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.