The aim of the qualitative analysis carried out in this paper is to showcase examples of rhetorical strategies that can be found in contemporary popular science communication. The analytical corpus encompasses selected texts of winning presentations held during competitions organized according to the rules of the Three-Minute Thesis contest. The major objective of that competition is to choose the PhD student who can present his/her own research ideas and possibilities for their implementation in three minutes in a captivating fashion. The bare existence of such competition seems symptomatic of the increasingly visible necessity to speak about science in an accessible and intriguing way. Reflection occurs on the grounds of methodological solutions derived from text linguistics, pragamlinguistics and theories belonging to the cognitive paradigm in linguistics.