'Who's talking to me?': The construction of writers' identity in digital medical genres

The urgent need to find out medical information has led institutions and mass media publications to craft a new digital genre of expert / non-expert communication, without any previous agreement on either its rhetorical or discursive features. This genre, which I have labelled medical electronic popularizations (Med-E-Pops), has been initially identified as a blurred genre with hybrid functions, and understood as a reshaping and repurposing of medical research articles (Med-RAs), in an attempt to facilitate understanding by a heterogeneous audience, the Internet community.

This paper aims to uncover the extent of Med-E-Pops writers’ (in)visibility studying the use of abstract rhetors in their texts as a devoicing mechanism. Previous researchers concluded that abstract rhetors in scientific dissemination articles explain the situation described in the Med-RAs as independent of human agency. I will contrastively analyse the use of abstract rhetors in a comparable corpus of 40 Med-E-Pops and 40 Med-RAs. In particular, I will explore (1) the rhetorical distribution throughout the texts, (2) the semantic implications of each inanimate subject and (3) their combination with active verbs. This will allow me to reflect on whose voice is crafted in this digital genre and with what purpose.