English 5390: Writing for Publication Weekly Blog Post - Introduction or Conclusion

Question: Write either a first draft or revised draft of your introduction paragraph or conclusion paragraph for your article. Be sure to answer the question: what does my work contribute to the scholarship?

Here is my Introduction as it stands today.

Imagine reading the following in a scientific publication:

Mr. Kingzett says, ‘There is no known process of slow oxidation which has been established to produce ozone.’ Couched as it is, in such positive terms, this assertion contravenes the statements of those who have experimentally investigated the subject during the past forty years. It might, therefore, not unreasonably be anticipated that Mr. Kingzett should bring forward some new and crucial experiments of his own. He adduces none. At the same time, he fails to recognise certain distinguishing properties of ozone and hydrogen peroxide, and apparently is not conversant with many phenomena exhibited in the oxidation of phosphorous in moist air (Leeds, 1883)

What would you do? How would you respond? Can you even imagine something like that being published in a modern scientific journal in an article and not an opinion piece? I can’t. In fact, I can almost guarantee at some point before publication this would have seen a request from the Editor of the journal to soften the statement and ease the wording. Yet, this was published, 128 years ago. It seems to fly in the face of modern scientific writing, which Marie-Claude Roland describes as being “withdrawn” (Roland, 2009). She states that “they now appear as shunning responsibility, being just tentative, too polite to criticize research by others, eventually relying on writing practices that verge on fraud” (Roland, 2009). The difference in the way authors wrote then and wrote now implies a difference in the scientific ethos or, if not in the scientific ethos itself, in how that ethos is exhibited.

The scientific ethos has been defined as having several parts: universalism, communality, disinterestedness, organized skepticism, originality, and humility (Prelli, 1989). Of these, this article will primarily address the concept of disinterestedness, which “requires that scientists strive to achieve their self-interests only through satisfaction in work done and prestige accrued through serving the scientific community,” and organized skepticism, which “mandates that scientists temporarily suspend judgment in order to scrutinize beliefs critically against empirical and logical criteria of judgment” (Prelli, 1989, p. 49). To prove their integration into this scientific ethos, modern researchers avoid the use of personal pronouns, such as “I”, “me”, “mine”, and to prove their results to skeptics, they provide copious quantities of evidence for their results in the form of graphics, references, and even additional data published online. But was this always the case? Or has the presentation of the scientific ethos changed over the years?

In this article, I seek those answers by looking at a selection of papers from the Journal of the American Chemical Society that were published in approximately 40 year increments, starting in the 1880s and ending up in the 2000s. The difference between those 1880s papers and the modern papers, those from the 2000s, is striking. The modern papers are, in a way, presented in a manner that appears to be much less personal to the authors than they appeared to be in the 1880s. Papers written in the 1880s include the pronoun “I”, often associated with a statement of interest in the work. In the 1920s and 1960s, authors moved away from the use of pronouns and even on single-author papers did not use “I”, and although the pronouns “we” and “our” were found in the examples from 2000s, they were not attached to statements of interest in the work.
In addition, modern papers have much larger reference sets and much more supporting data than the oldest papers. This emphasis on data presentation and references may be the result of better technology and a larger body of work to cite, but one must ask if our feisty 1880s authors would have felt the need to use them had they been available. For example, Albert Leeds draws on his own personal experience with a compound, stating, “Now, the property of ozone that is most strikingly characteristic, is its smell. This smell, so far as long-continued familiarity with it enables me to judge…The solutions which I have prepared at different times myself…” (emphasis added) (Leeds, 1883). Nothing like this appears in the modern works. Modern authors would have felt the need to cite other sources for this information, instead of citing personal experience and admitting involvement in the work.

Works Cited

Leeds, A. R. (1883). Peroxide of hydrogen and ozone. Journal of the American Chemical Society , 5, 10-16. Prelli, L. J. (1989). The rhetorical construction of the scientific ethos. In H. W. Simons (Ed.), Rhetoric in the Human Sciences (pp. 48-68). London, U.K.: Sage Publications, Ltd. Roland, M.-C. (2009). Quality and integrity in scientific writing: prerequisites for quality in science communication. Journal of Science Communication , 8 (2), A04.

English 5390: Writing for Publication Weekly Blog Post - Outline

Question: Develop an outline for your scholarly article. What are the major headings? Does your outline logically and clearly present topics and highlight what your paper will contribute or add to the literature?

Outlining isn't one of those activities to which I have devoted large amounts of time in recent years. Unless the outline was part of the assignment, I just didn't do it because I compose primarily in my head and usually sit down with a good idea of what needs to go where and which sources I want to cite when. I do, however, draw on the outline when I get stuck or have no desire to actually write the paper. Then, the outline acts like a stepping stone to make me move through the paper and get it done.

The paper that I am revising is available under the scholarly article tab in the side bar. The original outline flowed like this:

• Introduction
• Methods
• Results and Discussion
  • 1880s
  • 1920s
  • 1960s
  • 2000s
• Conclusions

My modification to the paper is not complete, but at this point, I am working on increasing my sample size from 4 papers in each decade to 10 papers in each and refocusing on the concept of disinterestedness and author ethos and how those concepts are presented in each stage of the 4 selected decades to get a view on how scientific writing has changed over these many years. Of course, I may change my mind again before I am done. But the new outline stands as follows:

• Introduction
• Methods
• Disinterestedness
  • Personal Pronouns
    
  • Personal Experience
    
  • Reaction to Others in the Field
    
• Ethos
  
  • Graphics/Supporting Data
    
  • Document Layout
  • Reference List Length
  • Hedging
    
• Conclusions

The new outline displays the topics that will be discussed in the revised version of the work. Is it the final version? Not likely. I reserve the right to change my mind, reorganize, reorder, and even reverse the order or revert to the old one. Since disinterestedness is considered to be part of the scientific ethos, it may be that I decide to put the whole thing under ethos.

I suspect that my paper can be part of the discussion on how scientists, in this case chemists, write that I looked at in my blog post on exemplars and conversant, and I feel that the historical context of tracing the way scientific writing has changed over time is interesting. However, I cannot guarantee that it will be accepted as part of the conversation or even recognized as making a contribution. My interest in this area does not guarantee universal interest, and we are only guessing at what our audience will think using our own filters and viewpoints on the field.

English 5390: Writing for Publication Weekly Blog Post - Exemplars and Conversants

Question: What selections might best serve as your exemplars and conversants in the scholarly article assignment? Identify at least three exemplars and three conversants as an annotated bibliography. Feel free to discuss any other observations you have with these selections.

Anne Sigusmund Huff defines an exemplar as "a document already in the literature that accomplishes the kind of task you are trying to accomplish in an effective way. It does not have to address the subject that interests you." And she defines a conversant as "specific article or book, a specific contribution to the canon of scholarly work in your field." These pieces are ones that are part of the conversation that you hope that your work will join and can be surprisingly difficult to identify, especially over the course of a week. I took notes on many articles, many of which I have discounted as being useful for my purposes, although they may fulfill others needs.

My chosen Conversants:

1. Lopez Rodriguez, C. I. (2007). Understanding scientific communication through the extraction of the conceptual and rhetorical information codified by verbs. Terminology, 13(1), 61-84.

   Lopez Rodriguez looks at specific word use in scientific communication. She "focuses on verbs as instruments of conceptual, textual and rhetorical activation in scientific discourse and investigates the relation between the distribution of verbs, the different rhetorical moves of abstracts and the activation of conceptual areas." By identifying the most frequently used verbs in papers, she looks at how scientists write. While her paper does not include the change over time quality that mine does, it is part of the conversation on how scientists write.

2. Harmon, J. E.; Gross, A. G. (2009). The structure of scientific titles. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 39(4) 455-465.

   This paper fits into the conversation that I wish to enter with my paper and involves analyzing published scientific works. This one also includes the change over time that is a key focus of my paper. "Compared with titles from earlier times, modern ones are much more specific and technical, stripped of anything personal or openly literary."

3. Hutto, D. (2008). Graphics and ethos in biomedical journals. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 38(2), 111-131.

   This is an examination of the content of scholarly publications in the scientific field; in particular, Hutto looks at how graphics impact the ethos of the work, that is the ethos of researcher and the impact that perception of researcher ethos has on the work. While it doesn't cover changes in the perception of the scientists' ethos over time, it does look at how they build their ethos via proof in the form of graphics and choices made in the paper. "Perhaps less overtly, the reader will also use the text to judge the competence and reliability of the writer. Created ethos may supplement situated ethos, but it is certainly not secondary to it. Even a well-known researcher may say things that the audience judges to be unacceptable, so that a judgement of ethos must be made, and will be made, in every act of communication."

4. Roland, M.-C. (2009). Quality and integrity in scientific writing: prerequisites for quality in science communication. Journal of Science Communication, 8(2), A04.

   This is the conversation I want to join: Roland discusses use of personal pronouns, etc. She argues "that all the communicative changes linked to economic and social changes in the scientific community since the end of the 19th century have changed the image of researchers: they now appear as shunning responsibility, being just tentative, too polite to criticize research by others, eventually relying on writing practices that verge on fraud."
   

   
   
5. Pitrelli, N. (2010) Road maps for the 21st-century research in science communication. Journal of Science Communication, 9(3), C01.

   This piece is an opinion piece and not a research piece, but it shows that the conversation that I wish to join exists and was thriving as recently as 2010. "The past two or three years have really been fertile ground for the academic research on science communication. Some of the most prominent international experts have published a series of collective volumes gathering the most promising trends and research projects in this domain."

   
   

My chosen Exemplars:

1. Thayer, A., Evans, M., B., McBride, A. A., Queen, M., & Spyridakis, J. H. (2010). I, Pronoun: A study of formality in online content. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, 40(4), 447-458.

   While this does not directly address scientific writing, I feel that it is a well-written study on language choices that could serve as an example for other studies on language choices in other contexts. "The study found that readers perceived text passages to be less formal when they contained personal pronouns, active voice verbs, informal punctuation, or verb contractions. The study reveals that professional communicators can impact their readers’ perceptions of tone in online passages."

2. Grabinska, T., & Zielinska, D. (2010). Linguistics from the perspective of the theory of models in empirical sciences: from formal to corpus linguistics. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 40(4) 379-402.

   In this paper Grabinska and Zielinska illustrate the problem of the observer and the impact of model use in the sciences. While a step off from my main conversational goals, this papers has promise as an exemplar of a published paper dealing with language use. "To recap, people have attempted to describe most of the natural phenomena, including language, within the classical, reductionist framework. Yet, many processes and structures occurring naturally cannot be approximated adequately as closed, deterministic systems based on reductionism (having atomic elements with permanent characteristics combined together according to independent rules), with the characteristics of these basic elements clearly known."

3. Sunderland, N. (2009). Virtuous or vicious?: agency and representation in biotechnology's virtuous cycle. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 39(4), 381-400.

   While this paper does not fit into my conversation because it does not describe published works, it is possible exemplar in that it a published work discussing the rhetorical identity of scientists. "For example, scientists are presented as passive rather than active agents whose influence is limited to the laboratory context despite rhetorical use of their identity and credibility across all contexts of product development and consumption explored. Agency is highly significant in biotechnology and other areas of scientific advance because it determines who or what has moral decision making power regarding the place of new technologies in society."
   

   
   

And here is one more that fits somewhere in the genera and was interesting to me because it defended the source which started me out on this journey to look at old published scientific works and compare them to new ones.

1. Steiner, L. (1986, March). The uses of science: on rereading Thomas Kuhn. Critical Studies is Mass Communication, 106-111.

   This is the oldest paper in the list provided and I haven't a real place for it, but it caught my eye because I cited Kuhn in my paper and couched some of my observations in terms of his theories. "Yet profiting from Kuhn's insights does not demand wholesale literal acceptance of all of his contentions."

   
   

So there you go, a list of conversants and exemplars with a few spares here and there. I definitely learned that I need to look into the Journal of Science Communication and the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication as possible publication venues because the bulk of the sources that I ran into were published within those two journals.

English 5390: Writing for Publication Weekly Blog Post - Titles and Abstracts

Question: After completing the in-class exercise, what revised title(s) and abstract will you use for the article? Write a post that includes your title(s) and abstract.

The original form of the paper that I plan to rework and revise is currently linked under the Scholarly Article tab in the Navigation toolbar. The title under which it was graded in English 5384 was "Changes in Phenotype of Primary Research Papers Published in The Journal of the American Chemical Society since 1880" and the original abstract is as follows:

This paper examines the changes in the writing style and format (phenotype to borrow a term from genetics) in primary research papers published in The Journal of the American Chemical Society in its 130 years of publishing chemistry research. Sixteen total papers were selected from the 1880s, 1920s, 1960s, and 2000s (four papers from each time period). There have been significant changes in the level of personal involvement of the authors, their critiques of others, and in data presentation.

In the class exercise, I postulated 3 possible titles, which are Jessica says, (1) Phenotype changes of scholarly articles published in The Journal of the American Chemical Society over the past 120 years. (2) Changes in scientific writing style through time: 120 years of JACS (3) How chemists write: A tour through writing style in 120 years of published work.

None of the new titles are truly acceptable for a Journal article. One of the flaws of my original work was its relatively small sample size that provided a general survey of changes in papers from those published in the 1880s, 1920, 1960s, and 2000s. Perhaps this could be the new working title, while not one of the three options from class it may be more descriptive of the work.

Survey of changes in papers published in JACS in the 1880s, 1920s, 1960s, and 2000s

Perhaps not the most eye-catching title, but at least it is honest. Now for the new Abstract...

In the 1880s, "I" was not a dirty word in scholarly publication in Chemistry. In fact, in all four of the 1880s papers surveyed herein, authors used the word "I" or one of its other forms "me," "mine," "we," "our," etc. In addition, the 1880s authors were much more likely to admit investment and personal interest in the work than later authors. Somewhere between the 1880s and the 1920s, the concept of disinterestedness begins to take hold as authors step away from their work, at least on the written page. In the 1960s, disinterestedness reigns supreme, with personal pronouns used only in statements like "...further complicated by our complete ignorance of..." In the 200os, the personal pronouns started to reappear, used in the context of "We did this or that procedure." The vigorous investment and personal is not there. As the field of Chemistry matured, authors distanced themselves from their work to bring objectivity to the results. Perhaps now that the field has matured, chemists have begun to admit involvement in the actual experiments, and perhaps in future, they will admit interest in their own work.

I fully admit that the title and the abstract need lots of work, as do the content and research behind the work.