Titles in Medicine and Science Popularization

Given the spread of Internet-based communication over the last two decades, the transfer of scientific contents to lay audiences through the Web has become an increasingly significant phenomenon, bringing together aspects stemming from specialized discourse, media communication and persuasive/promotional language. In specialized discourse standardized formulations, even with a marked gate-keeping function, are considered to be appropriate in order to transfer given meanings and instantiate specific interpretive frameworks; on the other hand, in media communication emphasis on rhetorical resources is accepted as a prototypical way to construct news, confer newsworthiness to events and convey ideology-saturated value judgement. In contrast, the popularization of medicine holds an intermediate position on a discoursal continuum, combining the need for informativeness and accuracy of specialized communication and the need for cognitive immediacy, effectiveness and the avoidance of gate-keeping effects which is dominant in media and persuasive communication. Since popularization affects not only the micro-linguistic and rhetorical level but also, and quite markedly, pre- and early-textual aspects, this analysis will focus on one of such elements, namely, the titles used in medicine news articles, with the purpose of tracing the strategies typically used in online medical popularization (Science Daily and Scientific American) to effectively synthesize contents in terms of both clarity and impact, so as to facilitate the process of text location and selection when browsing online archives.