Reader expectation, rhetoric and clarity in scientific communication

Our group has written an article about this topic before (Pietrobon, 2005), but it is interesting that, despite scientific writing being the common endpoint for all scientific information (and part of scientific knowledge), by and large researchers themselves still ignore the need of a closer study of rhetoric. Rhetoric of science, which has been a formal field for several decades, can be informally defined as the field evaluating the association between how a scientific argument is constructed and its relation to the ability of convincing readers about these same arguments. Another information definition is the study of means and ends for persuasion.

Besides the pure lack of information by researchers on the topic, some controversy has being raised on whether all scientific theories and arguments are just based on pure rhetoric rather than a real connection of science with the world. While this is a philosophical discussion that goes beyond the main purpose of this post, the reality is that as human beings, researchers are influenced by their cognitive limitations and therefore their understanding of any text, including scientific ones, and their understanding of texts tends to follow some general patterns. These patterns are one of the objects of study of rhetoric of science or, more specifically, cognitive rhetoric.

To cite a simple example, think about a novice researcher trying to learn how to write a certain type of articles or a grant proposal for the first time. Without knowledge about the underlying text structure of that document, novice researchers will simply get it wrong. The content of their writing might even be correct, but if the underlying structure is not what peer readers expect, then the communication will blatantly fail.

There are multiple sources of texts that can be used to get started on the topic, and below are just a few:

Cognitive sciences and writing:

1. Gregg, Cognitive Processes in Writing (Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc Inc, 1981).
2. David Herman, Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences (Center for the Study of Language and Inf, 2003).
3. Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science (Oxford University Press, USA, 2003).
4. Ann Gill, Rhetoric and Human Understanding (Waveland Press, 1993).
5. Linda Flower, The Construction of Negotiated Meaning: A Social Cognitive Theory of Writing (Southern Illinois University, 1994).


Cognitive, rhetoric, and historical studies of scientific writing:

1. Lawrence J. Prelli, A Rhetoric of Science: Inventing Scientific Discourse (Univ of South Carolina Pr, 1989).
2. Alan G. Gross, Joseph E. Harmon, and Michael S. Reidy, Communicating Science: The Scientific Article from the 17th Century to the Present (Oxford University Press, USA, 2002).
3. A. J Meadows, Communication in science (Butterworths, 1974).
4. Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science (Oxford University Press, USA, 2003).
5. Alan Gross, The Rhetoric of Science (Harvard University Press, 1996).
6. Jack Selzer, Understanding Scientific Prose (Univ of Wisconsin Pr, 1993).


Finally, below is the book describing the linguistic concept of text blocks (which describes structure, in contrast with content) and their graphical display:

1. Michael Hoey, Textual Interaction: An Introduction to Written Discourse Analysis (Routledge, 2000).

The question then becomes: Is it time to start training our novice researchers in rhetoric and also to start evaluating the rhetoric quality/text structure of peer-reviewed articles?