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The Rhetoric of Science
| Article
# : |
19347 |
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Section : |
NATURAL SCIENCE
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1991 |
3,682 Words |
| Author
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Jeanne Fahnestock
Jeanne Fahnestock is associate professor of English language
and literature at the University of Maryland in College Park. |
A recent front-page article in the New York Times carried the emphatic headline "Cancer Rates in Industrial Countries Rise." Two weeks earlier, an article appeared in the "News & Comment" section of the weekly journal Science (the official organ of the American Association for the Advancement of Science) under the title "Experts Clash Over Cancer Data." The typical newspaper reader, skimming headlines and sampling leads, would come away from the Times' front page with a new fact about the modern world, one that would not contradict contemporary pessimism. The reader of Science, on the other hand, would learn that recent claims about the rising incidence of certain kinds of cancer were by no means universally accepted by statisticians and analysts of health data. The certainties of the newspaper headline would probably surprise the Science reader.
The difference between these two headlines is fairly typical of what happens to scientific "information" as it travels from the pens of researchers to one publication after another, each aimed at a different audience and each having a different purpose. While no one would accuse the New York Times of yellow journalism, there is a kind of sensationalizing in the changes that occur when science is communicated to different kinds of audiences.
The study of such language choices and persuasive strategies falls under the discipline of rhetoric. In the last 20 years, rhetoricians have studied how science is presented from expert to expert and what happens when science is communicated to nonscientists.
A change in certainty
One obvious difference between science for scientists and science for nonscientists is shown in the headlines above. There is often a change in the certainty of claims. Scientists writing research articles usually hedge their claims with qualifiers like "perhaps," "suggests," "could be associated with," "it seems likely that." Often these hedges seem to have a certain coyness or false modesty about them, as though the researchers really mean to proclaim their results emphatically but are only restrained by the polite conventions of science writing.
But when scientists write up their results for publication, they are keenly aware of key points where data could have been interpreted differently or of how much remains unknown around the small territory of knowledge they are staking a claim to. So, for example, after a naturalist writing in Science announced the discovery of a
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