Popularizing features in English journal editorials

Journal editorials allow readers to select the most deserving contributions in the literature and adopt approaches or procedures endorsed by an authority in the field; they act as gatekeepers to the community of practice and at the same time allow editors to connect directly with their readership. Following a number of studies on the structure and evaluative language of medical editorials, this article investigates the genre’s popularizing features in two unrelated domains (medicine and applied linguistics) linked by a common concern for the practitioner as well as the researcher. While some of these features are known to occur also in popular science articles, others are borrowed from the contingent repertoire of science or from non-academic registers, resulting in extremely rich, hybridised textualisations. The evidence collected from a corpus of 40 editorials is thus discussed with reference to the popularizing pressure placed on editorials and to the needs of ELF readers confronted with such texts. Possible avenues for further research are also suggested, in the light of current literature on intercultural academic discourse.