A Genre Analysis of Popularization Articles on Autism in Science Daily

Abstract

This paper analyzes the genre of popularization article discussing autism published by the magazine Science Daily. The objective of this research is to define this genre and describe its structure, language and most common rules. The method applied involved the analysis of 50 samples of texts following the models proposed by Bhatia (2004) and Swales (1990). Results suggest that there is a usual common structure among the texts of this genre and there are also some language forms that occur in most of the texts such as length, moves and steps, morphology composition, and the use of pronouns and verbs. In conclusion, after analyzing the results obtained from our corpus, a series of rules have been suggested in order to define the most common structure and forms within the genre of popularization articles published by Science Daily that discuss the topic of autism.