ABSTRACT

This paper reports a cross-genre study of how academics engage their audiences in two popular but underexplored academic genres: academic blogs and Three Minute Thesis (3MT) presentations. Based on a corpus of 65 academic blog posts and 65 3MT presentations from social sciences, we examine how academics establish interpersonal rapport with non-specialist audiences with the aid of engagement resources. The analysis identified new ways of informing and persuading a more diverse audience of their research in both genres. Further analyses revealed more engagement features overall deployed in 3MT presentations, especially those seeking to bring audiences into the discussion by mentioning them explicitly, directing them to think in certain ways, and addressing them with questions. Academic bloggers, in contrast, emphasized shared knowledge and offered more parenthetical commentary. The variations are explained in terms of mode and context, especially the time-constrained and face-to-face competitive context of the spoken genre. The findings have important implications for academics to address their audiences in taking their research beyond specialist insiders, and they shed light on how engagement works in very different academic contexts with different modes.

摘要

本文报告了一项跨类型研究，研究学者如何在两种流行但未被充分探索的学术类型中吸引观众：学术博客和三分钟论文 (3MT) 演示。基于来自社会科学的 65 篇学术博客文章和 65 篇 3MT 演讲的语料库，我们研究了学者如何借助参与资源与非专业受众建立人际关系。该分析确定了告知和说服更多样化的受众他们在这两种类型的研究中的新方法。进一步的分析揭示了 3MT 演示中总体部署的更多参与功能，尤其是那些试图通过明确提及他们、引导他们以某些方式思考并通过问题解决他们来将观众带入讨论的功能。相比之下，学术博主 强调共享知识并提供更多带括号的评论。这些变化是根据模式和上下文来解释的，特别是口语体裁的时间限制和面对面的竞争上下文。这些发现对于学术界解决他们的受众问题具有重要意义，他们将研究超越专业内部人士，并阐明了参与如何在不同模式下的非常不同的学术环境中发挥作用。