Both PhD students and established scholars are under increasing pressures to take their work to wider audiences, increasing their professional visibility, the value of their research and the reputation of their institutions. Academic blogs are now an established way of achieving this, although they also bring challenges to writers in the form of a relatively unpredictable readership and the possibility of immediate and potentially hostile criticism.  Here I explore how writers recontextualise in blogs work which they have previously published in journal articles, examining how researchers construct a different writer persona and relationship with their readers to define the new rhetorical context.

Ken Hyland is an Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia. He has published 300 articles and 29 books on writing and academic discourse with 87,000 citations on Google Scholar. According to the Stanford University/Elsevier analysis of the Scopus database, he is the most influential scholar in language and linguistics (for both 2022 and 2023). A collection of his work, The Essential Hyland, was published in 2018 by Bloomsbury. He is the Editor of two book series (Routledge and Benjamins), is a visiting professor at Jilin University in China, and was founding co-editor of the Journal of English for Academic Purposes and co-editor of Applied Linguistics.