Two Sides of the Same Coin? Exploring Persuasive Discursive Practices in Academic and Popularized Texts in Psychology

Abstract

Circulation of scientific discoveries occurs in various discourse communities. Adopting an audience-oriented view of writing (Hyland, 2010) and drawing on the appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005), the current study aimed to explore the evaluative strategies psychologists would use to share their specialist knowledge with scholarly and non-scholarly readers. To this end, a corpus of 38 academic research articles and 38 popularized science articles from the archive of an English international refereed journal, Current Psychology, and two English popularized magazines, Newsweek and New Scientist, were analyzed in terms of attitude resources of appraisal, namely appreciation, affect, and judgment. The results of the study revealed that palpable degrees of persuasion were achieved through including certain attitude elements in both corpora despite no statistically significant difference. The results debunked the myth of objectivity in academic discourse and disclosed the psychology experts’ appealing to persuasive tools for convincing the specialist and non-specialists of the truth value of their research outcomes. The findings carry pedagogical implications for English for the students of psychology courses. Indeed, future psychologists need to get familiar with the common discursive strategies to address their intended audience in academic and non-academic settings.

Keywords

• academic research articles
• popularized science articles
• science popularization
• the appraisal theory
• attitude resources