Stance in academic blogs and three-minute theses

This paper reports a cross-genre study of how academics show authorial stance in two increasingly popular but underexplored academic genres: academic blogs and Three Minute Thesis (3MT) presentations. Based on a corpus of 75 academic blogs and 75 3MT talks from social sciences, we explore how academics represent themselves and their research to non-specialist audiences in two very different contexts. We found that the 3MT presenters used more stance resources and took stronger positions, largely by indicating certainty and creating a more visible authorial presence. Academic bloggers, on the other hand, preferred to downplay their commitment and highlight affect. The variations are explained in terms of mode and context, especially the time-constrained and face-to-face competitive nature of the spoken genre and the potential for critical feedback in the blogs. The findings demonstrate the salience of stance in the two genres and role of context in academic communication. It has important implications for scholars who are seeking to take their work to new audiences in perhaps unfamiliar genre