Moving beyond the What to the Why: Differences in Professional and Popular Science Writing

Abstract

This article argues that an understanding of professional and popular science writers' goals provides a basis for both explaining and evaluating their language use. Rhetoricians fault scientists for unnecessarily stilted language; scientists fault popularists for inaccuracy and sensationalism. Although these charges are sometimes justified, they deflect attention from the obstacles writers face and the ways in which they use language to overcome these obstacles.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 17 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.