Drawing on rhetorical genre studies, we explore research article abstracts created by generative artificial intelligence (AI). These synthetic genres—genre-ing activities shaped by the recursive nature of language learning models in AI-driven text generation—are of interest as they could influence informational quality, leading to various forms of disordered information such as misinformation. We conduct a two-part study generating abstracts about (a) genre scholarship and (b) polarized topics subject to misinformation. We conclude with considerations about this speculative domain of AI text generation and dis/misinformation spread and how genre approaches may be instructive in its identification.

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.

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.

Driving research questions from the prevailing issues and interests and developing from them new theories, formulas, algorithms, methods, and designs, and linking them to the interests of the larger audience is a vital component of scientific research papers. The present article discusses outlining purposes or stating the nature of the present research, and listing research questions or hypotheses in the introduction of academic papers. This corpus-based genre study focuses particularly on Move 3 of the model “occupying the niche.” The results indicating disciplinary variation show that the writers of Computer Science (CS) research articles, over the years have developed an increased use of outlining purpose/stating the nature of the present research, having the characteristics of purposive, descriptive, extension of the previous work, contrast to the existing work, brevity, complexity, and a description of methodology. It also shows that listing research questions or hypothesis may have distinctively different functions in developing genres as compared to the established ones such as physics.

This research article reports the results of an online survey distributed among technical writing instructors in 2006. The survey aimed to examine how we teach intercultural communication in basic technical writing courses: our current practices and methods. The article discusses three major challenges that instructors may face when teaching about intercultural communication. These challenges concern teacher preparation, time and proposed goals and objectives, and teaching materials and methods. This article provides some suggestions for addressing the challenges and enriching a technical writing curriculum.

This research article investigates new developments in the representation of the intercultural component in textbooks for a service technical writing course. Through textual analysis, using quantitative and qualitative techniques, I report discourse analysis of 15 technical writing textbooks published during 1993–2006. The theoretical and practical elements of intercultural teaching have been expanded in recent years, but this progress is quite slow. This article provides some directions in which the textbooks can be revised. Such an analysis may be of interest to textbook writers and educators.

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.

This article examines the frequency and discourse functions of 752 active transitive clauses in a 66,500-word corpus of sixteen research articles in the physical sciences. The overall rate of actives was only 34 percent; the rates were lowest in the Methods (12%) and Abstracts (27%), higher in Introductions (41%) and Results (40%), and highest in Discussions (44%) and Conclusions (52%). The active was often required because of the principle of end-weight. Throughout the research article actives with “real world” grammatical subjects were used to state “scientific truths.” The most prominent other functions tended to vary from section to section and to correlate somewhat with the semantic subcategory of the grammatical subject. Active clauses with human subjects were used to cite research and to introduce metadiscourse, while ones with discourse subjects were used to introduce graphics, and ones with research process subjects and research product subjects were used to make evidential statements about results.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.