Blurring the lines between genres and audiences: Interaction in science blogs

Science blogs have been attracting the attention of linguists, rhetoricians and communications scholars alike as the discourse of science becomes more and more influenced by new digital media and more scientists engage in the practice of blogging for the purposes of knowledge dissemination and public engagement. The paper analyses writer-reader interaction in a corpus of blogs maintained by individual scientists, considering both posts and comments. The analysis is corpus-driven to the extent that it harnesses corpus linguistic tools for frequency observations to detect language patterns of interaction, but tries to interpret frequency in light of linguistic and rhetorical models of audience engagement in science popularization. The findings confirm a tendency of blogs to exploit all of the linguistic strategies of audience involvement already found in the literature, reader pronouns, questions and the conversational style typical of spoken science communication, testifying to the blurring of genres and audiences.