David Banks & Emilia Di Martino 
Specialized Discourses and Their Readerships 

This volume studies the relationship between the writers of specialized text and their readers in a broad range of settings, including research, popularization and education. It offers younger researchers an insight into the targeting process, helping them consider the impact their work can have, and showing them how to achieve greater exposure. Further, it offers an invaluable reflective instrument for beginning and experienced researchers, drawing on a veritable treasure trove of their colleagues’ experience. As such, it represents a way for researchers and students in linguistics and related disciplines to access issues from a different, insider perspective.






Reader targeting has become a very sophisticated process, with authors often addressing their potential readers even in video. Compared to other forms of writing, academic writing stands out because authors are, in the majority of cases, also consumers of the same type of products, which makes themexcellent “targeters.” 

Table of Content

Editors’ Preface: Specialized Discourses and their Readerships: A Historical Sketch and an Introduction to the Papers.- Chapter 1: The Scientific Research Article Publication Process as a Macro-Genre: Outlining the Parameters of Successful and Unsuccessful Communication between the Writers and the Gatekeeping Readers.- Chapter 2: “Logically, We Quite Agree with the IARC”: Negotiating Interpersonal Meaning in a Corpus of Scientific Texts.- Chapter 3: Recognising Voices: The ‘Voice-holder’ Aspect of ENGAGEMENt in Experts’ Tweets on the Fukushima Nuclear Crisis.- Chapter 4: From Academic Discourse to the Construal of Scientific Cognition and Knowledge Structures.- Chapter 5: Motion and Locution: A Pragma-scientific Study of Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman and Keye Abiona’s Even Kins are Guilty.- Chapter 6: “Tetanus? Who Cares about Tetanus?”: Audience Engagement and Co-participation in Medical Blogs.

About the author

David Banks is an Emeritus Professor at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale in France. He is former Head of the English Department, Director of ERLA (Equipe de Recherche en Linguistique Appliquée) and Chairman of AFLSF (Association Française de la Linguistique Systémique Fonctionnelle). He is the author or editor of 30 books and has published over 100 academic articles. His publication The Development of Scientific English, Linguistic Features and Historical Context (Equinox) won the ESSE Language and Linguistics Book Award in 2010. His research interests include the diachronic study of scientific text and the application of systemic functional linguistics to English and French.





Emilia Di Martino holds an MA in Education from the University of East Anglia, a Ph D in English for Special Purposes from the University of Naples Federico II and is currently an Associate Professor of English Linguistics at Università Suor Orsola Benincasa, Naples(Italy). She is interested in a wide variety of topics, mostly focusing on the nexus of identity, language and power. She is a regular reviewer and sits on the advisory panel for a range of national and international journals. Her latest publication is a research monograph:
Celebrity Accents and Public Identity Construction: Analyzing Geordie Stylizations (Routledge, 2019).