categoryallspace2-Articles Scientific Communication Rhetoric http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Scientific-Communication/Rhetoric A directory of resources about articles and scientific communication and rhetoric in the field of technical communication. en-us Copyright (c) 2005-08 by the EServer. All rights reserved. tclib-editorial@eserver.org (TC Library Editorial Board) webmaster@eserver.org (Geoffrey Sauer) http://tc.eserver.org/images/newlogo.gif http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Scientific-Communication/Rhetoric http://tc.eserver.org/30687.html http://tc.eserver.org/30687.html Arguments manifest in scientific visuals through graphic representation, content placement, and overall document structure. These arguments, designed to influence public perception, change over time in relation to sociopolitical climate. Analysis of a series of documents constructed deliberately to influence perception can help to determine patterns of argumentation and perceived exigencies. In this article, four self-guided tour brochures produced for distribution to visitors to the Glen Canyon Dam in 1977, 1984, 1990, and 1993 are analyzed in order to identify rhetorical strategies designed to influence public perceptions of the dam site, and examine how public perception of the dam, and related argumentation, is structured by sociopolitical climate. http://tc.eserver.org/30700.html http://tc.eserver.org/30700.html Given Alan G. Gross's substantial contributions to the rhetoric of science, most recently with Joseph E. Harmon and Michael Reidy (2002) in Communicating Science, I looked forward to reading Gross's latest work, Starring the Text: The Place of Rhetoric in Science Studies--until I read the preface. In the preface, Gross notes that Starring the Text is not a new con- tribution but a 'major refiguring' (p. ix) of his earlier work The Rhetoric of Science (1990). Like most readers, I am decidedly less enthusiastic about reading a revision of an older contribution than I am about reading a new contribution. http://tc.eserver.org/30210.html http://tc.eserver.org/30210.html This article uses qualitative material gathered at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to construct a model of the rhetorical activity that occurs at the boundaries between diverse communities of practice working on complex sociotechnical systems. The authors reinterpret the notion of the boundary object current in science studies as a rhetorical construct that can foster cooperation and communication among the diverse members of heterogeneous working groups. The knowledge maps constructed by team members at LANL in their work on technical systems are boundary objects that can replace the demarcation exigence that so often leads to agonistic rhetorical boundary work with an integrative exigence. The integrative exigence realized by the boundary object of the knowledge map can help create a temporary trading zone characterized by rhetorical relations of symmetry and mutual understanding. In such cases, boundary work can become an effort involving integration and understanding rather than contest, controversy, and demarcation. http://tc.eserver.org/29683.html http://tc.eserver.org/29683.html Science writing for general audiences in newspapers and magazines differs from scientific writing for scientists in journal articles, letters, and grant proposals. The general public is limited in its knowledge and its understanding of scientific advancements, so science writers try to seize on the public's interest in science and "translate" discoveries and developments for them. Science writing differs from scientific writing in audience (lay versus expert), purpose (to entertain as well as to inform or persuade), and techniques such as the use of human interest, control of pace and diction, and appeal to interest in and the utility of science. http://tc.eserver.org/29538.html http://tc.eserver.org/29538.html This article investigates the contribution visual rhetoric and rhetorical genre studies (RGS) can make to health care education and communication genres. Through a visual rhetorical analysis of a patient record used in an optometry teaching clinic, this article illustrates that a genre's visual representations provide significant insights into the social action of that genre. These insights are deepened by an insider analysis of the patient record that highlights how content analyses of visual designs need to be elaborated by contextual considerations. A combined visual rhetoric and RGS analysis shows that clinical novices learn to interpret the record's visual cues to safely traverse the complex requirements of this apprenticeship genre. The article demonstrates that visual rhetoric research can meaningfully contribute to the understanding of genres by presenting an enriched contextual analysis achieved by consulting with context insiders. http://tc.eserver.org/29529.html http://tc.eserver.org/29529.html This pilot study obtained baseline information on verbal and visual rhetorics to teach microscopy techniques to college biology majors. We presented cell images to students in cell biology and biology writing classes and then asked them to identify textual, verbal, and visual cues that support microscopy learning. Survey responses suggest that these students recognized some of the rhetorical strategies used and conflated others, revealing intriguing questions for further research in undergraduate microscopy education. http://tc.eserver.org/29255.html http://tc.eserver.org/29255.html '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. http://tc.eserver.org/29063.html http://tc.eserver.org/29063.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/29162.html http://tc.eserver.org/29162.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/29078.html http://tc.eserver.org/29078.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/26692.html http://tc.eserver.org/26692.html Suggests that the interrelated skills of understanding and representing (re-presenting) the abductive inference (often neglected in technical and professional communication pedagogy) are critical for the scientific communicator vis-a -vis kairos, and that science communication instructors ought to develop a pedagogy that includes the instruction of this skill. http://tc.eserver.org/25994.html http://tc.eserver.org/25994.html Expresses concisely why scientists need to use plain language when they write for the public. http://tc.eserver.org/24566.html http://tc.eserver.org/24566.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/21977.html http://tc.eserver.org/21977.html If there is a canonical text in this still-early period of the rhetorical criticism of science, it is the 1953 <i>Nature</i> paper in which James D. Watson and Francis H.C. Crick proposed the double helix structure for DNA. http://tc.eserver.org/21978.html http://tc.eserver.org/21978.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/21232.html http://tc.eserver.org/21232.html Communicators usually focus on audience needs, and rightly so. But scientific communicators may find it equally important to consider the needs and cultural values of the scientist/engineer researchers they work with. Working within the context of their culture, as well as observing (or at least recognizing) their etiquette and standards, can help us become their trusted collaborators. http://tc.eserver.org/19370.html http://tc.eserver.org/19370.html In analysing a scientific debate, there are at least two types of relevant information. One is the debate itself, experienced first hand or via a transcript. Another is what can be called backstage information, which includes the debaters’ preparations, plans, notes, thinking and reservoir of arguments and responses. Familiarity with backstage information can provide insights for understanding the dynamics of the debate. Often, the only individuals with much backstage information are the debaters themselves, plus perhaps one or two advisers or close friends. An observer of the debate seldom has access to backstage information. The next best thing, then, is generalisations based on backstage experience with debates of a similar nature. http://tc.eserver.org/18311.html http://tc.eserver.org/18311.html Аргументацию можно рассматривать как социальную знаковую подсистему (если принять, что системой является язык), которая, как и всякое человеческое знание, создана, по Канту, силой человеческого разума (Kant 1929). Согласно Канту, человеческое знание основано на производимых мышлением операциях структурирования, которые трансформируют ощущения в чувственные образы. Знание есть конструкт человеческого мышления и возникает в результате взаимодействия "узнаваемого" ("knowable") с мыслительными возможностями познающего субъекта. Конструктивные знакообразующие потенции познающих субъектов считаются общими для всех людей. Это не означает, что все познающие субъекты создают идентичные познавательные конструкты; но разнообразие конструктов на некотором абстрактном уровне является отражением категорий, управляющих этим процессом - например, логических (Collins 1954; Kneupper 1977) Всякая социальная реальность становится межсубъектной посредством коммуникации. Важным фактором в становлении или изменении знаковых подсистем является, соответственно, принятие или отвержение структуры знания. Если старая структура знания отвергается или оказывается непригодной для описания или объяснения некоторого объекта, ее место заполняется новой или модифицированной. Поэтому можно говорить о сосуществовании конкурирующих структур знания, каждая из которых, являясь продуктом человеческого разума и человеческого взаимодействия, не может претендовать на абсолютную истину. Следовательно, можно говорить о том, что и аргументативные теории могут быть поразному пригодны для разных целей. http://tc.eserver.org/14053.html http://tc.eserver.org/14053.html 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. http://tc.eserver.org/13923.html http://tc.eserver.org/13923.html Academic disciplines certify knowledge through publication in scholarly journals; therefore, peer review of journal articles is one method of authorizing someone’s speech.  It is possible, however, to see peer review and other strategies as methods by which elites silence or de-authorize voices that pose a threat to their status.  This article discusses four methods of forum control--peer review, denial of forum, public correction, and published ridicule.  Examples are drawn from cases in science.