(1988). Reader‐response and the pathos principle. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 152-166.

This question, the engine humming at the center of Bakhtin's vision, generating alien words like heteroglossy and polyphony, is one that rhetoricians do not ask. And our work is poorer for the silence. We make inquiries, sometimes very probing ones, into ethos, and occasionally we investigate some rhetor in great detail. But we take identity for granted. It is Plato or Socrates or Burke doing the speaking. we fail to notice is that these labels do not designate autonomous, univocal entities. They designate composites-collections of voices, some in harmony, some in conflict. Mikhail Bakhtin, then, has something to tell us: listen. Listen and you will hear a verbal carnival of such depth and diversity, of such extravagance and exuberance, that your ears will never be the same again. The most immediate consequence of this newfound affluence is that the traditional triangular paradigm of rhetorical events becomes lopsided. The speaker's corner becomes very heavy. But two questions, in parallel with Bakhtin's obsessive probe, present themselves-Who is listening? and What is being said? -and they find similarly multivocal answers. This additional plurality does not so much balance the triangle as burden it. That is, as soon as we start to listen more carefully, the paradigm proves hopelessly inadequate. It simplifies interactions to the point of insignificance, it undervalues or ignores essential elements, and it effects an artificial closure on an inherently openended process. Applying it to any rhetorical event, once we are fitted with our new ears, reveals this inadequacy, but, to keep things in the family, consider how the paradigm fares in an examination of multivalence in the Phaedrus.

As the means by which written communication is conveyed, typography is in many respects analogous to classical rhetoric. The elements of persuasion, emotion and pleasure, balance, perception, dynamics, style, form, and shape are discussed as they apply to both the concept being communicated and the typographic medium.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">></ETX>

The author suggests that answers to some of the more difficult questions in the readability-formula debate may be found in W. Gibson's book, Tough, Sweet, and Stuffy (1966). Gibson, in his analysis of style, develops a set of quantifiable characteristics of language that will produce tough talkers, sweet talkers, and stuffy talkers. In specifically analyzing these three familiar American voices, he is able to combine two necessary attributes of readability for technical communicators: a set of specific rules and a rationale for applying them, providing another slant on the readability issue.

Research Article| November 01 1987 Narration and Argumentation: Quintilian on Narratio as the Heart of Rhetorical Thinking John O'Banion John O'Banion Humanities Division, Sauk Valley College, R.R. 5, Dixon, IL 61021 Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1987) 5 (4): 325–351. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1987.5.4.325 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation John O'Banion; Narration and Argumentation: Quintilian on Narratio as the Heart of Rhetorical Thinking. Rhetorica 1 November 1987; 5 (4): 325–351. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1987.5.4.325 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1987, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1987 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

A review of recent research in the field of technical writing and communication indicated that although the methodologies employed were sound, they were not fully articulated. An attempt to use a double-blind research design in the writing classroom by dividing the students into competing teams that reviewed each other's work led to some interesting reactions by the students as well as to some the need to introduce more open-ended assignments in our classrooms. Asking our students to come up with competing solutions to the same problem and requiring them to design means of testing their effectiveness can develop their abilities in critical thinking and group dynamics. At the same time this approach will allow teachers to pursue their own research on various problems in technical communication. The result is a unit which has pedagogical effectiveness and suggests new directions for writing research.

(1987). For a modern rhetoric: A prose‐poetic persuasion. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 87-89.

Technical communication may be chiefly informational in intent, but there are persuasive elements in almost all communications. Sometimes, even in technical matters, persuasive communication skills are very important. The author provides arguments for improving these skills, discusses a number of mini-strategies that can be used to persuade the recipients of written communication, and touches on the ethics of using persuasion tools.

Not too long ago, publication tasks such as layout, font selection, merging of text and graphics, and copyfitting were addressed only by communication professionals. Now, programs like Pagemaker by Aldus and Ventura Publisher by Xerox make these issues just another personal computer application, like spreadsheets, calendars, and word processing. The impact of desktop publishing (DTP) is already being hotly debated, and we open this new IEEE Transactions section on communication technology with an article that has significant implications for this debate.

Research Article| May 01 1987 Rhetoric and Praxis: The Contribution of Classical Rhetoric to Practical Reasoning Rhetoric and Praxis: The Contribution of Classical Rhetoric to Practical Reasoning, edited by Jean Dietz Moss. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press of America, 1986. pp. xi + 172. Josina M. Makau Josina M. Makau Department of Communication, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210 Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1987) 5 (2): 194–198. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1987.5.2.194 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Josina M. Makau; Rhetoric and Praxis: The Contribution of Classical Rhetoric to Practical Reasoning. Rhetorica 1 May 1987; 5 (2): 194–198. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1987.5.2.194 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1987, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1987 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Based upon several years of research on proposal writing in large management consulting firms, this article attempts to define the proposal genre and argue the importance of the background section, especially in the management consulting environment. Because the background is the first major section in these proposals, it offers writers the opportunity to demonstrate implicitly their qualifications as problem solvers long before a qualifications section does so explicitly. That demonstration, the projection of image and ethos, can occur logically—through an argument that responds to the generic requirements of proposals, and psychologically—through the incorporation of themes that respond to the rhetorical situation.

Writing last year in a Carnegie Foundation special Report, Nell Eurich reported that “more and more companies are teaching analytical skills and critical thinking” in corporate training classrooms (Corporate Classrooms, p. 77). A recent Associated Press story tells of Xerox Corporation's decision to spend $5 million to start a nonprofit institute at its Palo Alto Research Center that will “study how people think and learn and … try to develop new, more effective ways of teaching.” David Kearns, Xerox chairman and chief executive officer, is quoted as saying that “one of every three major corporations now is teaching new workers basic reading, writing, and mathematics.”

The role of the reader in how the meaning of a text is formed has been a nearly obsessive concern of recent critical thought. Books and articles abound taking one stand or the other on the question of where meaning lies: in the text, in the reader, in the intentions of the author, in the intertext, in the practices of interpretive communities, and so on. For the most part, such talk tends to be seen as a kind of elegant diversion-the stuff of graduate seminars and doctoral thesessomewhat removed from the more practical tasks of teaching our students to read intelligently and to write with conviction. And certainly things seem to go on pretty much as they always have in most classes on literature-that is, texts get assigned to be read and papers to be written, students plow more or less dutifully through both, some haggling over meanings and grades takes place, and students and teachers alike go home at the end of the term, having done Shakespeare, or the Seventeenth Century, or the Modern Novel, or even Literary Theory. The writings of Jacques Derrida and Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish haven't changed that, and I doubt that any theory of reading ever will. But while theories of reader-response or deconstruction may seem to have had little effect on the practice of teaching literature, they do hold much in common with how many of us try to teach writing. The reasons for this are fairly plain. The meanings of most texts read in literature classes really are pretty stable-not because they hold some sort of intrinsic fixed messages, but simply because they are familiar texts that we, as a community of readers at the university, have long agreed on how to go about interpreting. This isn't the case, though, when we read student writing. Then we are faced with texts that are both new to us and whose meanings have often not yet been fixed even in the minds of their authors. In a freshman writing class the instability of meaning is a fact of life, not a point of critical debate. Nowhere else is the importance of a reader's expectations, of interpretive codes, shown more clearly. Where we look for analysis, our students often appeal to emotion; where we expect example, they call on popular sentiment, what everybody knows. The problem is not that our students are dumb, but that they're not yet members of the club-they don't know the sorts of things we as academics look for when we read. And so one way of looking at our task as teachers of writing is to see it as helping our students to confront the kinds of talk that go on at the university, to think about the values and assumptions that underlie such discourse. Joseph Harris teaches writing at Temple University.

When teachers talk about the good qualities of student writing, one of their favorite terms is voice. Good student writing has it; bad student writing doesn't. Voice is sometimes a sign of control, of ethos, of style. It is often associated with persona or mask. But it is also often associated with something Peter Elbow in Writing with Power calls juice-a combination of magic potion, mother's milk, and electricity (286). When we read writing that has this juice, we feel the pulse of a writer churning over the facts the world presents (Ruszkiewicz, Well Bound Words 67); we sense the energy, humor, individuality, music, rhythm, pace, flow, surprise, believability (Murray, Write to Learn 144); we hear the voice of a real person speaking to real people (Lannon, The Writing Process 14). And while this voice-as-juice seems to have gained a considerable amount of respectability lately, it brings with it a kind of evangelical zeal that may not do us any good at all.

An Early Commentary on the “Poetria Nova”; of Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Marjorie Curry Woods, ed. New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1986. Pp. Ixvi + 505. Studying Writing: Linguistic Approaches. Charles R. Cooper and Sydney Greenbaum, eds. (Written Communication Annual, Vol. 1.) Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. Rhetoric and Praxis: The Contribution of Classical Rhetoric to Practical Reasoning. Edited by Jean Dietz Moss. Washington, D.C.: Catholic U of America P, 1986, Pp. xi + 172.

Research Article| November 01 1986 Amatory Persuasion in Antiquity: Studies in Theory and Practice Amatory Persuasion in Antiquity: Studies in Theory and Practiceby Nicolas Gross. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985. pp. 192. Thomas Conley Thomas Conley Dept. of Speech Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL 61801 USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1986) 4 (4): 424–425. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1986.4.4.424 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Thomas Conley; Amatory Persuasion in Antiquity: Studies in Theory and Practice. Rhetorica 1 November 1986; 4 (4): 424–425. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1986.4.4.424 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1986, The International Society for The History of Rhetoric1986 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This article studies the fate of scientific observations as they pass from original research reports intended for scientific peers into popular accounts aimed at a general audience. Pairing articles from two AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) publications reveals the changes that inevitably occur in “information” as it passes from one rhetorical situation to another. Scientific reports belong to the genre of forensic arguments, affirming the validity of past facts, the experimental data. But a change of audience brings a change of genre; science accommodations are primarily epideictic, celebrations of science, and shifts in wording between comparable statements in matched articles reveal changes made to conform to the two appeals of popularized science, the wonder and the application topoi. Science accommodations emphasize the uniqueness, rarity, originality of observations, removing hedges and qualifications and thus conferring greater certainty on the reported facts. Such changes could be formalized by adopting the scale developed by sociologists Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar for categorizing the status of claims. The alteration of information is traced not only in articles on bees and bears, and so on, but also on a subject where distortions in reporting research can have serious consequences—the reputed mathematical inferiority of girls to boys. The changes in genre and the status of information that occur between scientific articles and their popularizations can also be explained by classical stasis theory. Anything addressed to readers as members of the general public will inevitably move through the four stasis questions from fact and cause to value and action.

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.

Research Article| February 01 1986 Richard Whately's Public Persuasion: The Relationship between his Rhetorical Theory and his Rhetorical Practice Lois Einhorn Lois Einhorn Department of English, General Literature, and Rhetoric, State University of New York, Binghamton, N. Y. 13901, USA Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1986) 4 (1): 50–65. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1986.4.1.50 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Lois Einhorn; Richard Whately's Public Persuasion: The Relationship between his Rhetorical Theory and his Rhetorical Practice. Rhetorica 1 February 1986; 4 (1): 50–65. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1986.4.1.50 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1986, The International Society for The History of Rhetoric1986 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

That anyone should want to use critical reading in analysis of advertising should be surprising if one accepts a broad conception of letters as including anything in print that worth studying. My idea of English studies supports point of view that our concern in English departments ought to be with critical reading and writing of all kinds of texts, just imaginative literature. In other words, we ought to be concerned as much with rhetorical inquiries as with aesthetic inquiries. In its own right, advertising provides a kind of distinctive knowledge about society. To some critics, advertising fills a genuine need by creating markets for new and valuable products and by expanding and strengthening economy. Advertising also reveals how techniques of science can contribute to better living. In addition, it informs people about available goods and services and invites them to secure good things of life-material comforts, entertainment, travel, and so forth. To some critics, however, advertising creates false values. These critics contend that since some products are basically alike, all too often advertisers appeal to people's baser instincts and emotions to sell their products. To stimulate demand for a product, they attach psychological values such as acquisitiveness, power, sexual pleasure, attractiveness, social approval, and competitive success, none of which are in product. To attain these values, all consumer needs to do to buy appropriate product. In brief, advertising an exercise in a special kind of persuasion. As if these criticisms were enough, advertisers have been accused of manipulating people without their consent at some deeper level of consciousness, of selling to id, as one critic put it (Seldin 442-43). A number of critics have commented on use of techniques in advertising. Vance Packard calls them hidden persuaders(3). Marshall McLuhan refers to them as subliminal pills for subconscious in order to exercise an hypnotic spell (228). They are not meant for conscious consumption. Their mere existence, asserts McLuhan, is a testimony to somnambulistic state of a tired metropolis (229). There evidence to suggest that some of these criticisms are justified. As early as 1934, James Rorty, in his book Our Master's Voice:Advertising, noted that the advertising man is, in fact, a journeyman psychologist (241). He

(1986). A critical thinking heuristic for the argumentative composition. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 16, No. 1-2, pp. 67-78.

Although tutors are usually excellent students, they seldom have previous tutoring experience.For this reason, tutor training is an important aspect of any writing center program.A general training program -which includes two to three hours of orientation focusing on procedures, tutoring roles, responsibilities, and policies -is usually required of all new tutors.During their first semester of employment, additional training in study skills, communications, critical thinking skills, and interpersonal skills may also be required.In addition to this general training, tutors also need specific training in the tutoring of writing.Most tutors learned to write using the product method -a formal, grammatical approach with instruction beginning at the sentence level, moving to the paragraph, and finally culminating

Research Article| November 01 1985 Rhetorik—Topik—Argumentation. Bibliographie zur Redelehre und Rhetorikforschung im deutschsprachigen Raum 1945-1979/80 Rhetorik—Topik—Argumentation. Bibliographie zur Redelehre und Rhetorikforschung im deutschsprachigen Raum 1 945-1979/80Robert Jamison und Joachim Dyck (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1983, 349 pp. Ln.). Jørgen Fafner Jørgen Fafner Kobenhavns Universitet Institut for Retorik, Klerkegade 2, 1308 Copenhagen, Denmark. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (1985) 3 (4): 295–297. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1985.3.4.295 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jørgen Fafner; Rhetorik—Topik—Argumentation. Bibliographie zur Redelehre und Rhetorikforschung im deutschsprachigen Raum 1945-1979/80. Rhetorica 1 November 1985; 3 (4): 295–297. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.1985.3.4.295 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1985, The International Society for the History of Rhetoric1985 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Responses to one poem, Coleridge's Frost at Midnight, were studied using repertory grid technique. Twenty-one undergraduate stu- dents of English literature participated. A significant commonality in response was found within the grids, suggesting that for this group of readers a number of invariant features in the poem were determining response. The grids also brought to light individual differences in approach to the poem, which were explored during interviews with each student. Grid technique thus offers a method for mapping the boundary between individual and common features in literary response. A major tradition in literary studies has argued that a literary text offers one correct reading which all well-informed and sufficiently sensitive read- ers can be expected to discover. Recent arguments have undermined the authority of this approach: Fish (1980, p. 13), for instance, finds the author- ity of the text secondary to that of the interpretive community in determin- ing a given reader's response. One recent reader of Fish has taken him to imply that any reading of a literary work is acceptable (Eagleton, 1983, p. 85). Behind this debate lies an obvious but important theoretical point. To what extent does a given literary work constrain individual readings? Does a work's structure as a whole, for example, tend to determine the way in which its parts will be understood? Or is the work open at any point to influences originating outside the boundary of the text? Clearly, texts cannot be divorced from the language and culture in which they are written and read; but it might be postulated that a work of literature is distinguishable from other types of discourse by its possession of a structure of meaning internal to the text, and that this tends to direct the responses of all com- petent readers. To be specific: two or more elements within a text may be amenable to a variety of interpretations, according to the disposition or experience of indi- vidual readers; for example, I may enjoy Donne's attitude toward women, my neighbor may detest it. But if, despite such response differences, inter- pretations of particular elements in the poem show systematic relationships to each other across all readings, it may be argued that the text exhibits an internal structure that is determining response. In studying this question Groeben's (1980) distinction between text mean- ing and text sense is helpful. We may postulate that a given work has a

You are, at the least, obliged not to be ignorant, not to be dogmatic, not to be arrogant. You must explain fully, offer carefully collected evidence, and reason logically. You must disavow coercion, manipulation, and image-making. You must welcome, not threaten; disclose, not deceive; be generous, not hostile. You must, in your argument, make a common world, with room in it for yourself and your reader. (231)

To speak of and cynicism in the same breath is to bear a double burden of pejorative jeopardy. The pejorative freight of either term, rhetoric or weighs heavily against anyone who tries to use these terms in non-pejorative ways. Such people are quite simply trying to swim against a torrent of pejorative everyday usage. Yet some of the positive historical legacy of the traditions of classical and of the ancient cynics is still around and does carry over into contemporary contexts, especially when we speak of and cynicism away from the marketplace and in academia, where still is the art of persuasion and cynicism graces literary texts with clever displays of verbal play and repartee. Wayne Booth at a recent conference, in discussing the problem of the public image of rhetoric, quoted a colleague as referring to some fellow as asshole, but at the same time explaining that the term was not intended in its pejorative sense. The twist of irony in the remark stimulates our imagination to come up with a context in which someone could be an asshole in a nonpejorative sense. Quite possibly there is a virtue in acting like an asshole towards others who act the same. Let us leave aside any question of a non-pejorative sense of rhetoric. What possible approbation can there be for the cynic, or for the use of the role of the cynic in our rhetoric? What is the rhetorical payoff of a cynical ethos? What function do cynical remarks serve in rhetorical strategies? To pursue these questions I caution against question begging assumptions when we examine the phenomenon of cynicism, for cynicism is a loaded term. But first off, cynical remarks do not a cynic make. Yet certainly they are used as evidence for attributing cynical attitudes, beliefs and cynicism to the one who makes them. Note in your own experience the degree to which the attributions of cynic and cynical are simply allegations that a sin has been committed. A second note of caution. The phenomenon of cynicism is, I believe, recalcitrant to any essentialist description, and we ought to avoid the pitfalls of pursuing a phantom of cynicism, that is, seeking to describe or to define the essential nature of cynicism. If you are not willing to take my advice on this matter, I commit you to chasing your tail endlessly in verbal circles, a game called whose paradigm is on first?

Traditional views of organizational communication have fallen short because they misapprehended and oversimplified the realities of rhetorical behavior in organizations and because they offered weak theoretical underpinnings for the study of business communication. Recent developments in rhetorical theory spearheaded by the work of Toulmin, Perelman, Polanyi, and others offer a coherent, theoretically sound, and productive way of analyzing discourse in organizations. Applying constructs of the “new rhetoric” to the study of sample documents from a representative organizational situation illustrates the importance of consensus building as a tacit communication purpose, reveals the decision-making process involving the text's audience, and demonstrates the central role of context or situation in shaping discourse. Rhetoric in organizations, just as in other “rational enterprises” (such as the disciplines of science and law), reveals underlying paradigms that are determined by the nature of communal behavior and by the nature of thinking man.

Up until the publication of Alexander Bain's English Composition and Rhetoric in 1866, most American college textbook rhetorics were organized around belletristic discourse classifications; that is, they divided up the subject of writing into established literary forms such as orations, history, romance, treatises, sermons, and the like. Bain's textbook brought about what we now, thanks to Thomas Kuhn, refer to as a paradigm shift, sweeping away these belletristic schemes and substituting five forms-Description, Narration, Exposition, Persuasion, and Poetry-that, with the exception of Poetry, have survived up to the present in Freshman Composition and are known in the trade as the Modes of Discourse. 1 In recent years, however, another paradigm shift has been taking place, and Bain is now often held responsible for the impoverishment of rhetoric in the late nineteenth century.2 Regrettably, in the campaign to undo the damage he did, little attention has been paid to his intellectual milieu or to the question of why he did what he did, with the result that the true historical importance of the modes has been obscured. The most noteworthy feature of Bain's English Composition and Rhetoric-and the reason perhaps for its popularity among his contemporaries-may be its reliance upon the scientific thought of the day. During the previous century in Bain's native Scotland, Adam Smith, George Campbell, Hugh Blair and Joseph Priestley had sought to redefine the basic aims of rhetoric, largely in an effort to accommodate the increasingly prestigious natural sciences. As Wilbur Samuel Howell has argued, the classical rhetorical systems offered little guidance to the scientist in presenting his discoveries to the learned community and to the public at large: they conceived of persuasion as an appeal to commonplaces rather than facts, they depended for methods of proof on the logic of deduction rather than induction, they encouraged the use of ornamental figurative devices rather than plain statements, and in general they were designed for popular exhortation rather than for disseminating fresh knowledge.3 In his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke points the way to-

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.

Most rhetorical history has concerned itself with the theory of argumentation discourse as it developed from classical to modern times. This article traces a parallel but much less investigated strand of rhetorical history: the theory and practice of explanation. The slow growth of a body of knowledge about how information could best be communicated without necessary reference to overt persuasion is followed from Henry Day's Art of Rhetoric through contemporary explanatory rhetoric.

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.

Most rhetorical history has concerned itself with the theory of argumentative discourse as it developed from classical to modern times. This essay traces a parallel but much less investigated strand of rhetorical history: the theory and practice of explanation. The slow growth of a body of knowledge about how information could best be communicated without necessary reference to overt persuasion is followed from Aristotle's Rhetoric through the beginnings of a theory of written discourse in the American nineteenth century. A later continuation of this essay will trace explanatory rhetoric into modern times.