From the time that rhetoric first differentiated itself from philosophy there has been a widespread belief that the craft of rhetoric is, to a considerable extent, the art of deception with impunity. As early as Plato's Gorgias dialogue and as recently as a proposed rule from the Food and Drug Administration, one finds those who argue that even the skills of technical and scientific communication are, in effect, artful forms of misrepresentation. These critics indict not only those who sell and apologize-easy targets-but also those those avowed purpose is merely to make messages clearer. Can it be true that all forms of communication skill, even those that enhance clarity and precision, are merely elegant forms of lying? Does the word "rhetoric" deserve its tainted historical connotation? Or, even worse, is writing itself an inherently self-serving (i.e. misleading) way of adapting to one's environment?.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

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).

J. B. S. Haldane, in attempting to show connections between Marxist political theory and Darwinian evolutionary theory, blurs the generic characteristics of political and scientific discourse. Read from the perspective of Bakhtin, this blurring of genres is also a blurring of ideologies. Haldane's essays thus contribute to our understanding of the cultural dimensions of scientific activities and accordingly help re‐define concepts of genre in scientific writing.

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.

As with On the Origin of Species, we find that the work to be considered here-The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs-demonstrates Darwin's use of hedges to project the ethos of a cautious scientist. Hedges are linguistic elements such as perhaps, might, to a certain degree, or it is possible that. When people use hedges, they signal that they are taking a cautious stance on the truth-value of the referential matter they seek to convey. Hedges are a type of metadiscourse, a level of writing in which authors draw attention to the very art of writing itself-they discourse about their discourse (Crismore, Talking to Readers). This metadiscursive trait, however, represents only one aspect of Darwin's rhetoric. In Coral Reefs, he sculpts a key chapter into a Ciceronian form so pure that one might have to return to the Renaissance to find a parallel, and within this larger form, he strategically places hedges and other metadiscourse. He, further, employs visuals (drawings, diagrams, and maps) for persuasion at those points were the tension between his audiences preconceptions and the new theory being presented threatens to reach a dangerous level. The visuals and the metadiscursive commentary about them, also, help to establish his ethos and to build the argument for his theory of coral reefs. These elements, so perfectly embodied in Coral Reefs, were the rhetorical tools of an extremely sophisticated scientific mind which has much to pass down to our own conception of scientific writing. All too many of today's professional, academic, and textbook writers view exposition of findings as being all that is needed-and other parts of the written document, including visuals, can be handled even more perfunctorily: facts by themselves are enough, after all, according to this view. Darwin, however, believed that bald facts and blunt explanations were insufficient, as he clearly indicates in his A utobiography. There, he writes that in Origin he had first presented a short and rather vague discussion of his own innovative idea in the area of embryology. Later, other scientists got the for the new idea. Darwin felt no bitterness, for he knew that the fault had been his alone and that this fault was a rhetorical one: I failed to impress my readers; and he who succeeds in doing so deserves, in my opinion, all the credit (Barlow 125). Facts and blunt explanations were not enough-rhetorical strategies were needed to impress the reader-even (and we have some reason to say especially) professional scientists. Since, even granting the A utobiography, there will always remain a question about the precise nature of the intended audience for Origin, and since, moreover, a cloud of non-scientific, anachronistic controversy hangs over its theory of natural selection, we have turned to Darwin's work on coral reefs: this work was unquestionably intended for the professional scientists, and yet it also, like Origin, sets forth a theory that involves a historical development measured in geological time. Coral Reefs has, we think, some

A bibliography and its introduction provide a convenient way to narrow the scope of selecting pedagogical material by discussing recent, easily accessible books in the field of technical communication. The bibliography consists of two parts: one is devoted to more traditional textbooks appropriate for classroom use, whether in academia or in industry and business; the other discusses such other resource materials for collateral use and supplementary reading as scholarly studies, anthologies, and handbooks. The bibliography is reasonably comprehensive for books published from the beginning of 1988 through June 30, 1990. 42 books are annotated, and an additional ten are listed.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

Social constructionist theories suggest that scientific knowledge is the product of socially created conceptual frameworks. These theories have influenced the study of scientific writing because of their emphasis on persuasion and consensus. These issues are developed by the authors of three recent books: Gould demonstrates the social nature of science; Bazerman shows the social nature of the development of scientific genres; and Myers explores scientific writing as socially mediated narratives.

Best Collection of Essays, NCTE Awards for Excellence in Technical and Scientific Communication.Effective a major sourcebook that offers technical writers, editors, teachers, and students of technical communication a wide variety of practical guidelines based on often hard to find research in the usability of printed and electronic media.The book's eighteen chapters provide a wealth of material on such topics of current interest as the writing of design manuals, research in cognitive psychology as applied to the design of user manuals, and the organizing of manuals for hierarchical software systems. Included are chapters by such well known scholars in the field as Philip Rubens, Robert Krull, Judith Ramey, and John Carroll.Effective reviews the advice offered by other to produce usable documentation books, describing the different types of usability research and explaining the inherent biases of each type. It goes beyond the actual design of textual and/or electronic media to look at these designs in context, giving advice on effective management (good management is a requisite of good writing), on the relationship between document design and product design, and on how to find out who one's readers really are. Advances in the presentation of textual information are explained, with suggestions on how to improve the usability of individual sentences and the design of entire books.The concluding chapters discuss advances in the design and use of online information and offer valuable insights into the use of graphic information and the development and design of information communicated via electronic media.Stephen Doheny Farina is Assistant Professor of Technical Communication at Clarkson University. Effective Documentation is included in the Information Systems series, edited by Michael Lesk.

Writing in the humanities may, typically, be distinguished from writing in the social sciences in its treatments of abstractions. Writing about literature is here characterized as data-driven, in that it begins with a text and proceeds up the ladder of abstraction by interpretive classifications which are likely to diverge from one interpreter to another. Social science writing is described as conceptually driven, in that writers begin with communally defined abstractions which then drive the selection and discussion of data; the divergence between writers' abstractions characteristic of data-driven writing is less likely to occur in conceptually driven writing. This article describes how the difference shows up in professional academic writing, some of the confusion students experience in trying to shift from one kind of writing to another, the strengths and weaknesses of each kind of writing, and the benefits to be gained from alternating between the two kinds.

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.

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.

Personal-computer-based communications media-electronic mail, bulletin boards, and computer conferencing-have great potential for integrating scholarly and scientific research networks. Research networks, or information organizations of faculty who share an interest in a research area, are central to scholarly and scientific progress. They have been critized, however, for their exclusion of young researchers and of faculty at isolated or low prestige institutions. Studies show that computer networking opens network access by obliterating social barriers and status distinctions. It has often been argued that, if used as a medium for research network communication, computer networking could democratize research networks. Personal computer information services designed for personal computer uses, as well as personal-computer-based bulletin board systems, represent the most promising avenue for research network communication owing to their low cost, flexibility, and egalitarian ethos.

In the years 1980 to 1985, the NOTEPAD computer conferencing suite was extended and enhanced to subserve an experimental program into electronic journals and other kinds of scientific communication. The use of the system for chit-chat, synchronous conferences, and electronic journals is described. The majority of the users, spread over all the UK, logged first into the informal areas of communication, but their frequency of access to the system varied considerably. One result of computer conferencing was that four people who had not previously met had regular online conferences to discuss a particular area of work, which was subsequently published as a scientific paper. Because the computer used was also in full use as a university service, some initial trials were made to establish its usefulness as an aid for learning. The author concludes with a discussion on facilitating computer conferencing communication.

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.

It is argued that the management world is becoming more aware of the value of documenting controls for the administration and operation of organizations. That awareness unfortunately does not include the fact that many of these management-system writings-writing that are meant to get things done-are ineffective as well as inefficient. Writing mechanics tailored to the discipline of systems writing developed at the Grumman Corporation are described. They stem from the view that systems writing must be tailed to the system reader's communication needs, where the thoughts and words used in the systems document are not only properly selected and arranged, but are written in the easiest-to-read manner.

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.

C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon, Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing. Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1984. 171 pages. Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap. Ed. Winifred Bryan Horner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. New Essays in Technical and Scientific Communication: Research, Theory, Practice. Ed. Paul V. Anderson, R. John Brockmann, and Carolyn R. Miller. Baywood's Technical Communications Series: Volume 2. Farmingdale, NY: Bay wood Publishing Co., 1983. 254 pages. Persuasive Messages, Ruth Anne Clark. New York: Harper & Row 1984. vi + 250 pages.

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.

Occasionally, it's nice to be wrong. I opened this book reluctantly, fearing that it might be one of those collections by which a profession self-consciously asserts its coming of age and academic legitimacy. What I found instead was one of the best (i.e., stimulating) collections of essays about technical and scientific communication to appear so far.

This collection is a project of the Committee on Technical and Scientific Communication of the National Council of Teachers of English and is designed for teachers of technical and business writing at two-year institutions. However, instructors at four-year institutions also will find much here that is informative and useful.

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.

A rational and popular viewpoint is that the function of scientific writing is to communicate knowledge. A study of prominent journals, however, suggests that clear communication is not appreciated within the reading-writing-refereeing community. If clarity is a goal for a journal, the editor must take action.

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 advantages of radio as a medium for scientific information flow include its speed relative to printed material, the `live' aspect, simplicity and economy relative to television, and the ubiquity of inexpensive receivers. The licenses of commercial radio stations effectively preclude all-science broadcasting. Public broadcasting stations are hampered by lack of financial support. The physicians radio network in New York City is a for-profit operation that uses a sideband of an FM channel to broadcast special-interest news and information to a limited group. Funded by proprietary advertisers, it serves as an example of `scientific radio', but a drawback is the need for special receivers.

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.

Further indication of our interest in visual aspects of engineering/scientific communication is our introduction of a cover illustration for the TRANSACTIONS. This line drawing was created by Art Appel and Joan Musgrave using an experimental program at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. After creating a single arrow (or other object, symbol, or design), the artist can change its size, rotate it about any axis, replicate it, and superimpose images with the “hidden” lines being eliminated. If we view this assemblage of arrows not as a graphic design but as an ambiguous indicator of direction, we can immediately understand Wolf Von Eckardt's concern (page 63) with signs that don't guide and words that don't inform.

Three members of the staff of the University of California at Davis prepared The Science of Scientific Writing to help students and laboratory researchers write term papers, dissertations, and articles for journals. The authors say that they developed the book by working with teachers and pupils in a variety of disciplines, and that its principles have been applied successfully in such diverse subjects as engineering, genetics, food science, psychology, veterinary medicine, physics, and agriculture.

paid circulation and a smaller base over which to distrib ute the expenses of the publications program, driving up unit costs to unacceptable levels.Such appreciable increases in cost would defeat the Society's efforts to maintain the broad and effective distribution of its publications."The Society therefore urges that the systematic library reproduction of copyrighted scientific articles without permission of or payment to the publisher will have a deleterious effect on the dissemination of chemical knowledge and on efforts to promote scientific research in the field of chemistry."If unlicensed and unpaid-for dissemination of such journals or the articles or data contained therein is accomplished through remote-user retrieval from central information sys tems rather than by photoduplication, the result will be the same, namely, the elimination of the nonprofit publisher's ability to recover its expenses through sales of its publications and hence a negation of its ability to continue publishing activities.The only realistic publishing alternative to the elimination of the system of economic incentive and financial return estab lished by copyright is government or government-subsidized dissemination.However, this m T ist be considered unacceptable to both scientists and the general public.It necessarily involves official bureaucratic control over the choice of works to re ceive exposure, whether in conventional printed form or by computer storage and retrieval, as well as the potential for suppression of unorthodox views.

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.

The researcher is best served by high editorial standards and ready access, both in the primary journals and in the secondary publications needed for data retrieval and for literature reviews of specialized topics. Specialized periodicals that respond to a real need for consolidation of a particular field can be useful, but commercial pressures leading to unwanted publications and poorly edited articles waste both the time of investigators and the library budget of their institutions. The cost of publication and dissemination is small in proportion to the total expense of a research investigation, but research may nevertheless be impeded by library deletions arising through inadequate correlation of library and research budgets. High-quality periodicals, both primary and secondary, that do not recover part of their costs through page charges are particularly vulnerable in times of economic retrenchment and as a result of recent interpretations of copyright law. Proposals to reduce primary publications to printed summaries, with details available on request by photocopy or microfilm, do not serve the best interests of the researcher.

We are privileged to be here today. For the better part of three days we have the opportunity to cogitate and agitate about the future of scientific journals. We all thank IEEE for arranging this forum.

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.”

Although computer technology has been introduced into virtually every phase of scientific communication, relatively little use has yet been made of it in primary dissemination, perhaps because of the limited operational scale of the typical scientific publisher. An Editorial Processing Center (EPC) is conceived as a mechanism for combining small publishing operations to achieve a scale great enough for significant computerization while leaving each editor in full command of his own publication. The EPC's computer assists authors, editors, and referees to perform their essential, intellectual functions by relieving them of nonessential, programmable functions. Its final output is a magnetic tape for use in photocomposition. Its potential benefits include immediate operating economies, more effective communication, a base for innovation in the form of publication, and benefits to secondary processors and analysis centers. A number of questions remain, however, chiefly in relation to the exact operating point at which any given configuration would become economically advantageous. Work is in progress to provide the answers.

“Scientific communication” is defined as the public display, by an individual scientist or small group of scientists to other scientists, of the results of recent research accomplished by the individual or small group, by means of papers published in scientific journals, delivered at conferences, or informally distributed among members of invisible colleges. A “social function” of scientific communication is defined as an effect of scientific communication on a scientific discipline or on one or more of its members. It is argued that the social functions of scientific communication grow out of three fundamental characteristics of science as a social enterprise: (1) science is a professional occupation; (2) science is a value-directed norm-governed social activity; and (3) science is a system of social exchange. The characteristics of scientific papers are examined in light of their social functions. It is suggested that these functions may be classified in three categories: (1) surveillance functions; (2) socialization functions; and (3) social control functions.