage of use of each indi-
vidual strategy, and about aggregated scores per theme.
• Aggregated scores for the themes Subject Matter, Tailoring
Information to the Reader, and Stance are generally high, with
the themes Credibility and Engagement scoring much lower.
94 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

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Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and
indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to
the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence
and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the
permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copy-
right holder.
 CHAPTER 7

Corpus Example: Using an Analytical

Framework to Characterize First-Year
Undergraduate Newspaper Article Writing

Abstract This chapter details the analysis of a corpus of 140 newspaper arti-
cles based on a single academic source text written by first-year undergraduate
liberal education students. The analysis is both quantitative and representa-
tional, and qualitative and inductive. It is quantitative in the sense that data
were produced about the number of times each strategy was employed. In a
second, qualitative step, the way the student writers employ each strategy is
determined and categorized. In the original analysis, all 34 strategies in the
analytical framework were analyzed, but to keep this chapter readable, we
only present the results for one strategy out of each theme: describing the
method from Subject Matter, applied implications from Tailoring Information
to the Reader, mention of statistics from Credibility, stance markers from
Stance, and references to the reader from Engagement. To conclude this
chapter, we discuss the general insights that can be drawn from this analysis
and consider the use of the analytical framework in didactic settings.

Keywords Science journalism • Student writing • Text analysis •

Educational settings

7.1  Introduction
This chapter presents the results of the analysis of a corpus of newspaper
articles written by undergraduate students. This analysis is both quantita-
tive and representational as well as qualitative and inductive: it shows how

© The Author(s) 2023 99

F. M. Sterk, M. M. van Goch, Re-presenting Research,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28174-7_7
100 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

often each strategy was used, and in what way each strategy was used. The
goal of the chapter is to give insight into what kinds of results can be
expected when using the framework to analyze a corpus of texts in-depth.
Furthermore, because this corpus was written by first-year students, this
chapter shows that the framework can also be used in didactic or educa-
tional settings. For readability, we have limited the presentation of results
to the analysis of five strategies.

7.2  Corpus Construction
This corpus consists of 140 newspaper articles written by first-year under-
graduate liberal education students. These students were enrolled in the
program Liberal Arts and Sciences at Utrecht University, The Netherlands;
students pick their own specialization and receive training in interdisci-
plinary research skills to become so-called disciplined interdisciplinarians.
Students were asked to write a newspaper article in the first month of their
first year of training, at a point in the program when they have not declared
a disciplinary specialization. Although the core curriculum of Liberal Arts
and Sciences places a strong focus on academic writing, no specific train-
ing in popularization writing is offered until the final year of the program.
As the program offers education in Dutch, all texts were written in Dutch
and examples in this chapter have been translated into English for
readability.
Whereas the corpus in Chap. 6 is based on a diverse range of source
texts, topics, and disciplines, this corpus is based on a single source text:
“#Sleepyteens: Social media use in adolescence is associated with poor
sleep quality, anxiety, depression and low self-esteem” (Woods & Scott,
2016). This academic text details the effects of social media use, especially
during the night, on the lives of teens. Students were asked to read this
academic text before class. In class, students were given one hour to write
a newspaper article of 400 words about the academic paper. The newspa-
per article had to be suitable to publish in the science section of a quality
Dutch newspaper. The target audience of the text consisted of a general
audience that was interested in science, but did not necessarily receive
higher education training. Students were told that the goal of their text
was to retain the readers’ interest and make sure that the presented insights
were understandable. Part of the resulting corpus was used in the con-
struction phase in the development of the analytical framework (see
Chap. 4).
 7 CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK… 101

7.3  Analysis
The analysis was conducted in two steps. In the first step, each individual
text was analyzed for the occurrence of strategies, using the analytical
framework. This led to a type of analysis and outcome that was also shown
in Chap. 5. For each text, all occurrences were coded in NVivo. This led
to quantitative and representational data; in other words, for each strategy,
a percentage could be given to denote how many texts made use of it. This
data is visualized in tables (see Table 7.1 through 7.5) in which the num-
ber of texts that used a strategy is shown as well as the number of refer-
ences, or in other words how many times that strategy was used in how
many texts. Because a single strategy can be employed multiple times in
one text, the number of references can be higher than the total number
of texts.
The second step was qualitative and inductive; per strategy, all coded
text was gathered in NVivo and then coded again in subforms (or sub-
codes). In other words, the way each strategy was used in this specific
corpus was characterized. For example, what does the use of the strategy
humor look like? How do students use statistics? By thematizing and
describing how students employed the strategies, this step provided us
with insights into the way first-year liberal education students write popu-
larization texts. The insights the analysis produced about student popular-
ization writing skills and consequences for setting up an educational
program in popularization writing are detailed in Sterk et al. (2022). Here,
on the other hand, we will focus on the textual side of the analysis and
show the different ways in which strategies were employed within this
corpus. With this information, Tables 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, and 7.5 were
expanded with the number of texts and references for each specific use of
a strategy. For reasons of readability and succinctness, in this chapter we
only reproduce the results for five of the 34 strategies—one from each
theme: describing the method, applied implications, mention of statis-
tics, stance markers, and references to the reader. The other strategies
were analyzed in the same manner but are not reported on in this chapter.
If context is added for clarity in the example text, the strategy under dis-
cussion is underlined.
102 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

7.4  Analysis Example 1: Describing the Method

The results of the analysis for the Subject Matter strategy describing the
method are shown in Table 7.1. Seventy-one percent of students used
describing the method to add information about the methodology of the
academic text in their newspaper article. For this strategy, five subcodes
were found: participants, research question/goal/hypothesis, measured
constructs, materials, and mentions of the original research.
The level of specificity varies, with some students re-presenting the meth-
odological framework word for word and others writing a summarized
statement. Students pick and mix information from the academic text; in
most texts, multiple subcodes are represented. The next example combines
statements about the participants, the research question, and the materials:

(1) The research into the influence of social media among teens [research
question] was conducted in Scotland. 467 Scottish pupils between 11
and 17 years old took part [participants]. In class and online, ques-
tionnaires were administered that teens needed to fill in [materials].

The subcode that appears most often is that of participants, who are men-
tioned in varying degrees of specificity. The academic article explains that

(2) Participants were 467 Scottish secondary school pupils aged 11–17
years. (Woods & Scott, 2016, p. 43)

Most student texts mention that 467 Scottish teens took part in the
study, some add they were aged 11–17, others merely mention that ‘about
500 participants’ took part:

Table 7.1 Results for describing the method

Number of texts Number of references

Describing the method 100 153

Participants 76 86
Research question/goal/hypothesis 68 85
Measured constructs 37 39
Materials 32 43
Mentions of the original research 16 19
 7 CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK… 103

(3) The research was conducted with students from secondary school
in Scotland, they were in the age group of 11 to 17 years old.

The research question and hypothesis appear in student texts in multi-

ple different forms. In the academic text, the research question is posed in
the following way:

(4) The present study makes a novel contribution to the literature by

examining how overall vs. night-time specific social media use and
emotional investment in social media relate to sleep quality, anxi-
ety, depression and self-esteem in adolescents. (Woods & Scott,
2016, p. 41)

Some student writers stick close to the academic text and mention
night-time versus overall social media use or sleep quality, anxiety, depres-
sion, and self-esteem when talking about the research question. Others
represent these statements in a more abstract manner and mention that
research is being done into the effects of social media. Generally, all texts
that mention the research question include a mention about social media.
In the following example, the same constructs are mentioned as in the
academic text, but the research question is reformulated to be easier to
understand:

(5) A connection is sought between the use of social media and the
quality of sleep, and with depression, anxiety, and self-esteem. The
focus is specifically on the influence of the use of social media right
before going to bed.

In the academic text, the measured constructs mentioned are poor

sleep quality, anxiety, depression, self-esteem, emotional investment in
social media, overall social media use, and night-time-specific social media
use (Woods & Scott, 2016). Each construct has its own subheading, mak-
ing it easily discoverable by the reader, and a short paragraph of text that
explains the materials used to measure these constructs. In the student
corpus, some writers mention all constructs, yet more often, only a selec-
tion of constructs is disclosed:

(6) These students were asked about their sleep quality, their mental
health (with regards to depression and anxiety), their self-esteem,
104 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

how much social media they use and how much of this is at night,
and how big their emotional investment in social media is.

In the academic text, the references made to materials center around

the use of a questionnaire:

(7) Pupils in 1st to 4th year (aged 11–15) completed questionnaires in

class, either in pencil-and-paper form or online, hosted by­
qualtrics.com. … Pupils in 5th and 6th year (aged 15–17) com-
pleted the online questionnaire hosted by qualtrics.com outside of
class, via a link circulated by the school. (Woods & Scott,
2016, p. 43)

In the student writing, some texts only mention the questionnaire; oth-
ers add that it was conducted partially online and partially in class, or men-
tion the type of scale that was used to measure outcomes, or that consent
was obtained:

(8) In class as well as online, questionnaires were provided that teens

needed to fill in.

Comments about the methodology are a logical place to not only show
how but also by whom the research was conducted. Mentions include the
authors of the paper, the location of the research, and the title of the
paper. These types of mentions were also coded in another strategy: lexi-
cal mention of the original research.

(9) The research ‘#Sleepyteens: Social media use in adolescence is asso-

ciated with poor sleep quality, anxiety, depression and low self-
esteem’ investigates the influences of social media of teens on the
sleep quality and psychological well-being of teens.

7.5  Analysis Example 2: Applied Implications

The results of the analysis for the strategy applied implications, part of the
theme Tailoring Information to the Reader, are shown in Table 7.2. Forty-­
eight percent of students mentioned applied implications of the insights
of the academic text in their newspaper article. Two types of applied impli-
cations are used: implications and calls to action. An implication
 7 CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK… 105

Table 7.2 Results for applied implications

Number of Number of
texts references

Applied implications 67 82
Call to action—analyzed by content 56 62
Conscious choices social media 23 23
No mobile phone 20 21
Conscious choices social media + no mobile phone 8 8
Not further specified 10 10
Call to action—analyzed by referent 56 64
For the reader 20 24
For ‘us’ 13 14
For teens 11 11
No referent 8 8
For parents 3 4
Using self-reference 3 3
Implications 18 21
For teens 11 11
For mental health 4 4
For society 4 4
For parents 2 2

represents the further-reaching consequences of the research topic. A call

to action nudges the reader into taking a certain action needed because of
those implications. In most cases, when a call to action is added, the impli-
cation on which the call to action is based is left implicit in the student
writing.
The first type of applied implication is implications. Implications are
mentioned on the level of teens, mental health, society, and parents,
though never on the level of research because that type of implication is
part of a different strategy: academic implications. In the student corpus,
mentioned implications are about teens, mental health, society, or parents.
Often, information that is presented as a result in the academic source text
is instead represented as an implication in student writing. On the one
hand, this shows that participants stick close to the source text. On the
other hand, this poses a factual misrepresentation of the source text
because it did not specify the information to be an implication.
For teens, the focus is on the potential implications of social media and
the use of smartphones at night, for example on health. For this subcode
106 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

specifically, what is presented as an implication in the student writing is in

fact part of the results in the academic source text.

(10) It is the future, and sometimes the unfortunate future, that this
generation of teens will grow up with constant connectivity and
experience insomnia as being unchangeable.

Implications for mental health similarly feature claims that originate as

results from the research but are re-presented as implications. In the fol-
lowing example, the mental and emotional low point that is mentioned
shows a connection to one of the consequences of social media use that is
discussed in the academic text:

(11) Not only has our physical condition deteriorated because of

intensive and late-night social media use, it also brings us to a
mental and emotional low point.

Implications for society do present implications that are further reach-

ing than the information already presented in the paper. Here, claims are
made about the implications for society at large:

(12) Right now, it is important to do research as a society to learn how

to deal with these consequences. It is important that technology
keeps striving forward, but this should not be at the cost of the
well-being of humans.

Implications for parents show the action that parents can undertake
because of the new information in the academic paper. The difference with
a call to action that is directed at parents (see below) is that a call to action
explicitly and directly speaks to parents to spur them on to take action,
whereas implications do not directly address the parents:

(13) Because of this research they [parents] can warn their brood with
more conviction about the consequences that social media have.

The second type of applied implication is a call to action. Calls to action

can be classified either by content (that is, the action they refer to) or by
referent (that is, the person that needs to take action). In terms of content,
 7 CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK… 107

broadly seen, a call to action can contain either one or two claims that are
both closely connected to the main claim. The first claim is that conscious
choices need to be made about the amount of time spent on social media.
This call to action connects to claims in the results of the academic text
that state teens use a lot of social media, and that this might cause unwanted
consequences. In these calls to action, the reader in general or teens spe-
cifically are addressed and asked to consider the amount of time they spend
on social media:

(14) Use it [social media] the way you like it, but when it has an influ-
ence on wellbeing, it’s sensible to ‘disconnect’ for a while and
enjoy your beautiful experiences without the nasty side-effects of
social media.

The second claim made in calls to action is that readers should not use
a mobile phone late at night or should not take their phone to bed. This
call to action connects more specifically to the claim in the academic paper
that 86% of teens take their smartphone to bed with them:

(15) So just leave your phone downstairs when you go to bed, and it
really doesn’t hurt you to send a little less texts every now
and again.

The third type of call to action combines the two claims about making
conscious choices about social media and leaving mobile phones out of
the bedroom:

(16) That is why it is wise to take a step back from social media. The
most important step is to leave your mobile phone and laptop
downstairs. That way you’re not tempted to use social media at
night. It’s also important that you’re not too invested in
social media.

The fourth subcode contains calls to action that are not further speci-
fied. This subcode contains calls to action in the realm of social media and
phone use that might propose a change on a higher level than the
individual:
108 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

(17) We should think of an alternative to deal with this [social media].

A way that doesn’t negatively impact mental health and the
quality of life.

Students use six different referents in their calls to action: the reader,
us, teens, calls to action where the referent is not specifically addressed,
parents, and self-reference. Referents are mostly teens or people connected
to them, which shows a clear connection to the topic of the research.
A call to action is most often addressed to the reader in general, usually
by using ‘you,’ although imperative verbs sometimes lack a referent. These
are the most direct types of call to action. Although some of these texts are
clearly written with parents or teenagers in mind as the target audiences,
in the 20 texts where ‘you’ is used in the call to action, there is no clear
target audience distinguishable, which makes it difficult to specifically pin
down what type of reader ‘you’ refers to:

(18) So, next time you pick up your phone, or watch another Facebook
video, think twice, and put it away.

A call to action can also use ‘we,’ ‘our,’ and ‘us’ to make an inclusive
group of the author of the text and its readers. This type of referent is used
when the writer wants everyone to commit to the call to action.

(19) Maybe it’s time for us to find a replacement for all the cat videos
and ‘Facebook posts’ and to start reading books again.

Calls to action can also be used to make a claim about the behavior of
teens that needs to change. In these texts, it is clear that teens themselves
are not the target audiences, but that the text is instead written about
teens and aimed at parents or maybe even the general audience.

(20) Teens should not be on social media just before going to bed and
especially not in the middle of the night when they wake up.

Calls to action can also be presented without a specific referent. In this

subcode, more general calls to action can be found that focus on a level
that overarches the individual:

(21) In the current society more awareness about the negative conse-
quences of social media is necessary.
 7 CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK… 109

Similarly, parents can be the referent in the call to action. Although it is

the parents that are spurred into taking action, the action still refers to the
use of mobile phones and social media in teens:

(22) Make sure that your teen limits the use of social media and reduces
it to zero in the evenings. Because of this, teens will lead a health-
ier life with less social and mental problems.

In some cases, the writer uses self-reference in a call to action. In these

cases, the writer shows the reader the desired behavior through self-­
reference (the underlined words in this example are also coded for explicit
self-reference):

(23) To conclude I would like to offer a resort for those people for
whom it’s not too late yet. All these problems originate in attach-
ing too much value in social media. My tip is to be more aware of
the time you spend online. Otherwise, you might be the next
social junkie.

7.6  Analysis Example 3: Mention of Statistics

The results of the analysis for the Credibility strategy mention of statis-
tics are shown in Table 7.3. Thirty-nine percent of students mentioned
statistics in their newspaper article. There are 11 types of statistics that
are used, captured under two main types of statements.
Mentions of statistics appear mostly in percentages, though some-
times they are written out in words. Mentions of statistics are exclusively
used in two types of statements about the topic of the academic source
text: either about issues teens face because of phone/social media use or
about the behavior of teens regarding that phone/social media use.
Although these claims are presented separately, one statistic is often used
in both claims; 97% of teens use social media, which is part of the claim
about behavior of teens but also often added to claims about issues teens
face. Most mentions of statistics (96 out of 106) are directly lifted from
the academic text; in only 10 cases did statistics appear that were added
from other sources.
In claims about issues teens have, five claims can be distinguished that
are all mentioned in the academic text. Three of these statistics are copied
110 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

Table 7.3 Results for mention of statistics

Number of texts Number of references

Mention of statistics 54 109

Issues teens have 29 56
21% depressed 13 14
35% bad sleepers 13 13
47% anxiety 12 12
Not further specified 8 9
25% wake up from phone 5 5
37% loss of sleep through social media 3 3
Behavior of teens 41 50
90% use social media night and day 18 18
97% use social media 13 16
86% sleep with phone 11 11
54% of day on social media 6 6
Not further specified 1 1

out of the first paragraph of the results section in the academic article: 47%
of teens suffer from anxiety, 35% of teens are classified as bad sleepers, and
21% are depressed. This information appears in the academic text in the
following way:

(24) Mean scores and standard deviations for each measure are pre-
sented in Table 1. 97% of participants indicated that they used
social media. 35% of participants were classed as poor sleepers,
with a PSQI score greater than 5… . PSQI scores were positively
skewed, so were transformed—by taking log 10(score + 1)—to
meet normality assumptions for all further analysis. 47% of par-
ticipants were classed as anxious and 21% as depressed, according
to the HADS cut-off score of 8 or above… . (Woods & Scott,
2016, p. 44)

In the popularized texts, the student writers ignore the explanation of

the statistical analysis and reduce the content to simple statistics, which
are used only in the presentation of the results of the study—no other
claims or consequences are drawn from the statistics:
 7 CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK… 111

(25) 467 Scottish pupils were examined in this study. 97% of the pupils
said they use social media. 35% report poor sleep quality. 47% of
the pupils were classified as anxious and 21% as depressed.

Two other mentions of statistics in claims about issues that teens face
are not results from the research itself, but statistics that are mentioned
in the introduction of the academic text and originate in other academic
sources: 37% of teens experience loss of sleep through social media and
25% of teens wake up because of their phone. The 37% statistic is pre-
sented in the academic text as follows:

(26) Concerning social media in particular, Espinoza … surveyed 268

young adolescents and found that 37% reported losing sleep due
to the use of social networking sites. (Woods & Scott, 2016, p. 42)

This statistic is mostly used as part of the strategy presenting

results/conclusions, but can also be found in other parts of the text, for
example as part of the strategy novelty:

(27) A major change in the sleep pattern of youngsters has occurred

with the introduction of social media. Teens sleep less because
they spend more time on their phones when they are already in
their beds. 37% indicate a lack of sleep with chronic fatigue as a
consequence.

The 25% statistic is presented in the following way in the academic text:

(28) A quarter of adolescents’ report sleep interruptions from incom-

ing text messages … and social media alerts are likely to cause
similar sleep disturbances. (Woods & Scott, 2016, p. 42)

This statistic is presented in an almost identical fashion in student

writing:

(29) A quarter of all teens indicate they sometimes wake up from noti-
fications from their phone.
112 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

Some mentions of statistics appear that the student writers added

from other sources (10 out of 106 cases). In some texts, these other
sources are mentioned, but not in all. In seven cases, these statistics are
presented as part of the strategy presenting results/conclusions, in two
cases as part of the strategy novelty and once in a contextualization.
The statistic used in the contextualization is:

(30) Almost one in three Dutch people indicate that they had trouble
sleeping this year.

Here, the statistic is not only used to introduce the topic but also to
connect it to (Dutch) readers.
The second way in which mentions of statistics are used is to make
claims about behavior of teens. Here, four claims are made that are all part
of the academic text: 97% use social media, 90% use social media at night
and in the daytime, 86% sleep with their phone, and 54% of teens’ days are
spent on social media.
The fact that 97% of teens use social media is always included as a
research result and re-presented together with the three statistics about
problems that teens experience, as already described. In fact, the 97% sta-
tistic can already be seen in example (23). It is also presented on its own,
without the statistics about issues teens face:

(31) Out of all the participants in the research, 97% indicated that they
use social media.

The statistic that 90% of teens use social media at night is mentioned
in the opening sentence of the academic paper:

(32) Social media sites—such as Facebook and Twitter—have rapidly

become a central part of young people's lives, with over 90% now
using social media, day and night… . (Woods & Scott, 2016, p. 41)

In the corpus, the statistic is represented as part of other strategies:

seven times as part of novelty, six times as part of contextualization, and
five ties as part of presenting results/conclusions. The information is
used in different ways; some texts mention that social media is used at
night and in the daytime; others re-use the examples that are given of
 7 CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK… 113

social media platforms and merely mention that 90% of teens use social
media. The next example shows the statistic being used as part of nov-
elty to mention that even though the use of social media is a pressing
problem, not a lot of research is conducted into it:

(33) 90% of teens use social media, like Facebook and Twitter. So, it’s
no wonder that teens experience issues and the connection to
social media is quickly made. But until recently, no research was
done, and the connection was not proven yet.

The statistic that 86% of teens sleep with their phone in bed is men-
tioned in the introduction of the academic text, as is the statistic that
teens spend 54% of their day on social media:

(34) Firstly, incoming alerts during the night have the potential to dis-
turb sleep, as 86% of adolescents sleep with their phone in the
bedroom—often under their pillow or in their hand… . (Woods
& Scott, 2016, p. 42)
(35) Previous findings on Internet use in general are certainly relevant
when considering social media use specifically, as young people
spend 54% of their time online using social media… . (Woods &
Scott, 2016, p. 42)

Both mentions of statistics are mainly used as part of the strategy pre-
senting results/conclusions, even though the statistics are part of ear-
lier research and not an actual result of Woods and Scott’s (2016) research.
The 86% statistic is used as part of the strategy novelty twice, and the
54% statistic is used as part of the strategy novelty twice and contextu-
alization once. As part of presenting results/conclusions, it is used in
the following way:

(36) What’s more, the use of social media leads to the expectation that
someone is alert all the time and so teens spend 54% of their time
on social media.

In the next example, the 86% statistic is used as part of the strategy
novelty. Here, the statistic is deployed to introduce the topic, that is, it
is the first piece of information that is mentioned about it:
114 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

(37) Checking your Instagram in the evening? 86% of adolescents

sleep with their phone in their room, under their pillow or in their
hand. In a quarter of teens their sleep is disrupted by incom-
ing messages.

When the statistic is used as part of presenting results/conclusions,

it is used as a supporting argument to underpin the findings from the study:

(38) This [study] showed that the use of social media has a negative
influence on the confidence of adolescents and causes anxiety and
depression. Therefore, the quality of sleep and the hours of sleep
deteriorate, especially with night-time use of social media. The
latter is more common than many people may think; 86% of ado-
lescents sleep with their phone in the bedroom, of which a con-
siderable part sleeps with the phone under their pillow or in
their hand.

Note that in general, when mentions of statistics are used that are part
of earlier research and not an actual result of Woods and Scott’s (2016)
research, in almost all cases they are incorrectly re-presented because stu-
dents treat them as if they are results from the research even though they
are supporting information from previous sources.

7.7  Analysis Example 4: Stance Markers

The results of the analysis for the Stance strategy stance markers are
shown in Table 7.4. Seventy-one percent of student writers use stance
markers in their newspaper article. Stance markers are used throughout
the corpus to comment on the research, its findings, or implications. They
can be used to align with expectations, but also to go against expectations,
or to signal insecurity. They are more often used to contextualize informa-
tion than they are used to exert a value judgment or feelings. There are 14
types of stance markers, about value, order of magnitude, aligning with
expectations, insecurity, knowing for sure, deviating from expectation,
awareness of information, contrast, denominator of time, explanation,
commitment to a statement, signaling a reason, and giving focus.
 7 CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK… 115

Table 7.4 Results for stance markers

Number of texts Number of references

Stance markers 100 200

Value 43 53
Order of magnitude 24 27
Align with expectations 21 23
Insecurity 14 14
Know for sure 14 14
Deviate from expectation 13 15
Awareness of information 12 14
Contrast 11 13
Denominator of time 6 9
Explanation 5 5
Commitment to a statement 6 7
Signal a reason 4 6
Giving focus 4 4

Stance markers such as ‘interesting,’ ‘shocking,’ ‘important,’ ‘crucial,’

‘special,’ ‘essential,’ and ‘ridiculous’ can denote value.

(39) These are serious numbers.

(40) We all spend a ridiculous amount of time check our Instagram feed.

The order of magnitude is made clear through markers like ‘strong,’

‘big,’ ‘massive,’ ‘whopping,’ ‘a lot,’ ‘gigantic,’ and ‘huge.’

(41) In a whopping 35% of this group…

(42) This has a gigantic negative influence.

Statements can align with expectations, and while the expectations

themselves are often not explicitly stated, the alignment of the results
found in the study to those expectations is commented on, by using ‘as
expected,’ ‘it’s not a surprise,’ and ‘indeed.’ Alternatively, comments can
denote a deviation from expectations, signaled by ‘actually’ and
‘what’s more.’
116 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

(43) As expected, a connection was found between the use of social

media and the wellbeing of these students.
(44) All these small research projects have, not totally unsurprisingly,
given the insight that…
(45) It can be concluded that social media actually does have an influ-
ence on sleep deprivation.
(46) What’s more, social media use can also lead to depression, more
stress, and less self-confidence.

Markers of insecurity show that something might be the case, but that
the writer is not sure about it, using the markers ‘would,’ ‘might,’ ‘maybe,’
and ‘possibly.’

(47) That this doesn’t do much harm, is maybe a thought that you
recognize yourself in.
(48) This happens more often than people might think.

Alternatively, if writers know something for sure, they can signal this by
using ‘absolutely,’ ‘clearly,’ and ‘certainly.’

(49) This would certainly have a positive effect on the sleep routines
of students.
(50) The research clearly shows that the value that adolescents attach
to social media contributes more to anxiety, depression, and a low
self-­esteem than the amount of exposure to it does.

The underlying assumption that information is in fact already known or

accepted is denoted using ‘of course.’ These kinds of stance markers
explicate an underlying assumption that information that is being shared
in the text is in fact already known by readers or accepted to be true:

(51) Of course, excessive social media use is a key factor in increasing

sleep deprivation and depression, amongst others, in adolescents.

Contrast can be signaled by using the markers ‘but’ and ‘however.’

(52) What was new in the research, however, was the specific focus on
night-time social media use and emotional investment of teens in
social media.
 7 CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK… 117

(53) That the use of a phone makes it difficult for you to get some
sleep is not a secret, but that is not the only problem.

Denominators of time are used to show something is already happening

or information is already known, using ‘for some time’ or ‘quickly.’

(54) That this can have negative effects, had also been known for
some time.
(55) Add the so-called Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) to that and it
quickly becomes clear that social media has the ability to wreck
your night’s rest.

Stance markers can also be used to signal an explanation through

‘namely,’ ‘after all,’ and ‘then.’

(56) The conclusion then, is: …

(57) It is after all not bad to miss something every now and then.

Sometimes a writer does not want to fully commit to a statement and

will use ‘almost,’ ‘a sort of,’ or ‘seem like.’

(58) If you look at it that way, social media doesn't seem that social.
(59) There is a sort of urge to constantly be available and online.

A reason is signaled by using ‘so.’

(60) So, it comes as no surprise that social media influences the sleep
of these teens.

Giving focus by using ‘especially’ signals that something is mostly true

for a specific situation.

(61) Therefore, the sleep quality and the number of hours of sleep
deteriorate, especially with night-time use of social media.
118 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

7.8  Analysis Example 5: References to the Reader

The results of the analysis for the strategy references to the reader, part
of the theme Engagement, are shown in Table 7.5. Thirty-one percent of
students include references to the reader in their newspaper article.
References to the reader are used for the same type of goal as the strat-
egy inclusive pronouns: giving information or spurring the reader into
taking action. Except in these instances, the references are used to present
readers as part of the interaction, not to point to the writer and the reader
together, as would be the case with inclusive pronouns. References to
the reader consist of seven subtypes, six of which overlap with inclusive
pronouns: taking action, something happens to you/your body, daily
action, direct address of the reader, the writer says that you do something,
the writer says that you might do something, and you as a parent.
The most-used reference to the reader is a reference to spur the
reader into taking action. In 38 of these 43 instances, the text is also coded
as the strategy applied implications. Where inclusive pronouns are used
to signal collective action, references to the reader are used to connect
the action that should be taken by the reader and to make the action more
concrete:

(62) So, next time you pick up your phone, or watch another Facebook
video, think twice, and put it down.

Claims about what happens to readers’ bodies are also made using ref-
erences to the reader. These claims usually show a strong connection to

Table 7.5 Results for references to the reader

Number of texts Number of references

References to the reader 43 200

Taking action 20 43
Something happens to you/your body 10 43
Daily action 10 41
Direct address of the reader 10 23
The writer says you do something 7 17
The writer says you might do something 7 10
You as a parent 4 11
Not further specified 6 12
 7 CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK… 119

results from the paper that are discussed in the text. By mentioning these
results and using references to the reader, the results are made of per-
sonal interest to the reader:

(63) Current research tells us that the time of using social media and
emotional investment are also two important factors. When you
spend time on your phone at night, you absorb a lot of radiation,
and your sleepiness hormone is not produced or produced too
little. Because of this, your sleep rhythm gets out of sync, and you
have more difficulty falling asleep.

Like the use of inclusive pronouns, the use of references to the

reader to describe daily actions is connected to phones or looking at your
phone late at night. All instances are also coded as the strategy examples
from daily life. Here, references to the reader are used to describe how
the daily action or behavior is performed by the reader:

(64) At night before going to bed, you must check your phone. That
phone then doubles as an alarm clock, so you conveniently place
it next to your head when you go to sleep. And the notifications
that appear just before you fall asleep? Ah well, let’s have a look.

Although all instances in the strategy contain some form of a reference

to the reader, only a direct address of the reader explicitly addresses the
reader of the text and no one else. In 11 instances, in Dutch ‘u’ or ‘uw’ is
used, which are politeness forms for second-person pronouns. The use of
‘u’ and ’uw’ enhances the idea of the reader being spoken to directly. Also
note that Dutch has two forms for you: ‘je’ and ‘jij.’ ‘Je’ is unstressed and
can also be used to refer to people in general. In the use of ‘jij,’ the refer-
ent is stressed and used to mean one specific person; in this context that is
the reader of the text. This has implications for the coding of this corpus,
as references using ‘jij’ can be seen as a direct address of the reader, whereas
references using ‘je’ are not (and both had to be translated to ‘you’ in the
examples, inconveniently). Most instances of a direct address are com-
bined with a question to draw the attention of the reader; these questions
often ask if a situation that is described in the text is also applicable for or
familiar to the reader.
120 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

(65) Did you miss a Facebook or an Instagram post and are you sud-
denly not in the loop anymore? Do you have trouble sleeping?
Are you experiencing a lot of stress?

The writer can also tell readers that the readers are doing something.
Here, the writer describes a certain action that is connected to the reader
by referencing them:

(66) You used to compare yourself with the people you knew and
maybe two idols. Now you constantly see the best of the best
because those people are of course extra popular on social media.

In other cases, the writer does not assume the reader to do something,
instead adding a stance marker of doubt such as ‘maybe’ or ‘might.’
When doubt is used in combination with a reference to the reader, it
introduces the possibility of the one, specific reader not performing the
action. As a consequence of using a marker signaling doubt, claims can be
a bit bolder without offending the reader.

(67) You most probably recognize FOMO in yourself or in someone

around you.

Student writers use references to the reader specifically to address the

reader in their role as parents. As the academic text is about sleep depriva-
tion and depression in teens, some writers have specifically addressed their
text to parents of those teens. When using inclusive pronouns, the writer
and parents form a shared group, but when references to the reader are
used, they function to specifically make it clear to the reader that they are
addressed in their role as a parent:

(68) You might recognize it as a parent, your child says he’s going to bed
at 23:00, but when you quickly go to the bathroom at 1:00, you see
the lights in his room are still on.
 7 CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK… 121

7.9  Interpretation
For a more comprehensive overview of the insights that were garnered
about the student writing in this corpus of first-year undergraduate texts,
see Sterk et al. (2022), in which the use of all 34 strategies is briefly dis-
cussed and lessons for educational practice are drawn from the overarch-
ing insights that were produced in this analysis. In this chapter we have
shown how the framework can be used in an educational setting to analyze
student writing. For five strategies, we have shown how often first-year
undergraduate students use the strategies in the framework in their news-
paper articles, and in what way these strategies are used. As can be seen
from the five strategies that are discussed in this chapter, there are specific
ways in which student writers use each strategy. This means that there is
enough similarity between the different texts in the corpus to categorize
and generalize the way in which each strategy is being used. Each dis-
cussed strategy was used in multiple ways, or in other words, contains
subcodes. This implies that there is no strict single way of using these
strategies. For almost every strategy, outliers were found. This means that
although these instances do adhere to the strategy as such, the specific
framing of the strategy is not used multiple times. It should be noted that
there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to use strategies; this analysis was not
normative in nature.
Through the analysis of five themes, interrelations between strategies
are already becoming visible. This can be seen, for example, in the use of
lexical mention of the original research in describing the method or
the mention of statistics as part of novelty, contextualization, and pre-
senting results/conclusions. These interrelations become even clearer
when looking at the use of all 34 strategies. This implies that although
strategies can be analyzed individually, they cannot be pulled apart com-
pletely. This is a consequence of the occurrence of overlapping strategies
and the allowance within the framework of overlapping coding.
A possible future step is to compare the analytic outcomes from this
specific corpus to those of other corpora. For example, this corpus could
be compared to a corpus constructed from texts from students from
another research field, to study the influence of disciplinary perspectives
on science writing. Or the current corpus could be compared to a corpus
122 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

of texts about the same academic texts, and written by the same students,
but later in time, for example at the end of their undergraduate studies.
This could give insight into how the use of strategies in science writing
develops over time. It could also be compared to a corpus of texts written
by professional science journalists, to study the differences between those
who are professionally trained to write and those who are not.

What You Have Learned in This Chapter

• This chapter presents the analysis of a corpus of 140 newspaper
articles based on a single academic source text written by first-­
year undergraduate liberal education students.
• For five strategies—describing the method, applied implica-
tion, mention of statistics, stance markers, and references
to the reader—quantitative data were generated about the
amount of use, and in a second analytic step, the way each
strategy was used was described.
• Describing the method is achieved through mentioning the
participants, research question/goal/hypothesis, measured
constructs, and materials. Mentions of the original research are
also included.
• There are two types of applied implications. Specific implica-
tions discuss further-reaching consequences of research find-
ings and are presented on the level of teens, mental health,
society, and parents. A call to action is used to nudge the reader
into taking action and to discuss conscious choices in social
media or using a mobile phone less.
• Mentions of statistics show issues teens have and behavior of
teens. Statistics are re-presented from the results section as
well as the introduction of the academic source text but are
almost exclusively used in the student writing to denote results.
• Stance markers are mainly used to comment on the research,
its findings, or its implications.
• References to the reader are used to give information or to
spur the reader into taking action. These references are
employed to include the reader as part of the interaction.
 7 CORPUS EXAMPLE: USING AN ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK… 123

References
Sterk, F. M., Van Goch, M. M., Burke, M., & Van der Tuin, I. (2022). Baseline
assessment in writing research: A case study of popularization discourse in first-­
year undergraduate students. Journal of Writing Research, 14(1), 35–76.
https://doi.org/10.17239/jowr-­2022.14.01.02
Woods, H. C., & Scott, H. (2016). #Sleepyteens: Social media use in adolescence
is associated with poor sleep quality, anxiety, depression and low self-esteem.
Journal of Adolescence, 51, 41–49. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adolescence.
2016.05.008

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
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The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
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and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the
permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copy-
right holder.
 CHAPTER 8

Framing Frameworks: Final Considerations

about Framework Development

Abstract In this concluding chapter, we look back on the contents of

Re-presenting Research as a whole. We offer insight into the theoretical and
applied insights that are generated through this book, which concern the
framework itself, compliance with the aims that were set for the framework,
the genre of popularization discourse as a whole, and applied insights.
Options for further research are discussed, which include branching into
other modes of popularization, focusing on the producer of popularization
texts, the application of the framework in other settings, adding an evalua-
tive component to the framework, and the construction of controversy in
popularization discourse. Lastly, we offer some considerations for those
readers wanting to develop their own analytical framework, whether it be
to analyze popularization discourse or any other type of genre or text.

Keywords Insights • Implications • Further research • Text evaluation

• Framework development

8.1   Introduction
Re-presenting Research has focused on the analysis of popularization dis-
course. In Chaps. 2 and 3, the theoretical and methodological back-
grounds and underpinnings for popularization discourse and its analysis
were put forward. In Chap. 4, we presented our analytical framework for

© The Author(s) 2023 125

F. M. Sterk, M. M. van Goch, Re-presenting Research,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28174-7_8
126 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

the analysis of popularization strategies in popularization discourse. The

framework is constructed through the iterative analysis of a corpus of
student-­written newspaper articles through which an a priori list of codes
(or strategies) was improved. This code list was then validated using a
corpus of professional science journalism texts. The analytical framework
consists of 34 strategies in five themes, which are specified in Chap. 4 and
identified through application remarks and further reading suggestions. In
Chaps. 5 and 6 we showed the application of the framework on the level
of the individual text and on a corpus level. In Chap. 7, we added an extra,
inductive step, to show how the analytical framework can also be a starting
point for the further categorizing of how a strategy is employed in a spe-
cific corpus of texts.

8.2  Theoretical and Applied Insights Generated

Through This Book
Previous studies into popularization strategies have offered insight into
the textual features used in a specific subgenre of popularization discourse.
Yet none of these studies has turned these insights into a framework that
can be used in subsequent studies or projects, in other words, a framework
that is applicable to code other texts or corpora than the one(s) under
discussion in that specific academic paper. Our framework is the first ana-
lytical framework for popularization discourse. As such, it adds to the
methodology of text analysis of popularization discourse and presents an
addition to the methodological options available in the fields of science
communication, discourse analysis, and communication studies.
Our framework is compliant with the four requirements of a proper
analytical framework that were discussed in Chap. 4. The framework is
usable in any subgenre of popularization discourse and any disciplinary,
multidisciplinary, or interdisciplinary setting because the presented strat-
egies are general enough to overarch constraints imposed by subgenres of
popularization or disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, as the frame-
work is developed by using two raters and validated through a high inter-
rater reliability, and since it includes application remarks for each strategy,
it is workable and reliable in analyses using multiple raters. The frame-
work also contains an explanation of each strategy to make it easy to apply
and usable in other studies, or indeed by professionals in the fields of
science communication and science journalism, or teachers and students
 8 FRAMING FRAMEWORKS: FINAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT FRAMEWORK… 127

in educational settings. As such, our framework enables both quantitative

and instrumental as well as qualitative and inductive analysis (see Kuckartz,
2019; Roberts, 2000): it can be used to show numerical values about how
often each strategy is used, as well as categorical data about in what way
each strategy is used.
Concurrent with the theoretical insights that were presented about
popularization discourse as a whole, this book has also offered insights for
the applied use of a framework for popularization discourse. In Chap. 6
we focused on professional writing and in Chap. 7 on student writing,
which shows that the analytical framework can be applied to different
corpora within the genre of popularization discourse. Even though a
direct comparison between the two corpora is outside of the scope of the
research that we have conducted, anecdotally, we were able to share the
insight that the use of strategies was denser in professional writing com-
pared to student writing.

8.3  Options for Further Investigation

and Research

Where do we go next? This book has hopefully given readers insight into
textual strategies in popularization discourse, in the set-up of (analytical)
frameworks, and in popularization discourse as a whole—but of course,
research is never finished. In our research, the focus has been firmly on
textual representations of science communication and science journalism.
As such, the analytical framework is only applicable to written text. It does
not cover spoken, visual, and interactive science communication or science
journalism—but the framework could very well be adapted to evaluate
these types of communication. The analysis of these types of populariza-
tion therefore remains for future studies.
Furthermore, this book has only dealt with the product of populariza-
tion, in other words text. Other relevant and adjacent avenues of investi-
gation could consider the producer and the recipient of popularization: the
writer and the reader. Such studies could, for example, ask: Which compe-
tences—knowledge, skills, and attitudes—are needed for popularized
writing? What should popularization writing training focus on, and which
of the framework’s strategies are trainable? To give an example: How can
you learn to use humor in writing? Which aspects of metacognitive aware-
ness do professional science writers employ while writing, compared to
128 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

student writers? How do readers perceive science journalism texts: Do

they recognize the framework’s strategies, and do they rate the quality of
texts that use many strategies higher than those that use fewer? And what
does ‘quality’ mean in this regard? Do readers get a better understanding,
or appreciation, of academic discourse through reading science journal-
ism? Similarly, we have only focused on text analysis using strategies. Other
relevant questions would be: What does a good science journalism text
look like, or a creative text, or trustworthy text? Another interesting
research direction would be to study text production, in other words to
investigate the actual writing processes taking place to construct popular-
ization texts.
Another avenue of research is to consider the application of the frame-
work in other settings. What would happen if professional science journal-
ists used the framework in their writing? This would mean that research
would focus on the use of the framework on the production side of text,
and not solely on the analysis side of text production. It would also entail
a transdisciplinary component to the research, where academics and prac-
titioners could work together in research about text production. On the
production side of texts, there are also opportunities to explore the inher-
ent tension that exists for science communicators and science journalists
who are responsible for the translation of academic insights to a broad
target audience: there is a fine line between presenting new insights in an
understandable manner and oversimplification, and between focusing on
newsworthiness and becoming inaccurate. In this line of research, the
interrelation between science journalists and press officers should not be
glossed over. Press officers working, for instance, at universities or research
institutes often produce the first recontextualization and reformulation
steps when writing a press release about new research. Science journalists
often use these press releases to determine which stories to write about
and as a stepping stone for their own text. Research about science journal-
ism text production should therefore take both science journalists and
press officers into consideration as producers of popularization discourse.
Furthermore, teachers could use the framework in an educational set-
ting. The current framework is usable to teach about the production of
popularization discourse. However, it lacks an evaluative component; the
framework cannot give any insight into if a strategy is used ‘properly’ or
‘effectively,’ nor can it be used as a rubric to grade popularization writing.
Future research could focus on the addition of an evaluative component
and the adaptation of the framework into the form of a rubric.
 8 FRAMING FRAMEWORKS: FINAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT FRAMEWORK… 129

Popularization discourse is often produced about controversial topics

or can give rise to societal debate about research topics that lead to con-
troversy. Although controversy as such has been outside of the scope of
this book, it should be noted that it is an integral part of the genre of
popularization. An unexpected finding in our research is that controversy
is hardly ever found on the level of a single text, which is why there is no
strategy in the framework dedicated to it. Perhaps controversy is con-
structed intertextually, or in the interaction between discourse and society,
or between author/text and reader, but more research is needed to pro-
vide better insight into this matter.

8.4  Considerations for Readers Who Want

to Develop Their Own Framework

In Re-presenting Research, we showed how we constructed our analytical

framework and how it can be applied in practice. For those readers want-
ing to develop their own framework, we would like to share some practical
considerations that we developed throughout our research.

1. Do not try to develop a framework on your own. One of the most

valuable aspects in the construction of our framework, we found,
was the opportunity to thoroughly discuss the text analysis that we
were working on, particular codes or texts with which we struggled,
and adaptations to the framework. Discussion also offers you a clear
reflection of your own frame of reference; the way you code a text
fragment might be totally clear to you but could come under scru-
tiny by your fellow coders. Having discussions about how you code
and why you do so is therefore very insightful and necessary in the
development of a framework that has the aim of being as objective
as possible.
2. Start working from an existing framework, not from scratch. Starting
from an existing framework enables you to have a base to work
from—if themes or strategies/codes in this existing framework do
not match up with the data you are working with, this will become
clear soon enough, and it can offer a stepping stone for discussions
about adaptations of the framework.
3. Use a big corpus of texts to construct and validate your framework,
but do not go overboard. As was shown by August et al. (2020),
130 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

coding of very big samples of text (that is, a 128,000-document

corpus) is only really possible by employing data science techniques.
Even then, hand-coding of a portion of those texts is needed in the
validation of the computational analysis. The biggest hand-coded
corpus that we encountered while researching popularization dis-
course frameworks was 337 texts, once again from the research by
August et al. (2020)—though this analysis was performed on the
sentence level. The chosen level of detail in a framework, and subse-
quently, the analysis of texts, also influences the number of texts that
is realistically codable with the available number of analysts and
within the set timeframe of the research. Keep in mind that there are
two limiting factors in text analysis: it is necessary to achieve satura-
tion (that is, you have coded all that needs to be coded according to
your own coding parameters or theoretical framework) versus the
time that is available. The higher the level of detail you include in
your framework, the smaller the number of texts that are codable
within a certain timeframe while still maintaining saturation of data.
4. Work in iterative rounds. In our research, we needed seven coding
rounds to construct an analytical framework that we were happy
with, that produced a very high level of agreement, and that was a
true reflection of the texts that we were coding. It is also hugely
beneficial for the development of the framework to code new texts
from the same corpus in the different iterative rounds. Of course, no
two texts are the same, and a new batch of texts often means that
you are presented with new coding problems that call for a further
adaptation of the framework—until at some point you reach code
saturation. Also make sure to code the same texts as your fellow
analysts, at least in the construction phase of the framework, to
allow for true discussion about the coding.
5. Document everything. This includes difficulties in coding, differ-
ences in coding, topics that were under discussion among analysts,
and changes made to the framework. The decisions you make might
make sense to you now, but ‘future you’ will be thankful to know
why a certain decision was made or how the framework was adapted.
6. Determine when your framework is considered to be a finished
product. A framework is never truly finished; this is to say that fur-
ther discussion about the framework and, potentially, adaptations to
it is always possible. Even though our framework is presented as a
‘finished product’ in this book and is definitely highly applicable to
 8 FRAMING FRAMEWORKS: FINAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT FRAMEWORK… 131

the genre that it was constructed for, further analysis of texts could
always reveal more strategies that had previously not been encoun-
tered. To give a concrete example, as we noted in Chap. 5, the sci-
ence journalist will also sometimes give a voice to researchers that
were not part of the research project under discussion in the text.
The voice of this other researcher is added either to give an explana-
tion about difficult subject matter or to add an alternative opinion
or interpretation. This textual feature is not captured well enough
under the strategies giving the researcher an active voice or giv-
ing the non-researcher an active voice. It might be coded as
explanation, opinion, or additional sources. Alternatively, an extra
strategy might need to be added to the framework. The same goes
for the use of self-reference in a quote, which therefore cannot be
coded as explicit self-reference. Here too, an additional strategy
might be needed—but this is also dependent upon the question if
and how adding an additional strategy would enrich our under-
standing of textual features in popularization discourse. All in all,
the choice is yours to keep adapting a framework or to mark it as
‘finished’ when it can describe the chosen genre well enough.

8.5  Final Remarks
In 1986, Fahnestock was one of the first researchers to discuss populariza-
tion as a discourse. Over time, with the development of popularization
discourse as a genre, implicit rules have formed about what can and cannot
be done in popularization texts and, consequently, the genre has become
rigid (as a sidebar, this process happens for all genres, not just populariza-
tion discourse). For popularization discourse, this has meant that the focus
is firmly on news value and research results. This is what Fahnestock
referred to as ‘the wonder’ and ‘the application’ as the two main themes
in the discourse (Fahnestock, 1986). Generally, the produced insights are
re-­presented as ‘facts’ or ‘the truth’—even though some of the main aims
of popularization discourse are to show the audience the value of and need
for scientific research, and to convince them that academic research is a
reliable process. It would make sense, therefore, to give more attention to
the way research is being conducted and scientific findings are produced,
but methodology is hardly ever extensively or comprehensively discussed
in these texts. The exception to the rule, here, is research where the meth-
odology is very innovative or flashy. And this is where we once again return
132 F. M. STERK AND M. M. VAN GOCH

to the immune therapy research from the Rosalind Franklin Institute and
the University of Reading that put Fifi the Llama—and, through Fifi, the
methodology that was used—right in the center of their communication.
But this is an exception to the current rules about what popularization
discourse should look like. In the future, let us focus on alternative and
creative ways to talk about research that do not solely focus on results.

What You Have Learned in This Chapter

• This book has shone a light on popularization discourse as a
genre, as well as presenting the first analytical framework with
which to analyze this type of discourse.
• Further investigation could focus on applications of the frame-
works for other modes of popularization, on the producer or
recipient of popularization discourse, on the application of the
framework in the production of science journalism or in edu-
cational settings, on the addition of an evaluative component,
or on the way that controversy surrounding research findings
and popularization discourse is constructed.
• Considerations for developing a framework for text analysis
are: do not try to develop the framework on your own, start
working from an existing framework, use a big corpus of texts,
work in iterative rounds, document everything, and determine
when your framework is considered to be a finished product.

References
August, T., Kim, L., Reinecke, K., & Smith, N. A. (2020). Writing strategies for
science communication: Data and computational analysis. Proceedings of the
2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing,
5327–5344. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-­main.429
Fahnestock, J. (1986). Accommodating science: The rhetorical life of scientific
facts. Written Communication, 3(3), 275–296. https://doi.org/10.1177/
2F0741088386003003001
Kuckartz, U. (2019). Qualitative text analysis: A systematic approach. In G. Kaiser
& N. Presmeg (Eds.), Compendium for early career researchers in mathematics
education (pp. 181-198). SpringerOpen. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-­3-­030-
­15636-­7_8
Roberts, C. W. (2000). A conceptual framework for quantitative text analysis: On
joining probabilities and substantive inferences about texts. Quality & Quantity,
34(3), 259–274. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1004780007748
 8 FRAMING FRAMEWORKS: FINAL CONSIDERATIONS ABOUT FRAMEWORK… 133

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and
indicate if changes were made.
The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to
the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence
and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the
permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copy-
right holder.
 Glossary

Term Explanation

Academic Discourse that pertains to academic endeavors, for example academic

discourse articles or research reports.
Codes or A code or category is part of a category system, that is, markers used
categories to categorize text. They can be factual, thematic, evaluative,
analytical, theoretical, natural, or formal.
Coding A process that attaches a code to text.
Corpus A corpus is a collection of texts surrounding the same genre, text
type, or theme.
Framework An analytic codebook that displays textual features (see: strategy) and
their properties.
Popularization The process of constructing popularization discourse.
Popularization Discourse in which academic insights are communicated to a broad,
discourse non-expert audience in understandable language and in the context
of everyday life.
Research The communication of academic insights from the humanities and
communication social sciences (SSH field) to a broad, non-expert audience. For
communication from the STEM field, see science communication.
Rubric An analytic table that shows assessment criteria and grading points
and can be used to assess student performance.
Science The communication of academic insights from the natural sciences/
communication STEM field to a broad, non-expert audience. For communication
from non-STEM fields, see research communication.
(continued)

© The Author(s) 2023 135

F. M. Sterk, M. M. van Goch, Re-presenting Research,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28174-7
136 Glossary

(continued)
Term Explanation

Science journalism The communication of academic insights from any field (though
usually natural sciences/STEM) to a broad, non-expert audience,
performed by a journalist.
Strategy A theory-driven, communicative goal that consists of lexical to
multi-sentence features.
Text analysis A research method in which insights about written text are produced
by turning text into data through the process of coding.
Qualitative text A type of text analysis that reduces the complexity of text into
analysis categories/codes to develop a category system/coding frame.
Quantitative text A type of text analysis that scores the occurrence of categories,
analysis sometimes to then perform statistical analysis.
 Index1

A 75, 80, 84, 85, 92, 93, 100, 101,

Academic discourse, 3, 6, 7n2, 14–19, 121, 132
21, 22, 128 Announcing the new finding or new
See also Scientific discourse contribution to the discipline,
Academic implications, 53, 54, 58, 59, 58, 59, 80
78, 80, 86, 89, 92, 105 Appeals to reader, 30, 52
Academic texts, 15 Applied implications, 52–54, 58, 59,
Additional sources, 51, 55, 58, 59, 78, 77, 80, 81, 86, 88–92, 101,
80, 86, 87, 90, 92, 131 104–109, 118, 122
Analogy, 29, 30, 53, 58 Argument structures, 30, 58
Analysis (noun), 4, 5, 7, 9, 25, 27, 28, Assessment, 4, 27, 28, 35–40
34, 35, 40, 41, 46, 52–57, 65, See also Assessment criteria
66, 81, 84–87, 92, 93, 99–120, Assessment criteria, 28, 40, 41, 58
125–128, 130, 131
See also Computational analysis;
Corpus analysis C
Analytical frameworks, 4, 5, 7–10, Categorize, categorized (verb),
25–28, 35, 41, 46–60, 65–81, 84, 26–28, 121
85, 99–122, 125–127, 129, Category/categories, 26, 27
130, 132 Category system, 26
Analytic codebook, 5 Clarity, 39, 101
Analyze, analyzed (verb), 4, 5, 7–10, Code, coding, coded (verb), 29, 34,
26–29, 34, 41, 47, 51, 65, 66, 35, 47, 48, 51, 75, 80, 81, 101,

1
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

© The Author(s) 2023 137

F. M. Sterk, M. M. van Goch, Re-presenting Research,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28174-7
138 INDEX

104, 109, 118, 119, 121, E

130, 131 Educational settings, 5, 8, 27, 28, 36,
See also Consensual coding; 100, 121, 127, 128, 132
Descriptive coding; Pattern Engagement, 9, 31, 48, 49, 50, 60,
coding; Simultaneous coding 80, 92, 93, 118
Code list, 126 Example(s) from daily life, 31, 52–54,
Coder, coders, 5, 34, 58, 129 56, 58, 59, 77, 80, 84,
Code(s) (noun), 26, 47, 65–81, 126, 86–88, 91, 119
129, 130 Explanation(s), 8, 27, 46, 50, 53,
See also Category/categories 54, 58, 59, 77, 80, 86,
Coding manual, 35 88, 92, 131
Coding schemes, 5, 26–28, 41, 46 Explicit self-reference, 57, 59, 79, 81,
Computational analysis, 29, 86, 90–92, 109, 131
34, 35, 130
Consensual coding, 47
Contextualization, 29, 32, 52, 58, 59, F
75, 76, 80, 86–88, 91, 92, 112, Features of conversational discourse,
113, 121 31, 53, 57, 59, 79, 80, 86,
Contribution to research, 54, 59, 78, 87, 91, 92
80, 86, 89, 92 Fifi the Llama, 2, 3, 132
Corpus, 2, 5, 9, 29, 34, 47–49, 66, Framework, 4–6, 8–10, 13, 17, 27,
84–93, 99–122, 126, 129, 46–49, 51–60, 65, 66, 75, 81,
130, 132 84, 92, 100, 102, 121, 127
Corpus analysis, 81, 86–91 See also Analytical framework(s);
Credibility, 9, 30, 48–50, 53–56, Analytic codebook; Category
59, 60, 78, 80, 86, 89, system; Code list; Coding
92, 93, 109 frame; Coding manual; Coding
scheme; Framework
development; Framework for
D analysis
Describing the method, 29, 52, 58, Framework development, 125–132
59, 76, 80, 86–89, 92, 101–104, Framework for analysis, 4, 5, 7–9,
121, 122 25–29, 34, 35, 45–59, 65, 66,
See also Method(s) 83–93, 99–122, 125–131
Descriptive coding, 47 Frameworks, 4, 5, 7, 9, 25–41, 46, 51,
Direct quote from the academic 60, 125–132
publication, 53, 55, 59, 78, 90, 92
Discourse analysis, 8, 14, 126
Discourses, 7n2, 14, 15, 17–20, 22, G
28, 50, 129, 131, 132 Genre requirements, 37, 38
 INDEX 139

Giving the non-researcher an active Link to the academic publication, 51,

voice/direct quotes, 55, 59, 80, 55, 59, 78, 80, 86, 90–92
81, 86, 91, 92, 131
Giving the researcher an active voice/
direct quotes from the researcher, M
54–56, 58, 59, 78–81, 86, Mentioning more research is
89–92, 131 necessary/next step in research,
54, 59, 78, 80, 86, 89–92
Mention(s) of statistics, 54, 59, 78,
H 80, 86, 87, 89, 90, 92, 99, 101,
Humor, 29–31, 58, 59, 79, 80, 86, 109–114, 121, 122
91, 92, 101, 127 See also Statistic(s)
Hyperlinks, 53, 58, 59, 76, 80, Method(s), 3, 29, 58, 59, 91, 92,
85–88, 92 101–104, 121, 122
Metaphors, 21, 30, 31
Multidisciplinary, 7, 7n2, 8, 46,
I 51, 60, 126
Imagery, 21, 52, 53, 58, 59, 77,
80, 86–92
Impact, 3, 18, 29, 30, 50, N
75, 88, 108 Newspaper articles, 9, 99, 100, 102,
Inclusive pronouns, 29, 31, 53, 104, 114
56–59, 79, 80, 86, 87, Novelty, 49, 52, 58, 59, 80, 81,
90–92, 118–120 86–88, 90, 92, 111–113, 121
Interdisciplinary, 4, 7, 7n2, 8, 46, 51,
60, 100, 126
In-text specification of a source, 55, O
59, 78, 86–90, 92 Opinions, 5, 16, 20, 29, 31, 32,
36–38, 40, 50, 51, 55, 58, 59,
79, 80, 86, 90, 92, 131
J Organization, 18, 28, 30, 39,
Jargon, 15, 27, 30 49, 52, 57

L P
Lede, 30, 32, 52, 59, 76, 86, 87, 92 Pattern coding, 48
Lexical mention of the original Popularization discourse, 2–10,
research, 54, 59, 78, 80, 90, 92, 13–21, 25, 27–29, 34–37, 41,
104, 121 46–60, 84, 125–132
See also Lexical mention(s) See also Popularizations;
Lexical mention(s), 59, 80, 92, Popularization texts;
104, 121 Popularized texts
140 INDEX

Popularizations, 4–7, 14, 15, 17–19, Reformulation (noun), 6, 9, 13–21,

21, 22, 28, 34–39, 46, 49–51, 50, 59, 128
58, 84, 100, 101, 126–129, See also Reformulated (verb)
131, 132 Re-presentation, re-presented, 2–10,
Popularization strategies, 5, 28–34, 16, 17, 20, 22, 106, 112, 114,
47, 51, 59, 75, 126 122, 131
Popularization texts, 7, 9, 10, 49, 50, Research communication, 6
59, 101, 128, 131 Rhetorical category, 31, 48
Popularized texts, 10, 15, 21, Rubrics, 5, 9, 25–41, 46,
26, 50, 110 58, 59, 128
Presenting results/conclusions, 52,
53, 58, 59, 75, 76, 83, 86–92,
111–114, 121 S
Science communication, 3–6, 7n2, 8,
9, 13, 16–18, 22, 35, 36, 84,
Q 126, 127
Qualitative, 9, 26, 27, 41, 87–91, 99, See also Science communicator(s)
101, 127 Science communicator(s), 8,
Qualitative text analysis, 26 9, 20, 128
Quality of writing, 37, 38 Science journalism, 3, 4, 6, 7n2, 8–10,
Quantitative, 9, 26, 27, 41, 66, 14, 16, 22, 48, 65–81, 84,
84–86, 93, 99, 101, 122, 127 126–128, 132
Quantitative text analysis, 26 See also Science journalist(s)
Questions, 9, 19, 30, 31, 38, 52, Science journalism texts, 15, 85–91
57–59, 79, 84, 86–88, 90–92, Science journalist(s), 8, 9,
119, 128 17, 20, 22, 65, 84, 93,
122, 128, 131
Scientific discourse, 7n2, 18, 19
R Self-disclosure of the author’s public
Reader engagement, 29, 30 or personal life, 53, 56, 59, 77,
Recontextualization (noun), 6, 9, 86, 91, 92
13–21, 49, 50, 59, 128 Simultaneous coding, 47
See also Recontextualize(d) (verb) Stance, 4, 9, 30–32, 48–50, 55, 60,
Recontextualize(d) (verb), 50, 59 79, 80, 86–88, 92, 93, 114
References to popular lore and beliefs, Stance marker(s), 55, 57, 59, 79, 80,
and popular culture, 31, 56, 59, 86–92, 99, 101, 114–117,
79, 86, 91, 92 120, 122
Reference(s) to the reader, 53, 56–59, Statistics, 101, 109–114, 122
79, 80, 88, 90–93, 101, Story, 3, 20, 30, 58
118–120, 122 Strategies, 3–9, 21, 27–29, 34, 35, 41,
Reformulated (verb), 103 46–52, 58–60, 65, 66, 75–81, 84,
 INDEX 141

85, 92, 93, 100–102, 104, 105, Text analysis, 5, 26–28, 35, 41, 46,
111–113, 118, 119, 121, 122, 80, 126, 128–130, 132
126–129, 131 See also Qualitative text analysis;
See also Popularization strategies; Quantitative text analysis
Structural components; Textual components, 29
Sub-strategies; Textual Textual features, 3–7, 28, 46,
components; Textual strategies 126, 131
Structural components, 28, 29, 35, 41 Textual strategies, 5, 28, 127
Student writing, 51, 93, 104–106, Themes, 9, 15, 26, 28, 46, 49–51, 59,
111, 121, 122, 127 60, 80, 85, 92, 93, 101, 104,
Subject matter, 9, 49, 60, 118, 121, 126, 129, 131
80, 92, 93 Titles/subheadings, 56–59, 79,
Sub-strategies, 29, 58 86, 91, 92

T V
Tailoring information to the reader, Voice switching, 29, 32
9, 31, 48, 49, 60, 80, 92, Visuals, 2, 8, 31, 53, 59, 77, 86, 89,
93, 104 92, 93, 127