Moving Beyond the Moment: Reception Studies in the Rhetoric of Science    

Studies in the rhetoric of science have tended to focus on classic scientific texts and on the history of drafts and the interaction surrounding them up until the moment when the drafts are accepted for publication by a journal. Similarly, research on disasters resulting from failed communication has tended to focus on the history of drafts and the interaction surrounding them up until the moment of the disaster. The authors argue that overattention to the moment skews understanding of what makes scientific discourse successful and neglects other valuable sources of evidence. After reviewing the promises and limitations of studies from historical, observational, and text-analytic approaches, the authors call for studies of responses to research articles from disciplinary readers and argue for studies using a variety of qualitative and quantitative methodologies that will explore the real-time responses of readers to scientific texts, test the effects of rhetorical strategies on readers, and track the course of acceptance or rejection over time.

Paul, Danette, Davida Charney and Aimee Kendall. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (2001). Articles>Scientific Communication>Rhetoric

Multimodal Analysis: An Integrative Approach for Scientific Visualizing on the Web    

The Multimodal approach offers technical communicators and science writers an analytical tool to synthesize the meaning made in the connections across communicative modes. This multimodal synthesis can help technical communicators better exploit the meaning-making potential of multimodal combinations and understand the needs of future generations shaped by their increasingly developed multimodal literacy.

Maier, Carmen Daniela, Constance Kampf and Peter Kastberg. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2007). Articles>Scientific Communication>Technical Illustration>Biomedical

Narrative Medicine: A Model for Empathy, Reflection, Profession, and Trust  

The effective practice of medicine requires narrative competence, that is, the ability to acknowledge, absorb, interpret, and act on the stories and plights of others. Medicine practiced with narrative competence, called narrative medicine, is proposed as a model for humane and effective medical practice. Adopting methods such as close reading of literature and reflective writing allows narrative medicine to examine and illuminate 4 of medicine's central narrative situations: physician and patient, physician and self, physician and colleagues, and physicians and society. With narrative competence, physicians can reach and join their patients in illness, recognize their own personal journeys through medicine, acknowledge kinship with and duties toward other health care professionals, and inaugurate consequential discourse with the public about health care. By bridging the divides that separate physicians from patients, themselves, colleagues, and society, narrative medicine offers fresh opportunities for respectful, empathic, and nourishing medical care.

Charon, Rita. JAMA (2001). Articles>Scientific Communication>Biomedical

Newsletters in the Communication System of Science  

Newsletters play several important roles in the scientific community because they can be used to convey information (e.g., administrative information) that is not appropriate for more formal genres (e.g., journals) and because they can be a more timely form of communication than other media, such as books.

O'Hara, Frederick M., Jr. STC Proceedings (1995). Articles>Scientific Communication>Publishing>Newsletters

The Non-Fiction Novel as Psychiatric Casebook: Truman Capote's In Cold Blood    

As proposed in the classic work by Hervey Cleckley, M.D.--The Mask of Sanity--a psychopath typically meets sixteen diagnostic criteria. Every one of them applies to Richard Hickock as he is revealed by Truman Capote's <em>In Cold Blood</em>, a nonfiction novel about the murder of Kansas farmer Herbert W. Clutter and his family forty years ago. It transcends the boundaries of traditional journalism by closely examining the entire constellation of antisocial personality traits that Hickock exhibits. Drawn in large part from jailhouse interviews, Capote's portrait of Hickock breathes life into the psychiatric literature, thus rendering intelligible the mental evaluation provided by the physician who examined the accused in preparation for his upcoming trial. In so doing, Capote s best-selling masterpiece serves as a case study of a psychopath, one that conforms to established medical authority while maintaining its popular appeal.

Koski, Cherly A. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (1999). Articles>Scientific Communication>Biomedical

Nuclear Information: One Rhetorical Moment in the Construction of the Information Age  

Since the late 1970's we have been said to be living in the information age, and that name has stuck, with the phrase increasingly appearing throughout the closing decades of the millennium. The slogan, like all slogans, attempts to assert unity in the face of complexity; nonetheless, it captures, better than most such slogans, a dominant theme of almost all aspects of our everyday life. The slogan has its visual icons in advertising and journalism: binary bits flashing down wires and across the sky, tied to no location and independent of the humans who may need or use that information. Information has become an abstract universal, like atoms and electrons, to create or serve any entity, in no particular configuration, serving no particular purpose, gathered and used by no particular people (but of course provided or facilitated by specific companies who make this information their business). Information, however, is a human creation for human purposes, even if our devices now produce terrabytes of signals that travel only to other devices, never to be seen or touched by humans. This essay recovers a small piece of the history by which we constructed our understandings and uses of information, so that information has become pervasive in everyday life, needs, and action. It considers how information came to have major governmental and military meanings to the U.S. public during World War Two and after, and how an anti-nuclear test activist group asserted an alternative understanding of information to foster public opposition to government policy. This rhetorical reconstruction of information advanced a culture of citizen information, validated by citizen scientists to serve the needs and concerns of citizens, which pervaded the anti-war, environmental, and consumer movements that became our everyday reality in the second half of the century. Such citizen information embodies multiple assumptions about threats to everyday life, the necessity of reliable and up-to-date information for action to oppose the threats, large institutions whose interests are served by the threatening situation and which limit access to relevant information, science as an independent and objective source of information, and the responsibilities of a citizen to be informed.

Bazerman, Charles. UCSB. Articles>Scientific Communication>Technical Writing>Rhetoric

On Scientific Narrative: Stories of Light by Newton and Einstein    

Despite the prevailing assumption that narrative and scientific discourse are incompatible genres, in this article the authors show that scientific texts typically follow a narrative pattern. This simple observation that narrative and scientific texts are similar is not all that surprising when we recognize that scientific discourse, like all narratives, describes what happened and what it meant. Indeed, scientific texts are almost always accounts of scientists' experiences in reality. After developing a vocabulary of narrative, the authors analyze the works of Newton and Einstein, using narrative analysis to illuminate scientific texts as stories.

Johnson Sheehan, Richard and Scott Rode. Journal of Business and Technical Communication (1999). Articles>Scientific Communication

An Outline of Technicisation Theory    

Teachers and researchers in the field of Technical English have always been concerned with the nature of this subject, its major characteristics, and its chief uses in Science and Technology. Obviously, less time and efforts have been spent on how technical English is learned, particularly in situations where foreign students have to relate their limited linguistic knowledge to meaningful realizations of the language system in technical texts of immediate concern to their specialist studies. This research is an early effort to show how technical English is learned and, more specifically, what relevant factors are involved in the overall learning process.

Soheili, A., D. Barjasteh, and Laila Al Qadhi. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2001). Articles>Scientific Communication>Education>Language

Overview of the IMSA Project, A Patient-Oriented Information System    

This paper proposes an overview of the IMSA application, a patient-oriented medical information system. IMSA stands for Interactive Multimedia System for Auto-medication and aims to provide a health-care Internet tool for the end-user. This system proposes an environment that integrates on-line health information, medical and pharmaceutical databases and a knowledge-based system for medical diagnosis. The implementation process focuses on cognitive science, knowledge representation and human-computer interaction.

Curé, Oliver. Data Science Journal (2002). Articles>Scientific Communication>User Centered Design

The Passive Voice and Social Values in Science    

This article claims that two social values in science--falsifiability of science and cooperation among scientists--determine use of passives in scientific communication. Scientists do not always develop valid theories, so scientific experiments must be amenable to being repeated and found invalid. This requires that the experiments must not be discrete events. Science is also a cooperative enterprise. As an integral part of science, scientific writing employs more passives than actives to focus on materials, methods, figures, processes, tables, concepts, etc. Use of passives to focus on the physical world helps de-emphasize discreteness of scientific experiments. Besides, it also helps remove personal qualifications of observing experimental results. Finally, it enhances cooperation among working scientists by providing a common knowledge base of scientific work--things and objects. Looked at in this way, the passive voice in scientific writing represents professional practices of science instead of personal stylistic choices of individual scientists.

Ding, Daniel D. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2002). Articles>Scientific Communication>Grammar>Minimalism

Patients, Medicines, and Information  

Van der Waarde summarizes the reasons why medicinal information provided to patients is often confusing and describes a method for evaluating its effectiveness.

van der Waarde, Karel. Intercom (2004). Articles>TC>Biomedical>Scientific Communication

Peer Review: The Key to Quality in Scientific Communication  

The panel will present a discussion of the role of peer review in the process of authoring and publishing technical papers and scientific and technical articles. The three panelists discuss 1) the role of peer review in the publishing process and its importance in ensuring integrity and quality; 2) the working relationship between journal editor and reviewer; and 3) the kind ofpartnership among journal editor, author’s editor, and author that makes the most efective use of each review. Each panelist will give a IO-minute presentation followed by a brief question and answer period in which the other two panelists will participate. Following the presentations there will be a discussion period in which the audience will be divided into thirds and the panelists will rotate among the three groups for three Jifteen-minute sessions of open discussion.

Hibbard, Jeffrey L., Lottie B. Applewhite and David L. Armbruster. STC Proceedings (1997). Articles>Scientific Communication>Publishing

Perceptions of Accuracy in Science Writing      

Technical experts and writers often disagree about what constitutes accuracy in popular writings about science and technology, such as news media reports. In previous attempts to quantify accuracy in science news reporting, many of the sources’ comments pointed to objective errors, but a sizable number dealt with lack of completeness or stylistic issues. There has been no consensus among communication researchers on the kind of scheme that should be used to code such information. We suggest a scheme for categorizing empirical information about the different kinds of perceived “errors” that technical sources identify in articles about their work by journalists and other writers. This study may lead to strategies for enhancing the accuracy of popular writings about science and technology.

Carsten, Laura D. and Deborah L. Illman. IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication (2002). Articles>Scientific Communication

Plain Language in Science: Signs of Intelligible Life in the Scientific Community?  

'The importance of the work is inversely proportional to the number of people who can understand it' is an outdated attitude in today's scientific arena. The trend toward plain language is gathering force in government, academe, and scientific journals.

Locke, Joanne N., Lily Whiteman and Devora Mitrany. Science Editor (2001). Articles>Scientific Communication>Rhetoric>Minimalism

The Plain Style in the Seventeenth Century: Gender and the History of Scientific Discourse    

This article analyzes the statements on plain style made by Royal Society writers and seventeenth-century women writers. Using scholarship in feminist rhetorical theory, the article concludes that Royal Society plain stylists constructed scientific discourse as a masculine form of discourse by purging elements that were associated with femininity, such as emotional appeals. The article also discusses how women writers, particularly Margaret Cavendish, embraced a plain style more out of concern for their audience than out of a desire to eliminate undesirable feminine attributes. The implications of this historical study for understanding of current practice are noted.

Tillery, Denise. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2005). Articles>Scientific Communication>History>Minimalism

Plastic Language for Plastic Science: The Rhetoric of Comrade Lysenko    

Rhetoric of science reveals the role of rhetoric in the complex social enterprise that is standard science. Rhetoric plays a role in non-standard science too. The recent elucidation of the human genetic code calls to mind an earlier, tragic episode in the history of genetics, Lysenkoism in Stalinist Russia. It involved the repudiation of standard science in favor of an insular, intuitive, and anti-intellectual science called agrobiology which supposedly could shape agricultural productivity to political will. The tragedy is that careers were ruined and millions suffered starvation as the new science failed to bear its predicted fruit. Whether seen as a debased rhetoric of science or as a rhetoric of debased science, it assumed that language is plastic and can support a plastically reconceived science that reflected the plasticity of nature itself. This plastic rhetoric is strikingly similar to Plato s view of sophism, which of course differs considerably from contemporary views of sophism.

Dombrowski, Paul M. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2001). Articles>Scientific Communication>Rhetoric>History

A Polythematic Real-Time Synergistic Hybrid Data Telecommunication System for Scientific Research with Bidirectional Fuzzy Feedback Peer Review by Expert Referees    

Heterogeneous research environments, interests and locations do not necessarily coincide, thus hitherto the primary method of communication amongst researchers has been email. In this article a novel unified polythematic, real-time, synergistic, data telecommunication system is proposed with peer-reviewed, bidirectional fuzzy feedback for research scientists, to facilitate scientific information exchange via the extensible markup language (XML) on multiple scientific topics, e.g. in mathematics, physics, biology and chemistry.

Petratos, Panagiotis. Data Science Journal (2003). Articles>Knowledge Management>Scientific Communication>Collaboration

Preserving the Positive Functions of the Public Domain In Science    

Science has advanced in part because data and scientific methodologies have traditionally not been subject to intellectual property protection. In recent years, intellectual property has played a greater role in scientific work. While intellectual property rights may have a positive role to play in some fields of science, so does the public domain. This paper will discuss some of the positive functions of the public domain and ways in which certain legal developments may negatively impact the public domain. It suggests some steps that scientists can take to preserve the positive functions of the public domain for science.

Samuelson, Pamela. Data Science Journal (2003). Articles>Intellectual Property>Copyright>Scientific Communication

Promoting Access to Public Research Data for Scientific, Economic, and Social Development    

Access to and sharing of data are essential for the conduct and advancement of science. This article argues that publicly funded research data should be openly available to the maximum extent possible. To seize upon advancements of cyberinfrastructure and the explosion of data in a range of scientific disciplines, this access to and sharing of publicly funded data must be advanced within an international framework, beyond technological solutions. The authors, members of an OECD Follow-up Group, present their research findings, based closely on their report to OECD, on key issues in data access, as well as operating principles and management aspects necessary to successful data access regimes.

Arzberger, P., P. Schroeder, A. Beaulieu, G. Bowker, K. Casey, L. Laaksonen, D. Moorman, P. Uhlir and P. Wouters. Data Science Journal (2004). Articles>Publishing>Research>Scientific Communication

A Psychiatrist Using DSM-III: The Influence of a Charter Document in Psychiatry    

Explores the influence of DSM-III in the limited sphere of a single child psychiatrist.

McCarthy, Lucille Parkinson. WAC Clearinghouse (1991). Articles>Scientific Communication>Standards

Publishing Online-Only Peer-Reviewed Biomedical Literature  

Pediatrics is the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. Published continuously since 1948, the journal has achieved a circulation of 62,500, with broad additional distribution via international translations, proprietary computer systems, and online services. Pediatrics has an impact factor of 3.487, the highest ranked clinical journal (as opposed to research journal) in the specialty. In 1996, the editors were facing a growing backlog of quality articles, longer times to publication, and prohibitive and increasing print publication costs. They needed a viable publishing option that avoided the high variable costs and capacity constraints of print, and the Web beckoned.

Anderson, Kent, John Sack, Lisa Krauss and Lori O'Keefe. Journal of Electronic Publishing (2001). Articles>Scientific Communication>Online

Rational Management: Medical Authority and Ideological Conflict in Ruth Lawrence's Breastfeeding: A Guide for the Medical Profession      

This article presents a close reading of one chapter of the only guidebook written for physicians about the clinical management of breastfeeding. The medical discussion of the psychological aspects of breastfeeding articulates conflicting ideological views of women and their place in society, demonstrating how medicine reflects and contributes to a cultural context that is ambivalent about women's changing roles and the transformation of their practices as mothers. At stake is medicine's role in regulating maternal behavior.

Hausman, Bernice L. Technical Communication Quarterly (2000). Articles>Scientific Communication>Biomedical

Reading Darwin, Reading Nature; or, On the Ethos of Historical Science  

Darwin must be read and reread, interpreted and reinterpreted. We find this attention to a body of work that is well over a hundred years old to be highly unusual and worth investigating.

Miller, Carolyn R. and S. Michael Halloran. North Carolina State University (1993). Articles>Scientific Communication>History>Rhetoric

The Relevance of Feenberg's Critical Theory of Technology to Critical Visual Literacy: The Case of Scientific and Technical Illustrations    

Andrew Feenberg's critical theory of technology is an underutilized, relatively unknown resource in technical communication which could be exploited not only for its potential clarification of large social issues that involve our discipline, but also specifically toward the development of a critical theory of illustrations. Applications of critical theory help strengthen our discipline by forcing us to delineate extant approaches and consider whether democratic goals are being achieved through those approaches. If a critical theory of illustrations can be built from Feenberg's critical theory of technology, it should be useful for classroom instructors and researchers as well as theorists.

Northcut, Kathryn M. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2007). Articles>Scientific Communication>Visual Rhetoric>Technical Illustration

The Rhetoric Of Promoting Health    

This article uses Chaim Perelman's theories of argumentation to examine a recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, Promoting Health: Intervention Strategies from Social and Behavioral Research (2000). The IOM's text explores social and behavioral research to devise multipronged intervention strategies; it focuses on social, economic, behavioral, and political health as a means of assuring population health--and thereby expands the conventional boundaries of public health. Since Chaim Perelman's rhetoric is seldom applied in the field of health communication, employing his ideas to consider the role of style, arrangement, and argument in such a cutting-edge document can illuminate public health writing, as well as shed new light on Perelmanian rhetoric.

Hamilton, Margaret. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2002). Articles>Scientific Communication>Biomedical>Rhetoric