Popularising Scientific Discourse

Abstract

Science is dependent on the presence and usage of scientific discourse and it is through discourse that professional scientific activities within the laboratory are negotiated, understood, circulated, contested and scientifically evaluated. Professional science aims to use discourse in a communal setting of scientist with a specific domain and paradigm to find the most plausible explanation of phenomena in the world.

Transitions between ideas sometimes needed to be clearly expressed using linking expressions since readers could not always infer the semantic relationships. However, such linguistic items contributed to give coherence and readability to the paragraphs creating a logical flow of sentences. An effective paragraph has to display a structure consisting of a topic sentence to open the paragraph, some subsequent supporting sentence, although the concluding sentence is optional. The topic sentence introduces the main idea of the paragraph and the key words or controlling ideas that will be developed in the following sentences. The supporting sentences constitute the body of the paragraph whose purpose is to make the topic sentence clear and convincing. In order to indicate that the paragraph has reached the end we find in isolated paragraphs the concluding sentence to restate the main idea.

Metadiscourse interacts within the communication process to expand the scientific discourse. When the scientific personalizes his writing by going beyond the discourse, he uses metadiscourse, which is the linguistic and rhetorical manifestation of an author’s presence in a text. The scientific discourse therefore can be seen as the product of the scientific’s adaptation to the requirements and his own way of structuring the professional scientific activities. There is a mutual correspondence between belief structure and cognitive genre frame rather than an opposition between them.