While the IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) format is common in scientific writing, it may not currently be as ubiquitous as often thought. We undertook a systematic, corpus-based study of primary section headings in research articles across a range of STEM disciplines to investigate adherence to the IMRAD structure in relation to type of study (computational, empirical, or theoretical) and field. We identified four categories of structure: IMRAD, IMRAD+ (IMRAD with additional sections and/or different order), Nested IMRAD (multi-part studies), and Non-IMRAD. Papers in biology mainly used an IMRAD format, while less than half in engineering or social sciences did so. While empirical papers tended to use IMRAD formats, most computational papers did not. Thus, our findings show that IMRAD is a common but not universal structure for contemporary scientific writing. Awareness of these differences should encourage teachers of scientific and technical writing and scholars of writing studies to pay closer attention to the actual structural forms used in different STEM disciplines and with different methodological types of research studies.

To investigate how college students understand and use cloud technology for collaborative writing, the authors studied two asynchronous online courses, on science communication and on technical communication. Students worked on a group assignment (3–4 per group) using Google Docs and individually reflected on their experience writing collaboratively. This article explores leadership and how it interacts with team knowledge making and the collaborative writing process. Guidelines are outlined for instructors interested in adopting collaborative, cloud-based assignments, and the tension between providing clear instructional guidance for student teams and allowing teams to embrace the ambiguity and messiness of virtual collaboration are discussed.

Aristotle’s science writing serves as an instance of a classical science writer at work. Applying his theory of writing found in his Rhetoric, Poetics, Posterior Analytics, and Categories treatises to his History of Animals illustrates his work as a writer of life science. As rhetorical tools, his theory of tropes and figures and his theory of the model as developed in his theory of definitions and the enthymeme work as epistemic strategies. The essay concludes that further study should examine other rhetorical dimensions of his science writing.

This article analyzes a proposal submitted to a funding unit in Michigan Technological University by a PhD Forestry student. A rhetorical-cultural approach of the text provides evidence to argue that scientific writing is rooted in a cultural practice that valorizes certain kinds of thought, practices, rituals, and symbols; that a scientist’s work is grounded and shaped by an ideological paradigm; hence, scientific texts have material existence. We find out that science writing is kairotic, selective, and persuasive. The results of the analysis provide enough insights for technical communicators to think about the role that institutions and disciplines play in knowledge production. Thus, technical communicators will not only think about rhetorical moves when they are composing, they will also think about the articulations between contexts and ideological practices and how they shape the identity of writers and communicators.

Many science students believe that scientific writing is most impressive (and most professionally acceptable) when impersonal, dense, complex, and packed with jargon. In particular, they have the idea that legitimate scientific writing must suppress the subjectivity of the human voice. But science students can mature into excellent writers whose voices are clear, interesting, unburdensome, efficient, and accurate. To do this, they must abandon their ponderous scientific voices and use techniques that produce good style. When I teach for the Science Communication Center at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, I focus on helping students improve their scientific voice. I use workshop-style instruction, review of student writing, tutorial staff, and free online tutorials that I have developed. This article meditates upon the nature of good scientific voice as it analyzes examples of student writing to show improvements made through specific stylistic techniques.

The International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, recently established by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is an alleged attempt at public outreach. The NSF encourages scientists to submit visualizations that would appeal to non-expert audiences by displaying their work in an annual “special feature” in Science magazine, and each year they present the winning image on the cover of Science as the ultimate reward. Although the NSF advertizes the competition as an attempt to educate non-scientists, the visualizations lack sufficient textual explanation in the Science special feature articles and do not demonstrate clear significance for current issues in science. This article assesses the actual motivations behind the NSF's “Visualization Challenge,” given the lack of accompanying textual information, and it explores the consequences of allowing “scientific” visualizations to float into the public sphere unexplained. It will be shown that the spirit of this competition exemplifies the current shift from “public understanding of science” to “public appreciation of science” in the growing field of Science Communication, particularly through the technique of “framing” devices. This shift in objective, accentuated in the realm of visual communication, reinforces the public's view of science as a mythic authority.

One of the signatures of scientific writing is its ability to present the claims of science as if they were “untouched by human hands.” In the early years of experimental education, researchers achieved this by adopting a citational practice that led to the sedimentation of their cardinal method, the analysis of variance, and their standard for statistical significance, 0.05. This essentially divorces their statistical framework from its historical conditions of production. Researchers suppressed their own agency through the use of passive voice and nominalization. With their own agency out of the way, they imbued the methods, results, and presentational devices themselves with the active agency of the situation through the use of personification. Such a depiction creates the impression that the researchers and audience stand on equal epistemic ground as interested witnesses to the autonomous activity of a third party, the method, which churns out the brute facts of 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.

Le CPTSC (Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication) cree dans les annees 1970 a pour objectif de promouvoir les programmes en communication scientifique et technique, de developper les possibilites pour echanger les idees et les informations concernant les programmes, la recherche et les opportunites de carriere en communication scientifique et technique, d'aider au developpement de nouveaux programmes, de promouvoir l'echange d'information entre l'organisme et les parties interessees. L'A. propose un historique de ce conseil

Examining the history of science from the perspective of metaphor suggests that there are few differences between the literal and the metaphorical in scientific discourse. The central role of metaphors in science seems to ensure that science is open-ended, suggesting that conceptions of reality will always be open to change and interpretation.

This select bibliography highlights research on technical communication published by, for or about Canadians. It classifies Canadian research by form (books and articles) and by subject (translation studies; technology studies; graphics studies; historical studies; studies of the profession; specialty studies; genre studies; and linguistics/stylistic analyses).

Prescriptions for scientific writing about jargon and the passive voice are based on principles of writing presumed to be universal. They do not take into account that language varies with rhetorical setting, that scientists report their research to peer scientists, and that simplification of scientific language is more often translation than synonymy. Jargon, i.e., scientific terminology, is essential for designating new entities for which the language has no name. It makes for economy and for the accuracy and precision required in scientific research. The passive voice is unavoidable because scientists focus on the subject of their research as objects. The proscription of the passive voice and scientific jargon is rooted in the expectation that scientists write so as to be understood by the general reader.

As analysts of scientific writing begin to modify their stance against the passive voice and explore the complexities of its use, more research is needed on the rhetorical functions it serves in scientific writing. An analysis of twelve articles reporting experimental studies in speech-language pathology revealed consistently higher percentages of passive structures in the Method and Results sections, with relatively lower percentages in the Introduction and Discussion sections. These findings suggest that passive structures are more appropriate for expository purposes, in those sections where the author's rhetorical role is to describe procedures and present data. In contrast, active structures are more appropriate for argumentative purposes, in those sections where the author is criticizing previous research or advocating a new thesis.

Recent studies indicate that scientific research is part of prewriting in the scientific writing process. This article argues that since invention in scientific research is discovery of the unknown of the scientific community and invention in writing is discovery of ideas within existing knowledge, scientific research cannot be part of prewriting in the scientific writing process. Researchers should be aware that inventional heuristics introduced in freshman composition courses, which serve to discover ideas within existing knowledge, are not always applicable in real-life situations where scientific writing occurs, because the content of discourse is sometimes given in these situations.

This article argues that an understanding of professional and popular science writers' goals provides a basis for both explaining and evaluating their language use. Rhetoricians fault scientists for unnecessarily stilted language; scientists fault popularists for inaccuracy and sensationalism. Although these charges are sometimes justified, they deflect attention from the obstacles writers face and the ways in which they use language to overcome these obstacles.

Technical writers need a historical perspective in order to distinguish between enduring and transitory writing standards, to understand the variety of past styles in building future styles, and to give the profession a better sense of self-identity. To overcome the problems in developing a historical perspective, such as a dearth of artifacts to examine and the peculiarities in rhetorical time and place which undercut attempts to generalize on historical information, the 200 year-old federal collection of patents is offered as a solution. This collection of patents is also very often the only remaining written work of the ordinary mechanic of the nineteenth century, and this collection truly reflects technical not legal, business, or science writing.

This study examines three dimensions of paragraph topic sentence use in a corpus of scientific writing made up of research articles in biochemistry, geology, psychology, and sociology: 1. frequency of topic sentence use; 2. variation of topic sentence frequency in five rhetorical divisions; 3. variation of topic sentence types in these rhetorical divisions. Although the scientific writers used topic sentences in 55 percent of their paragraphs, differences existed among rhetorical divisions as to topic sentence frequency: writers used topic sentences quite often in results, results/discussion, and discussion, but quite seldom in methodology. Furthermore, topic sentence types differed across the divisions. In methodology, the topic announcement predominated; in discussion and introduction, the propositional occurred most often; in results and results/discussion, there was a balance of the two types. All these variations are thought to be related to differences in function (reporting facts versus interpreting) and texture (attributive versus logical text) across the rhetorical divisions. These variations may also affect ways of teaching paragraph skills in scientific writing.

The underlying principles of graphic theory have been largely ignored by the technical and scientific communication community. This impatience with theory creates numerous problems for readers of technical information since about 30 percent of such material is graphic in nature. This article offers an overview of the major theoretical schools that have some importance for these fields and discusses their implications for the design and preparation of referential texts.

Using examples from journal articles in the natural sciences, the author argues that scientific writing has conventions of personality which are rhetorically constrained. Writers represent themselves and their readers at specific junctures in the text through the use of pronominals, verbs entailing reasoning, modals expressing possibility or obligation, and adjectives or adverbs which qualify assertions. Seven rhetorical acts are identified which are likely to bring the writer and/or the reader to the surface of the text: 1) acknowledging assistance; 2) referring to one's own research; 3) justifying hypothesis selection; 4) justifying methods chosen or departures from established methods; 5) explaining adjustments to results or inability to interpret results; 6) stating conclusions and comparing conclusions to those of other studies; and 7) discussing implications for reader behavior.

A great deal of empirical research has been done in the past to test writing rules commonly taught in the classroom. To date, however, no one has constructed a deep theory of the relationship between cognition and writing that confirms the writing rules and explains why they work. Grunig, Ramsey, and Schneider construct a deep theory of the relationship between language, cognition, and writing — based upon theories and research in the fields of cognitive psychology, social psychology, philosophy of language, information theory, reading theory, rhetoric, and systems theory. The authors build a theory of writing that contains fifteen definitions, eleven premises, and eleven principles. The eleven axiomatic principles subsume practical writing rules, especially science writing rules, and offer a broad framework for research. The article concludes with results of several exploratory studies using the “signaled stopping technique” to observe the cognitive effects of writing.

Medical and scientific writing have traditionally occasioned debate. The earliest critics of scientific language were harsh because they were promoting a plain style of writing free from rhetorical embellishment, not because they questioned the writing ability of those they censured. Writing and language were central parts of scientific inquiry. Modern critics are likewise frequently harsh and derisive, but they have lost sight of the integrated approach to language and science that their predecessors had. This article examines three texts published within the last ten years that seem to reverse some trends in medical writing. Tapping non-scientific fields from philology to aesthetics to composition theory, these texts suggest ways in which the humanities can be reintegrated with the study of medical and scientific writing.

Although science and scientific communication have traditionally been considered objective and non-rhetorical, current thinking suggests that science is, to some degree, dependent on perception and belief, and that scientific communication reflects the values of its author. Sociobiology, a subset of evolutionary theory, considers the degree to which animal behavior is genetically determined. The question of the applicability of sociobiology to human behavior was brought to public attention by E. O. Wilson in Sociobiology [1], initiating a prolonged argument between Wilson and other scientists. This series of exchanges demonstrates a good deal of subjectivity on the part of the writers, and provides one example of a scientific debate that relies on traditional rhetorical techniques of persuasion.

With the rise of science, 18th-century logic and rhetoric began to make use of inductive patterns of discourse. In logic, William Duncan discussed two methods of organizing extended discourse, the methods of analysis and synthesis. Analysis represents the movement of thought as the thinker or writer works through a problem to discover its solution. This method is actually an early form of what is now known as problem solving that Joseph Priestley, a rhetorician as well as a scientist, introduced into rhetoric. He uses analysis in his scientific writing, especially in his Experiments on Different Kinds of Air, in the form of a five-stage mental operation or heuristic that records the progress of his thoughts as he experimented on air to isolate and identify oxygen.

Roman Jakobson's six-factored model of verbal communication provides the schema to generate formal definitions of business writing and technical writing. It also enables us to apply these definitions to communication in the world of work. The six factors—addresser, addressee, context, message, contact, and code—have six parallel functions—emotive, conative, referential, poetic, phatic, and metalingual. Each of these factor/function pairs is present to some degree in all types of writing, from technical writing to poetry. However, in certain types of written communication a few functions dominate the others. For instance, the referential or informational function is primary in technical and scientific writing. An examination of different binary functional relationships yields distinctions among various types of writing. For example, the inspection of the you versus it relationship yields the most substantive theoretical distinction between persuasive business writing and technical writing. From this single theoretical distinction emerge various practical aspects of communication, such as good will, the “you-attitude,” and the techniques of behavior modification applicable in business writing; and objectivity, clarity, and precision of meaning aimed for in technical writing.

Poster sessions—also known as science markets—play an increasingly important part in the presentation of the results of scientific investigations at symposia and congresses. However, it often appears that scientists, technical communicators, and graphic designers have hardly any idea of the purpose of a poster session. This paper deals with several aspects of this fairly new phenomenon. The willingness of the visitor at a poster session to read a particular poster is determined by his interest in the subject, the structure and quantity of the scientific information involved, and the presentation as such. The person presenting the poster can influence only the last three factors. The poster can best be designed on Din A3 format (29.7 cm × 42 cm) and photographically enlarged to poster size (1 m × 1.5 m). A science market with posters may also contribute to improve scientific communication within a research institute, in combination with the conventional in-house presentations.

At present the ethical concerns for technical communicators are narrowly defined in terms of management issues. Ethical problems cannot be solved by such a simplistic view. Instead we need to explore the ethical nature of the professional fields technical and science writing supports, the ethical positions in closely related fields, and the work that has already been accomplished in the general area of communication ethics. Once we have established such a foundation, we can begin to explore the most basic influences inherent in language uses on ethical concerns.

The article consists of four sets of questions designed to help the author, reviewer, and editor examine the medical/scientific manuscript from four different aspects: 1) its medical/scientific contribution to its field (Gross Examination); 2) contents and coverage of topic (In-depth Examination); 3) rhetoric and punctuation (Minute Examination); and 4) the manuscript-package assembled for transmission to journal editor (Components of the Manuscript). When such examinations are used one at the time as needed, they will help individuals to separate content from mechanics of presentation and to distinguish scientific evidence from erroneous speculation. They will also help authors, reviewers, and editors to judge objectively the scientific worthiness of the paper, to improve the literary presentation, and to elevate the quality of effective medical/scientific communications.

Medical and science writing are identified as areas of specialization for writers. The role of creative distractions and the use of the nonconscious are explained. Research, self-judgment, criticism, and practice exercises are cited as methods to solve basic problems. Solutions to the problems of specialization, expertise, and the “shifting audience” problem are also offered. The creative possibilities in medical and science writing are illustrated in the juxtaposition of fiction and nonfiction writing. Four major areas of career opportunities are presented for the medical or science writer.

The fiftieth anniversary of the death of Camille Flammarion, the great French astronomer, is the occasion for the authors of this article to review the beginnings of modern science writing. Flammarion's Popular Astronomy may be considered the first step in the popularization of science. The relation of science communication to other disciplines is discussed as well as the contemporary approach. One of the tasks of the popularizer is to present a correct image of science to the public. The authors conclude with a statement of UNESCO's involvement in the popularization of science.

Technical and scientific writing students can approximate professional style by determining the types and incidence of sentence openers in their own manuscripts. This article analyzes a variety of technical and scientific writing and suggests that students analyze their own writing in the same manner.

The problem of specialization in news reporting is enormously complex and often confusing, with arguments centering around how much expertise the specialized reporter should have and how he should acquire it. In perhaps no other area is the complexity and confusion greater or more perplexing than in science writing. Strengths and weaknesses of specialized training for science writing were explored in a mail survey of 152 newspaper, magazine, and free lance science writers in the United States and Canada. Advantages and disadvantages of specialized training were identified through analysis of comments which many science writers made on the questionnaires they returned. Some recommendations for potential science writers are presented.

Problem areas in science news coverage were identified as part of a survey of the accuracy of science news reporting in newspapers. Mail questionnaires and newspaper clippings were sent to the major sources cited in the articles. Common problem areas in science writing were identified by examining the comments scientists made on the questionnaires. Specifically, seven problem areas are discussed here: finding angles, writing leads, quoting accurately, using language correctly, interpreting technical conclusions properly, avoiding sensationalism, and using the words “cure” and “breakthrough.”

It is misleading to take for granted that scientific writing need not be pleasurable reading. Aiming only for clarity, simplicity, brevity, and directness, the writer may still produce writing that is tedious reading. The student scientist or engineer may learn to write with style and creative imagination by developing sensitive critical faculties through reading literature (even scientific literature) that displays these qualities.