ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to investigate the defining structural features of food blogs in order to categorize them as a genre of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC). First, the chapter provides an overview of food blogs by briefly presenting the state of the art and by framing food blogs as virtual discourse communities. Subsequently, a corpus of food blogs is presented, described in terms of its size and representativeness, the criteria of its compilation, and the demographics of the food bloggers. Next, food blogs are analyzed in detail as a genre of CMC by applying Susan Herring’s (2007) and John Swales’s (1990, 2004) models. The software UAM Corpus Tool (UAM-CT; O’Donnell, 2012) is also used to identify recurrent patterns in the structure of food blogs.
