ABSTRACTThe sections devoted to dissociation in The New Rhetoric identify many verbal forms that can express this reconceptualizing line of argument. This article reviews the linguistic options offered in English for epitomizing dissociations, including tautologies and constructions that prompt diverging meanings, orthographical devices like capitalization or subscripts that produce variants of a single word, word schemes like agnominatio and polyptoton that alter core forms, and affixes or modifiers that are either available as antonyms or require forcing apart by subsequent antitheses. Paying attention to the verbal expression of dissociations highlights cases that may or may not qualify as the rich reconceptualizations Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca had in mind. Arguments that involve three distinguished terms may, for example, reach a limit where dissociations merge into arguments from division, a long recognized device in traditional rhetoric/dialectic.

In The Rhetoric of Science rhetorical concepts can the persuasive work of scientific arguments Communicating Science the history of the scientific article as a genre, showing how it evolved in length, style through the nineteenth centuries Insight, with Harmon, communication and argues for the salience of visual modes of persuasion in scientifi illustrate Gross's mastery of different scholarly methodologies, from the theoretically and visuals, to the comparison of tactics across several works, to the compilation of large databases statistically sampled.Altogether Alan Gross's body of work, including seminal articles and significant anthologies, has established the field of the rhetoric of science and given it methods and a trajectory.No one after him has had to take this ground.The study presented here It applies classical analysis; it looks at historical practices texts as the initiating and formative precursors of later practices; and it considers visual persuasion.The particular case the renewal of botany in the sixteenth century and examined is how forms discourse arts of the time

The idea of genre marks large-scale repeated patterns in human symbolic production and interaction, patterns that are taken to be meaningful. Genre thus can be defined by reference to pattern, or form, and by reference to theories of meaning and interaction. This report on a discussion of scientific and technical genres at the 2012 Vicentennial meeting of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science & Technology (ARST) briefly considers the differences and difficulties with different ways of defining genres and their relevance to science and technology, explorations of the ways genres change or evolve, and pedagogical applications of genre analysis in scientific and technical discourse.

Condit, Prelli, and Depew and Lyne offer useful taxonomies of scholarship in the rhetoric of science, technology and medicine (RSTM), and once again provoke questions about the distinctiveness of a rhetorical approach. Rhetorical studies examine the choices rhetors make at all levels of invention (e.g., lines of argument, arrangement, terminology, visuals). But rhetoricians have not been clear in defining the distinctive contribution of their approach, and scholars in related fields do not routinely access or acknowledge rhetorical studies. There are also impediments to framing rhetorical studies for scientists and practitioners: the term rhetoric still has negative connotations in science publications, and rhetorical concepts like cooperation and reputation are addressed by other fields, creating a competing discourse. Nevertheless, RSTM will expand, and new directions for scholarship include visual rhetoric and the new persuasive practices brought about by online publication.

In its six chapters, Ryan Stark's monograph argues for a “paradigm shift” in “philosophical” views of rhetoric across the seventeenth century. Stark finds signs of this shift in the many well-known...

The author discusses how pursuing a rhetoric of science has consequences for both our understanding of science and our practice of rhetorical analysis. From a rhetorical perspective, science becomes a persuasive enterprise continuous with other persuasive practices in a culture. And rhetoric itself requires enrichment in three areas to become a better instrument of analysis for scientific texts; it needs to incorporate early modern dialectic, a more flexible stylistics, and an appreciation of the role of visualization in scientific argument.

Communicating Science: The Scientific Article from the 17th Century to the Present by Alan Gross, Joseph E. Harmon, Michael Reidy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 267 + x pp. Rhetoric and Renewal in the Latin West 1100–1540: Essays in Honour of John O. Ward, edited by Constant J. Mews, Cary J. Nederman, and Rodney M. Thomson. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003. 270 + viii pp. Electronic Collaboration in the Humanities: Issues and Options, edited by James A. Inman, Cheryl Reed, and Peter Sand. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004. 419 + xxiv pp.

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.

This study investigates the practice of presenting multiple supporting examples in parallel form. The elements of parallelism and its use in argument were first illustrated by Aristotle. Although real texts may depart from the ideal form for presenting multiple examples, rhetorical theory offers a rationale for minimal, parallel presentation. The form for presenting data can also influence the way it is observed and selected, as the case of the Linnaean template for species grouping illustrates. Parallel presentation is not limited to verbal phrasing. Arranging data in tables, typical in scientific discourse, satisfies the same requirements for minimal, equivalent presentation of evidence. Arranging representational or iconic images in rows or arrays is yet another mode for the parallel presentation of evidence, although this mode has a recent history. A cognitive rationale can perhaps explain the use of parallelism to present multiple supporting examples.

Fearless Speech by Michel Foucault. Edited by Joseph Pearson. New York: Semiotext(e), 2001. 183 pp. Literacy with an Attitude: Educating Working‐Class Children in Their Own Self‐Interest by Patrick J. Finn. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 243 + xii pp. Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth‐Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine by Susan Wells. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. 312 + xii pp. Black on Black: Twentieth‐Century African American Writing about Africa by John Cullen Gruesser. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2000. 205 + xiii pp. Making Social Science Matter: Why Social Inquiry Fails and How It Can Succeed Again by Bent Flyvbjerg. Trans. Steven Sampson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 214 pp.

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.

Catherine Hobbs, ed. Nineteenth‐Century Women Learn to Write. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1995.343 pages. $47.50 cloth. Richard Fulkerson, Teaching the Argument in Writing. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1996, 184 pp. Thomas P. Miller. The Formation of College English. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997. ix‐x + 345 pages. $22.95 paper.

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This article explores the usefulness of identifying the stasis of an argument, that is, whether it concerns an issue of fact, definition, cause, value, or action. The stasis of an argument can be seen as a component that has to be justified. An author must either assume or overtly appeal to the value of addressing a particular audience on a topic in a particular stasis. Once this principle of rhetorical analysis is in place, it is especially useful as an approach in the current enterprise of analyzing the rhetoric of the disciplines. While arguments in public forums naturally exploit the full stases, arguments in disciplinary contexts usually concern only the first two. “Exemplary” arguments in representative issues of Science and PMLA are then analyzed for their stasis and how they justify arguing over the issues they address. While science articles open and reopen questions of fact, classification, and cause while assuming the value of their enterprise, articles in literary criticism are problematic. They concern issues of value that are to a great extent already granted by their audience.

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.