Drawing to Learn Science: Legacies of Agassiz    

The use of visual representation to learn science can be traced to Louis Agassiz, Harvard Professor of Zoology, in the mid-19th century. In Agassiz's approach, students were to study nature through carefully observing, drawing and then thinking about what the observations might add up to. However, implementation of Agassiz's student-centered approach has struggled with the conflict between science as a form of developing "mental discipline" in which mastery of scientific facts is the goal and science learning as a socially situated activity with an emphasis on the process of learning, not merely its products. Present-day attempts to have students draw to learn science often succumb to these same conflicts, limiting their full realization.

Lerner, Neal. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (2007). Articles>Scientific Communication>Technical Illustration>History

The Emergence of a Root Metaphor in Modern Physics: Max Planck's 'Quantum' Metaphor    

The two purposes of this article are: 1) to use metaphorical analysis to determine whether or not Max Planck invented the quantum postulate and 2) to demonstrate how metaphorical analysis can be used to analyze the rhetoric of revolutionary texts in science. Metaphors often serve as the basis of invention for scientific theories. When we identify these metaphors in Planck's original 1900 quantum paper, it is clear that Planck did consider the quantum postulate to be important. However, we also see that he does not consider the quantum postulate to be revolutionary. A New Scientific Truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

Johnson-Sheehan, Richard D. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication (1997). Articles>Scientific Communication>History>Tropes

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

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

Scientific Rhetoric in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: Herbert Spencer, Thomas H. Huxley, and John Dewey    

Explains how rhetoric is related to modes of inquiry and to the social community in classical rhetoric and in scientific rhetoric in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Zappen, James P. WAC Clearinghouse (1991). Articles>History>Scientific Communication

Blasts from the Past

It does not matter if they were published 10 years ago or 100 years ago, old scientific papers may be more important than you think.

Marx, Werner and Manuel Cardona. Physics World (2004). Articles>Scientific Communication>History>Research

Gestural Enthymemes: Delivering Movement in 18th- and 19th-Century Medical Images    

This article contributes to recent efforts to add life and movement to rhetorical studies by focusing on the representation of movement in medical texts. More specifically, this study examines medical texts, illustrations, and photographs involving movement by Johann Casper Lavater, G. B. Duchenne de Bologne, Charles Darwin, and Étienne-Jules Marey. By identifying how figures of speech epitomize arguments, this examination follows a shift in the way arguments about movement are represented, a shift from static, visual arguments to gestural enthymemes, as they are named, arguments that are made in movements; these shifts are linked to developments in medical technologies involving photography. These arguments about and using movement attempt to “capture” or express the moments within which life, through the embodied gesture, resides. This extended understanding of the enthymeme broadens current understanding of argument to include delivery, links medical and rhetorical discursive practices, and informs how we make sense of and study the relationships between technology and rhetoric both in the past and present.

Newman, Sara. Written Communication (2009). Articles>Scientific Communication>Biomedical>History