In this article, the author proposes a methodology for the rhetorical analysis of scientific, technical, mathematical, and engineering (STEM) discourse based on the common topics (topoi) of this discourse. Beginning with work by Miller, Prelli, and other rhetoricians of STEM discourse—but factoring in related studies in cognitive linguistics—she argues for a reimagining of topoi as basic schema that interrelate texts, objects, and writers in STEM communities. Then, she proposes a topical method as a stable, broadly applicable heuristic that may help fit the rhetorical dynamics of the much-studied research article (RA) into the wider context of written technical discourse—exactly the type of improvement that Gross, Fahnestock, and others have proposed. Finally, as an illustration of this argument, the author performs a pilot topical survey of 18 RAs representing six STEM disciplines. This survey yields a set of 30 topoi used samplewide that can form a starting point for future surveys. She answers challenges to the significance and relevance of a topical method and finishes by sketching some future applications of the method that can move rhetoric of science beyond the RA.

This article reports on the types of scientific writing found in two primary grade classrooms. These results are part of a larger two-year study whose purpose was to examine the development of informational writing of second- and third-grade students as they participated in integrated science-literacy instruction. The primary purpose of the present article is to report on the “genre set” (Bazerman, 2004) established in this community around science instruction. Using Halliday’s (1993) Systemic Functional Linguistics approach and Hasan’s (1985, 1994) Generic Structure Potential, I describe the genres of scientific writing and drawing activities in which these children regularly participated. Findings indicate that children participated in several distinct scientific genres, some of which were flexible, and some of which were highly constrained by the teachers. Each of the genres represented a distinct purpose, structure, and linguistic nature of scientific discourse. The influence of this particular genre set on children’s appropriation of scientific discourse is discussed.

This article deals with how economists present their new knowledge claim in the genre of the research article. In the discipline of economics today, the claim is typically included not only in the obvious results/discussion section(s) but also in three other locations of the article: the abstract, the introduction, and the conclusion. The present study considers whether the rhetorical function of each of these three text parts has an impact on the linguistic realization of the claim. The corpus consists of 25 articles from two international journals, European Economic Review and Journal of International Economics. The investigation shows that economist authors commonly draw their readers’ attention to the claim by means of signaling expressions such as Our main finding is that . . . , not only in the introduction but also in the conclusion. The simple present seems to be the preferred tense in the claim sentence, even in the conclusion ( We find . . . / We argue . . .). The discussion of these findings includes the views of discipline insiders, providing clear indications of the strategic nature of the research communication process.

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.

Many engineering undergraduates receive their first and perhaps most intensive exposure to engineering communication through writing lab reports in lab courses taught by graduate teaching assistants (TAs). Most of the TAs' teaching of writing happens through their comments on students' lab reports. Technical writing faculty need to be aware of TAs' response practices so they can build on or counteract that instruction as needed. This study examines the response practices of two TAs and the ways the practices shifted after the TAs began using a grading rubric. The analysis reveals distinct patterns in focus and mode, some reflecting best practices and some not. It also indicates encouraging changes after the TAs started using the grading rubric. The TAs' marginalia became more content focused and specific and, perhaps most important, less authoritative and more likely to reflect a coaching mode. The article concludes with implications for technical writing courses.

The traditional distinction between writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines (WID) as writing to learn versus learning to write understates WID's focus on learning in the disciplines. Advocates of WID have described learning as socialization, but little research addresses how writing disciplinary discourses in disciplinary settings encourages socialization into the disciplines. Data from interviews with students who wrote lab reports in a biology lab suggest five ways in which writing promotes learning in scientific disciplines. Drawing on theories of situated learning, the authors argue that apprenticeship genres can encourage socialization into disciplinary communities.

The impersonalizing role passive voice plays in scientific discourse is well known. Analysis of the Methods sections of nine medical research articles shows that metonymy is another frequent strategy used to create anonymous authors/agents. Discourse agents were categorized into four semantic domains: familial lay, nonfamilial lay, authorial professional, and nonauthorial professional. Agents were investigated in relation to impersonalization and social identity. Results show that although possessive/causative metonyms produce generic participants and reduce most rival researchers to “previous studies,” significant health professionals are often referred to in terms of representational/locative metonyms, highlighting their authoritative social identities. Additionally, authors are either highly visible or, if they choose to disguise themselves, they do so quite drastically using impersonalization devices or agentless passives. In contrast, for other researchers and health professionals, co-occurrence of metonymy and passive voice is generally avoided; nevertheless, these agents are usually more hidden than are the present authors.

The history of writing to learn college science is tied to the development of laboratory methods. Such student-centered learning was widely hailed in the 1890s as student enrollments increased dramatically and a backlash grew against lecture and recitation methods. However, as the author shows using archival examples from Dartmouth College, Amherst College, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, science educators have too often relied on reductive measures of students' grasp of content rather than the kind of argument about scientific findings that is the stuff of real scientific writing and of real science. Although some contemporary science educators continue to tout the value of writing to learn science, the laboratory report or research article itself is a genre that dominates student activities but still largely suffers from the ills of its predecessors. Ultimately, the author calls for a renewed focus on laboratory writing, for both science education and writing studies, to fulfill the promise of previous reform efforts.

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.

Despite the widespread acceptance of many kinds of nonliterary texts for first-year writing courses, primary scientific communication (PSC) remains largely absent. Objections to including PSC, especially that it is not rhetorically appropriate or sufficiently rich, do not hold. We argue for including PSC and give some practical suggestions for developing courses and designing assignments using PSC

Researchers studying science communication have criticized the sensationalism that often appears in journalistic accounts of science news. This article looks at the linguistic sources of that sensationalism by analyzing the journalistic coverage of the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study of hormone replacement research, which was abruptly canceled in July 2002 and became the subject of many news articles. The article uses a coding system to analyze seven magazine and newspaper articles that appeared shortly after the WHI study was halted. The coding shows a high incidence of concrete nouns in the journalistic accounts and looks at the ways the syntax of their attributions are ordered to emphasize vivid nouns, the ways their verbs contribute to narrative, and some of the narrative devices employed in the journalistic reporting.

This article recounts how a communications and an engineering department developed a collaborative teaching venture—a linked writing course—to provide mentorship for students learning how to write lab reports.

The question of whether written genres can be learned through explicit teaching or can only be acquired implicitly through writing in authentic contexts remains unanswered. The question is complicated by the different parameters associated with teaching genre to first- or second-language learners, to children or adults, in settings in which the genre is authentically used or in settings (such as writing classes) in which genre learning is decontextualized. Quantitative studies of teaching genre offer mixed results, but in particular, there are no control-group studies of first-language adults. In this paper, we report research on teaching the genre of the laboratory report to first-language university students in biology labs. In this posttest-only control-group study, the treatment was the use of LabWrite, online instructional materials for teaching the lab report. We hypothesized that the treatment group would be more effective in: (1) learning the scientific concept of the lab, and (2) learning to apply scientific reasoning. Results of holistic scoring of lab reports for hypothesis 1 and primary-trait scoring for hypothesis 2 showed that the lab reports of the LabWrite students were rated as significantly higher than those of the control group. A third hypothesis, that students using LabWrite would develop a significantly more positive attitude toward writing lab reports, was also supported. These findings suggest that first-language adults can learn genre through explicit teaching in a context of authentic use of the genre.

Drawing on existing work on popularizations, this investigation of book-length scholarly essays by practicing scientists across three disciplines reveals a hybrid genre that is neither popularization nor research report. The study utilizes both textual analysis and personal commentary from the writer-researchers to achieve a three-way comparison between the popularization, research article, and the book-length scholarly essay that clarifies how these essays contribute to the authors’ academic agendas. Writing for both a general audience and a jury of their peers, these academics employ an argumentative generic structure. Such argumentation develops a rhetoric of rational inquiry, where understanding how answers to perplexing problems are arrived at is just as important as the answers themselves. This genre also suggests the possible resurfacing of the essayist tradition in the sciences, as these practicing researchers engage with wider audiences in theoretical and philosophical speculation.

Researchers studying science communication often examine how texts addressed to different audiences contribute to the formation of knowledge on a given issue. This article examines how arguments on scientific issues travel from text to text by considering how certain figures of speech persist from version to version. It uses a specialized genre of articles appearing in Science and Nature that introduces research reports appearing later in the issue. These pieces refer explicitly to a research report in the same issue, and in addition to their own agendas, re-present the researchers’ claims and supporting evidence. To investigate how the core of an argument survives, the expression claims and lines of support in epitomizing figures are compared. The articles sampled suggest that the figure antithesis, embodyingsingle-difference arguments,often persists from version to version. But in the process of perfecting a figured expression, arguments may be subtly changed in subsequent versions.

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.

Much of the literature concerning participant relationships in academic writing has discussed features that project the stance, identity, or credibility of the writer, rather than examining how writers engage with readers. In contrast, this article focuses on strategies that presuppose the active role of addressees, examining six key ways that writers seek explicitly to establish the presence of their readers in the discourse. Based on an analysis of 240 published research articles from eight disciplines and insider informant interviews, the author examines the dialogic nature of persuasion in research writing through the ways writers (a) address readers directly using inclusive or second person pronouns and interjections and (b) position them with questions, directives, and references to shared knowledge. The analysis underlines the importance of audience engagement in academic argument and provides insights into how the discoursal preferences of disciplinary communities rhetorically construct readers.

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.

Research on citations has generally examined citations as part of a system of rewards or as a rhetorical tool for strengthening arguments. This study examines the role of citations both as reward and as rhetoric. The reward system was examined by tracing over time the citation patterns of 13 research articles by two groups of scientists in chaos theory. The rhetorical practices were examined by determining how these articles were cited, by reviewing 609 citations of the 13 research articles. The analysis revealed that scientists consistently used five rhetorical practices: (1) using citations in the introduction, (2) using authors' names in the citation, (3) using the citation in a statement that asserts a high level of certainty, (4) using citations to create a research space, and (5) combining the use of the authors' names with placement in the introduction. These features indicated the articles' centrality in scientific discourse.

This article examines the strategies used to read science articles written in the IMRD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion) format. Drawing on the results of a survey conducted at an international conference of science editors, it shows how three reader roles—those of the scientist, editor, and reviewer—influence reading strategies. Overall, respondents were more likely to read in IMRD sequence as editors than as reviewers. When reading for personal gain as scientists, they read strategically, not in IMRD order. Other variables considered were the mother tongues (native English or nonnative English), ages, and scientific backgrounds of readers. Nonnative English speakers tended to focus on news-rich sections, especially when reading as scientists. No evidence was found of an effect of age, but there was some evidence of a difference between readers from the hard sciences and those from the humanities. The findings have implications for our understanding of the function and development of the research article and for teaching scientists how to write for publication.

Commentary: When this essay first appeared more than 10 years ago, it built on a small but substantial body of scholarship that declared scientific writing an appropriate field for rhetorical analysis. In the last 10 years, studies of scientific writing for both expert and lay audiences have increased exponentially, drawing on the long-established disciplines of the history and philosophy of science. These newer studies, however, differ widely in approach. Many take the perspective of cultural critique (e.g., the work of Bruno Latour and Stephen Woolgar), whereas others use the tools of discourse analysis (e.g., Greg Myers, M.A.K. Halliday, and J. R. Martin). But, application of rhetorical theory also thrives in the work of John Angus Campbell, Alan Gross, Charles Bazerman, Jean Dietz Moss, Lawrence J. Prelli, Carolyn Miller, and many others. Randy Allen Harris offers a useful introduction to this field in Landmark Essays on Rhetoric in Science (1997). “Accommodating Science” applies ideas from classical rhetoric and techniques of close reading typical of discourse analysis to the question of what happens when scientific reports travel from expert to lay publications. This change in forum causes a shift in genre from forensic to celebratory and a shift in stasis from fact and cause to evaluation and action. These changes in genre, audience, and purpose inevitably affect the material and manner of re-presentation in predictable ways. Two concerns informed this study 10 years ago: the impact of science reporting on public deliberation and the nature of technical and professional writing courses. These concerns have, if anything, increased (e.g., the campaign on global warming), warranting continued scholarly investigation of the gap between the public's right to know and the public's ability to understand.

Commentary: When “Thucydides and the Plague in Athens: The Roots of Scientific Writing” was written in 1988, genre analysis was an emerging area for scholarship. Thucydides' Historiae, which includes numerous political speeches in context, provides a rich resource for exploring the ancient roots of rhetorical genres. Thucydides' text also sheds light on the origin of a specific scientific genre - the medical case history. In describing a devastating plague in Athens, Thucydides uses the Hippocratic approach, following an ancient genre or form that is remarkably similar to the modern medical case history. Thucydides' case history of the Athenian plague enabled 20th-century epidemiologists to establish a diagnosis of the illness (influenza plus toxic shock syndrome), predict its return, and validate their diagnosis during a 1987 flu epidemic. Although “Thucydides and the Plague in Athens” only hints at Thucydides' genre knowledge, his case history of the plague and his presentation of speeches display considerable insight into the social construction and function of these recurring forms. In explaining the speeches in his text, for example, Thucydides says, “[M]y habit has been to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them by the various occasions” (1.22). He prefaces his account of the plague with a statement of purpose: to help future scholars recognize future outbreaks of the same illness. These remarks, viewed in the context of genre theory today, suggest that Thucydides not only knew how to use genres but also understood their social origin and purposes.

Examines tense, aspect, and voice choices in the reporting verbs in a corpus of research articles from the "Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine." Investigates how such choices correlate with other syntactic elements in the citations, as well as with the discourse functions of the citations in their contexts.

Hedging refers to linguistic strategies that qualify categorical commitment to express possibility rather than certainty. In scientific writing, hedging is central to effective argument: Hedging is a rhetorical means of gaining reader acceptance of claims, allowing writers to convey their attitude to the truth of their statements and to anticipate possible objections. Because hedges allow writers to express claims with precision, caution, and modesty, they are a significant resource for academics. However, little is known about the way hedging is typically expressed in particular domains or the particular functions it serves in different genres. This article identifies the major forms, functions, and distribution of hedges in a corpus of 26 molecular biology research articles and describes the importance of hedging in this genre.

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.

Rhetorical studies on experimental research articles in science have focused predominantly on introductions and discussions. The contextual nature of Results sections—the empirical heart of a scientific article—remains largely unexplored, however. What is known about the content of these sections comes from prescriptive style guides, which define Results as purely expository, leaving the argumentation to other sections of the article. This study examines one eminent biochemist's publications over time and a sampling of current articles authored by other biochemists. Six rhetorical moves were identified: (a) justifications for methodological selections, (b) interpretations of experimental results, (c) evaluative comments on experimental data, (d) statements citing agreement with preestablished studies, (e) statements disclosing experimental discrepancies, and (f) statements admitting interpretive perplexities. This investigation demonstrates that biochemists explicitly argue for the validity of their experimental data by employing certain rhetorical moves. Moreover, the findings challenge the traditional lore that Results sections engage in only simple, factual reporting.

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.

In this study, we analyzed how students from different interpretive communities shape their academic texts. Prospective educational researchers, prospective reading specialists, prospective teachers, and prospective nurses read an educational research article from which we had deleted the discussion section. After they had read the article, subjects completed it by writing a discussion section. We analyzed subjects' texts in terms of writers' manipulation of both content and procedural knowledge. Our findings suggest that mere participation in an interpretive community without explicit instruction in its ways of writing can enhance students' ability to write in that community. Our findings also suggest that participation in one interpretive community can facilitate writing in another community, provided the communities share discourse conventions.

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.

Two famous passages in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War illustrate the origins of scientific writing and shed further light on the relationship between scientific writing and epideictic rhetoric. Thucydides' account of the plague in Athens in 430 B.C. uses a structure based on the Hippocratic approach, as well as “scientific” medical terminology. The report of the plague is immediately followed by Pericles' Funeral Oration. Similar themes appear in both segments, but the rhetorical strategies are markedly different. This article analyzes the juxtaposed examples of scientific and epideictic discourse by applying theories from rhetoric and sociology advanced by Perelman, Fahnestock, Havelock, and Durkheim, as well as schema theory and reader-response theories.

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.

Introductions to research articles (RAs) have become an important site for the analysis of academic writing. However, analysts have apparently not considered whether RA introductions typically include statements of principal findings. In contrast, this issue is often addressed in the manuals and style guides surveyed, most advocating the desirability of announcing principal findings (APFs) in RA introductions. Therefore, a study of actual practice in two leading journals from two different fields (physics and educational psychology) was undertaken. In the Physical Review 45% of the introductions sampled contained APFs (with some increase in percentage over the last 40 years), while in the Journal of Educational Psychology the percentage fell to under 7%. These figures are at variance with the general trend of recommendations in primary and secondary sources. Thus preliminary evidence points to (a) a mismatch between descriptive practice and prescriptive advice and (b) diversity in this rhetorical feature between the two fields.

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.