RT - Journal Article T1 - Inform and entertain: An oxymoron in serious science communication JF - ijla YR - 2020 JO - ijla VO - 23 IS - 1 UR - http://ijal.khu.ac.ir/article-1-3079-en.html SP - 109 EP - 142 K1 - Academic research articles K1 - Popular science articles K1 - Science popularization Appraisal Theory K1 - Evaluative writing K1 - Persuasion. AB - The current study aimed to explore the nature of discursive strategies academics would use to share their specialist knowledge to both specialists and non-specialists. To this end, a corpus of 40 academic research articles and 40 popular science articles were randomly selected from the archive of four English international peer-reviewed journals and four English popular magazines and newspapers in the field of Nutrition. Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005), a discourse framework to examine evaluative and/or persuasive language, was used to analyze the data. The results revealed significant areas of similarity and difference in terms of certain discursive elements leading to discernible degrees of persuasion. The findings imply that in order to develop a scientifically literate society, scientists should appeal to diverse discourse resources to provide the public with their findings in an informative and entertaining way. The results of the study carry some pedagogical implications for EAP courses held in EFL settings since being able to both comprehend and produce scientific texts of different professional levels at international scale seems to be a requirement for the future scientists. LA eng UL http://ijal.khu.ac.ir/article-1-3079-en.html M3 ER -