Landmark Essays on Rhetoric of Science: Case Studies

Randy Allen Harris is Professor of English at the University of Waterloo, specializing in cognitive and computational issues of Rhetoric and Linguistics. His books include The Linguistic Wars (1995, 2018), Voice Interaction Design (2004), Rhetoric and Incommensurability (2005), Literature, Rhetoric, and Values (2012), and Landmark Essays on Rhetoric of Science: Theories, Themes, and Methods (forthcoming at Routledge).

Table of contents

Introduction

Giants in Science

1. John Angus Campbell Charles Darwin: Rhetorician of Science

2. Alan G. Gross On the Shoulders of Giants: Seventeenth-Century Optics as an Argument Field

3. S. Michael Halloran The Birth of Molecular Biology: An Essay in the Rhetorical Criticism of Scientific Discourse

4. James Wynn Alone in the Garden: How Gregor Mendel’s inattention to audience may have affected the reception of his theory of inheritance in Experiments in Plant Hybridization

Conflict in Science

5. Jeanne Fahnestock Arguing in Different Forums: The Bering Crossover Controversy

6. John Lyne and Henry F. Howe Punctuated Equilibria": Rhetorical Dynamics of a Scientific Controversy

7. Lawrence J. Prelli The Rhetorical Construction of Scientific Ethos

8. Leah Ceccarelli Manufactured Scientific Controversy: Science, Rhetoric, and Public Debate

Public Science

9. Richard M. Weaver Dialectic and Rhetoric at Dayton, Tennessee

10. Craig Waddell The Role of Pathos in the Decision-Making Process: A Study in the Rhetoric of Science Policy

11. Carol Reeves Owning a Virus: The Rhetoric of Scientific Discovery Accounts

12. Ashley Rose Mehlenbacher [formerly Kelly] and Carolyn R. Miller Intersections: Scientific and Parascientific Communication on the Internet

Writing Science

13. Charles Bazerman Reporting the Experiment: The Changing Account of Scientific Doings in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, 1665–1800

14. Greg Myers Text as Knowledge Claims: The Social Construction of Two Biology Articles

15. Michelle Sidler The Chemistry Liveblogging Event