Dr White is one of the principal architects of the Appraisal framework,an account of the means by which texts convey evaluative and attitudinal meanings. [See Language of Evaluation website for detailed information, contacts, bibliographies/links and an introductory course.] He is influential in the development of linguistics-based analyses of mass communicative discourse (journalism, politics, corporate communications, public relations and advertising) and in the contrastive analysis of journalism and political rhetoric across languages and cultures.

Dr White's further research interests include educational linguistics (literacy development, including English-language literacy development in indigenous and bilingual settings; genre-based pedagogy), translation studies and contrastive linguistics, corpus and computational linguistics (including sentiment analysis and opinion mining), argumentation theory and the language of persuasion, and new developments in Systemic Function Linguistic theory. For a detailed listing (with download links) of Dr White's publications see www.prrwhite.info.

He supervises PhD candidates working across these different topic areas.

Prior to undertaking academic study, Dr White worked as a journalist and journalism trainer for almost 20 years (Sydney Morning Herald, The Adelaide Advertiser, Special Broadcasting Service -SBS). He gained his PhD from the University of Sydney in 2000 and prior to teaching media studies, linguistics, discourse analysis and journalism  at the University of New South Wales taught linguistics and journalism at the University of Adelaide, linguistics and English Language studies at the University of Birmingham (UK), journalism and media studies at the University of Wollongong and linguistics at the University of Sydney.,

He is also a semi-professional jazz musicians, currently performing on saxophone and keyboards with the Travelling Circumstances jazz combo.