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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Nutr.
Sec. Nutrition, Psychology and Brain Health
Volume 11 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fnut.2024.1407929

Discursive Strategies to Feed Body and Soul: Analyzing Persuasive Resources of Appraisal in Popularized Articles on Nutrition and Psychology

Provisionally accepted
Niloofar Karami Niloofar Karami Mavadat Saidi Mavadat Saidi *
  • Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University, Tehran, Tehran, Iran

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The rapid and wide dissemination of knowledge has accelerated the popularization of science. The study aimed to explore the discursive strategies scientists would use to share their scholarly knowledge to non-scholarly readers. To this end, two corpora consisting of 70 popular science articles on nutrition and psychology from the archive of WebMD, New York Times, and Science Daily, Newsweek and New Scientist, were analyzed drawing on appraisal theory (Martin & White, 2005). The analysis unfolded discernible commonalities and discrepancies in the nutrition and psychology experts’ use of persuasive tools. The results of Chi-square tests revealed statistically significant differences between the two corpora in terms of the prevalence of three main categories of appraisal resources. The findings demystified the specialists’ zest for involving their attitudinal stances in communicating the scientific findings to the non-specialist audience.

    Keywords: Popular science articles, Science popularization, Appraisal Theory, non-scholarly readers, scholarly readers

    Received: 27 Mar 2024; Accepted: 09 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Karami and Saidi. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Mavadat Saidi, Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University, Tehran, 1678815811, Tehran, Iran

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.