This paper looks at the newly developed Knowledge Dissemination genre of TEDtalks, short popularizing speeches aimed at a non specialist audience and presentedby experts in their field, often top level academics. These informative and insightfultalks are made freely available on the web by TED, a non-profit organisation, andinvolve a wide variety of domains, ranging from the humanities to science andtechnology. The study mainly aims to identify whether, and to what extent, thisgenre differentiates itself from previously investigated forms of popularization,with specific reference to the way: TED speakers position themselves in front ofthe multiple audiences (co-present and on-line); specialised knowledge is ‘mediated’and made accessible by means of personal narrative, anecdote and humour. TheTED corpus collected for the purpose of statistical analysis exceeds three milliontokens. It is examined with reference to aspects such as argumentation, rhetoricalstructures and discourse organisation, drawing on the methods and instruments ofcorpus linguistics, textual linguistics, pragmatics and genre analysis. More specifical-ly, the study refers to Hyland’s (2010) concept of “proximity” to understand howTED speakers draw on different discoursal conventions to claim solidarity withtheir audience and manage their level of expertise. In order to do so, we look athow TED speakers employ the following discourse features: Organisation; Argu-ment structure; Credibility; Stance; Audience engagement