Constructing proximity: Relating to readers in popular and professional science

The view of academic discourse as a rhetorical activity involving interactions between writers and readers is now central to most perspectives on EAP, but these interactions are conducted differently in different disciplinary and generic contexts. In this paper I use the term proximity to refer to a writer's control of those rhetorical features which display both authority as an expert and a personal position towards issues in an unfolding text. Examining a corpus of texts in two very different genres, research papers and popular science articles, I attempt to highlight some of the ways writers manage their display of expertise and interactions with readers through rhetorical choices which textually construct both the writer and the reader as people with similar understandings and goals.