The Public Address and the Rhetoric of Science: Henry Rowland, Epideictic Speech, and Nineteenth-Century American Science

Rhetoric Review Jul 2015

The Public Address and the Rhetoric of Science: Henry Rowland, Epideictic Speech, and Nineteenth-Century American Science

Gabriel Cutrufello York College of Pennsylvania

Abstract

AbstractThe public address about scientific practice is an understudied genre in the scholarship on the rhetoric of science. Recent scholarship has studied expert-to-layperson addresses but not the relationship between addresses and other science writing. This article analyzes a scientific article and two speeches by Henry Rowland, the first chair of Physics at The Johns Hopkins University, and investigates how the public address supports and develops scientific ethos. Scientific ethos is developed through the genres of the scientific article and the public address, which delineates the mental activities that are presented through more commonly studied rhetorical activities in the scientific article. Correction StatementThis article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.Notes1. 1I thank RR reviewers John Campbell and Andrew King for their generous comments and my colleague Michael Zerbe for his advice and time. This article is stronger for their input.2. 2For examples of this scholarship, see Charles Bazerman's The Languages of Edison's Light, Alan Gross, Joseph Harmon, and Michael Reidy's Communicating Science, and James Wynn's Evolution by the Numbers.3. 3For examples of recent projects discussing the role of rhetoric in public debates about science, see Leah Ceccarelli's On the Frontier of Science, Alan Gross and Joseph Harmon's Science from Sight to Insight, and Aimee Kendall Roundtree's Computer Simulation, Rhetoric, and the Scientific Imagination.Additional informationNotes on contributorsGabriel CutrufelloGabriel Cutrufello is an assistant professor in the English and Humanities Department at York College of Pennsylvania. He can be contacted at gcutrufe@ycp.edu.

Journal: Rhetoric Review
Published: 2015-07-03
DOI: 10.1080/07350198.2015.1040303
Open Access: Closed
Topics: rhetorical theory

Citation Context

Cited by in this index (2)

Keeling et al. (2025)

Rhetorical Creativity in Particle Physics and the Crisis of Naturalness

Rhetoric Society Quarterly
Gordon et al. (2022)

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Casper (2007)

In Praise of Carbon, In Praise of Science

Journal of Business and Technical Communication
SULLIVAN (1991)

The Epideictic Rhetoric of Science

Journal of Business and Technical Communication

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