Experts’ and students’ recontextualisations of scientific research for a more general audience

Informing and engaging the public in new scientific findings is becomingincreasingly important. Graduate students are thus encouraged to develop skillin writing for an audience beyond their discipline. This article concerns writingby master’s biology of assignment-type modelled on News andViews articles. Published Views articles, which written by experts,summarise critique a newly published study wider scientificcommunity. To be convincing, academic writers must project authoritativestance towards topic developing this ability important forpostgraduate students. They also need skilled at readers, takingaccount readers’ prior knowledge recognitionas disciplinary members. Using Hyland’s (2018) model interactionalmetadiscourse, compares corpus 30 Viewsassignments with 55 Viewsarticles experts. We found that experts were using stanceresources authoritative identity, while hesitated toexplicitly include themselves writing; students’ use stance resourcesalso reflected limited nature knowledge. Studentsused engagement resources readers text, butsome misjudged wrote broader, less knowledgeableaudience. Suggestions made these guidestudents expressing audience.