Variations in Specialized Genres

Book excerpt: The book is an edited volume of carefully selected articles by eminent scholars focusing on the specialist knowledge transmission through genre variation, particularly on the issues of standardization and hybridity. The main focus was to analyse discursive popularization in the contexts and domains of natural sciences, law, and commerce, viewed in a diachronic perspective. The scholars involved have concentrated their studies on the creative transformation, hybridization, and even bending of genres used to popularise scientific, legal and commercial discourse for different communicative purposes and audiences, thus extending the conventional genre boundaries to disseminate specialized knowledge. The proliferation of specialized knowledge has indeed created a growing need to convey expert knowledge to a variety of addressees, with different levels of shared understanding and expertise. Such disciplinary knowledge can only be conveyed through various subtle manipulations of generic conventions keeping in mind the aims, the users, the media, the social contexts, and the domain with which specific knowledge is associated.