Into. In this introductory chapter, Bazerman talks about his motivation for and attitudes toward writing the book. At the very beginning, he talks about how he was motivated to look into the history of the disciplines in order to teach students how to write.
As a university teacher of writing I was charged with preparing students to write academic essays for their courses in all disciplines. Since academic assignments bear a loose relationship to the writing done by mature members of the disci- plines, a serious investigation of writing within disciplines promised to turn up information useful to teaching undergraduates.
He also talks about how he was limited by the methods of literary criticism.
What constitutes the repertoire of the English department is no easy thing to cate- gorize, nowhere codified, and nowhere discussed with methodological clarity. Rather, on the literary side it is embodied in the corpus of literary scholarship and criticism and in the seminar practices of textual discussion. Primarily it consists of close textual read- ings and historical contexting. The textual readings are all framed by recognition of traditional literary devices, and have been intensified by new critical insistence on the text in itself. However, other modes of criticism have suggested the application of inter- pretive frameworks from other disciplines, such as linguistics, psychology, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy. Such imported frameworks are justified in two ways: either they represent fundamental truths so that they cannot help but influence texts, or the writer on some level was aware of such ideas and constructed parts of the text upon them.
Historical contexting has served a variety of functions, from simply providing a deco- rative frame for a self-contained and independent text to offering a complete account for the creation and meaning of a historically bound text. On occasion text and context have been drawn more tightly together to view the text as a historical event within the un- folding context. Most often, contexting has served to make odd features of the text more accessible to the reader.
He uses the phrase "Historical contexting" a few times. In sum, Bazerman is going to reread primary texts in the history of science in order to show that science is an accomplishment, which puts him in the tradition of POROI. That is, the goal is to show that science is rhetorical and that it's not just about the communication of facts--or rather, he'll show that facts are themselves social in an important sense.
Just trying to think about how to square that circle. How are facts social? They're social in their uptake. Scientist need to get other people to care about the facts. Without rhetoric, facts can't circulate. Need to read that Bloor article!
"philosophy of science became important, not for the ultimate questions of epistemology, but for more modest ones of how people conceived of disciplinary activity"
"As will be evident throughout this book, I have been most profoundly influenced by Ludwik Fleck’s Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact."
"I began to see that current writing practices (in conventional, interactional, and epistemological dimen- sions) build on a history of practice and speak to a historically conditioned situation" Yes, so this is the emergence of the idea of writing as a conversation, and in fact Bazerman himself was the author of that paper in 1984 I believe? what paper was that? "A Relationship between Reading and Writing: The Conversational Model1 Charles Bazerman2" (from Ellen Carillo)
See. Context again. "contexting of writing as a multidimensional activity"
"What does learning to write better mean if we can-not moor meaning to language?" Learning to write better.
Important.
Examining the writing in science seemed a particularly important challenge for several reasons. First, the statements made through scientific discourse have been socially and culturally important in ways I hardly need elaborate; we are constantly rebuilding our world upon the statements of science. Second, scientific methods of formulat- ing knowledge have been highly successful in gaining almost universal assent to claims hardly accessible or persuasive to common sense. Third, as a result of science’s great success, habits of scientific discourse have influenced almost all other areas of intellectual inquiry. By unpack- ing scientific language one can come to understand important influ- ences in all disciplines. Finally, scientific language is a particularly hard case for rhetoric, for sciences have the reputation for eschewing rhetoric and simply reporting natural fact that transcends symbolic trappings. Scientific writing is often treated apart from other forms of writing, as a special code privileged through its reliance on mathematics (considered a purer symbolic system than natural language). If one can show the workings of formulating practices in sciences on the kinds of statements science produces, one can begin to mine important depths of rhetoric.7
Also important. Going to be writing that a lot probably.
Of course the sciences, or even one science, or a single specialty with- in science, is far from a single, unmixed discourse community. The more I looked at varieties of scientific texts, the more I saw, with Darwin, that variation is everywhere the rule. So I narrowed my view further, on a single mechanism generating similarity throughout the wide expanses of variation: Genre, and one genre in particular. The emergence and transformation of the single genre of the experimental report runs as a common thread throughout the natural sciences of the last three cen- turies and the social sciences of this century.
Variation, similarity, evolution.
I wonder if the genre of the experimental report is a constitutive rule (Searle; Swidler), or at least functions as one.
"Clearly, many other genres of great significance have emerged in the sciences. Important stories remain to be told about theoretical articles, reviews of literature, speculative articles, handbooks and other refer- ence works, proposals, and various pedagogic genres—their separate histories and interrelationships. Yet the experimental report has a ubiq- uity that seems to overshadow the others. The experimental report seems central to manyconceptions of the sciences as empirical inquiry.9 The experimental report has developed as a favored solution of the problem of how to present empirical experience as more than brute fact, as a mediated statement of inquiry and knowledge."
Context again. "However, attempts to understand genre by the texts themselves are bound to fail, for they treat socially constructed categories as stable natural facts. Recently Ralph Cohen has argued against formalist and essentialist views and presented a more socially con- structed view of literary genres as “historical assumptions constructed by authors, audiences and critics in order to serve communicative and aesthetic purposes”(210)."
Carolyn Miller, sure.
"Thus though genre emerges out of contexts, it becomes part of the context for future works. [I feel like that's what's going to happen in this book; he's going to show how people needed to shape discourse in order to produce the genre of the experimental report, how that genre itself became a context or social fact, and how that context was itself modified by the APA. It's a conversation between humans that's mediated by texts. Very Anne Freadman. The discourse of science was shaped, shapes, and is itself shaped--a structuring structure that is predisposed to act as a structuring structure.] Thus the social fact of genre has given the study a peg to rest on. The emergence of the genre of experimental report is a social reality that helps shape discourse in a great range of disciplines. Now anyone with results to report must somehow address the context created by the social fact of this genre."
"the largest lesson that this study holds is not that there are simple genres that must be slavishly followed, that we must give students an appropriate set of cookie cutters for their anticipated careers, but rather that the student must under- stand and rethink the rhetorical choices embedded in each generic habit to master the genre. Although genre may help stabilize the multiform rhetorical situation of scientific writing and may simplify the many rhe- torical choices to be made, the writer loses control of the writing when he or she does not understand the genre."
Variation is everywhere in this chapter, as is emergence and change.
"What is the fundamental goal of the study of writing? To that question I have been able to find no better answer than the practical goal of helping people (myself included) to write better. That goal suggests a facilitating question: How does writing work?" So Bazerman is basically initiating writing studies.
"To help people write more effectively we need to unpack the entire transaction and identify what the words are doing in the middle."
"Study of writing was considered necessary only for the grossly incom- petent"
Ok, so Bazerman is paranoid about being confused with the postmodernists and argues that the writer, which he is, is constructive. "writer is always looking with delight and surprise at what can be done with this fallen state."
"praxis-oriented constructivist study"<- what Bazerman is doing
Seems important.
Yet any praxis-oriented constructivist study cannot avoid evaluative assump- tions built in somewhere. To mark human constructions as worthy of attention is to valorize accomplishments. To be curious as to how these things were accomplished implies a desire to imitate, incorporate, or outdo. To study choices is to notice what they accomplish and what they don’t. To develop a praxis from such study is to encourage some lines of development for human society at the expense of other developments or nondevelopment. Finally, practical goals necessarily provide an eval- uative framework for the entire scholarly endeavor.
All of those verbs are what Bazerman is doing in this book.
"One peculiar aspect of the accomplishment of scientific discourse is that it appears to hide itself. We know that poetry, laws, and news- papers are the active products of word-hagglers. The only ploy to mini- mize human linguistic agency in these endeavors is to invoke divinity, muses, or the depths of the human psyche. Yet to write science is com- monly thought not to write at all, just simply to record the natural facts. Even widely published scientists, responsible for the production of many texts over many years, often do not see themselves as accom- plished writers, nor do they recognize any self-conscious control of their texts. The popular belief of this past century that scientific language is simply a transparent transmitter of natural facts is, of course, wrong; the evidence presented in this book only confirms this conclusion ar- gued so forcefully and frequently in recent years. It is nonetheless fas- cinating that such a misconception could have thrived so well in the face
of the massive linguistic work that has gone into scientific communica- tion. This attests to the success of scientific language as an accomplished system."
"The apparent transparency of the system to the latercomers is some- thing then imputed back to the firstcomers and makers of the system. This book, examining the many rhetorical choices evidenced over the last three centuries, should help dispel the view that scientists never have and never will write. Sometimes scientists’ rhetorical choices are self-conscious responses to perceived rhetorical problems; sometimes they are unselfconscious impromptu inventions; sometimes they are slow and imperceptible shifts. In whatever way these writing choices are realized and become institutionalized, they shape the kind of thing we consider contributions to knowledge. To unpack what kind of thing a contribution to knowledge is, we need to see what these choices origi- nally were and why they were made. We need to see what kinds of mechanisms are embodied in current unreflective practice. And by bringing unreflective practice to attention, we reassert conscious con- trol over it."
Bazerman even uses the idea of the blackbox earlier. "The socially situated study of writing directly implies an interest in psychology, for in every situa- tion, coming and going, writing vanishes into the black boxes of human nervous systems" This is an act of making visible then, of bringing before the eyes.
Wait, is this a history of practice? "The concern for actual practice leads to a smaller role for rhetorical theorists than is usual in rhetorical histories The actual writers of scien- tific texts take center stage" Oh, but you're thinking of pragmatic histories. Pragmatic. Practical.
"the attempt to understand what scientific language has become in practice"
case studies
worlds, understood epistemologically. "In the attempt to understand what scientific language has become in practice, this book consists of a series of case studies. In chapter 2 the analysis of three texts will suggest how much differences in writing matter. The differences are not just on the page, but in how the page places itself with respect to social, psychological, textual, and natural worlds. By examining texts from three different disciplines, we see what very different textual objects they are and what different worlds they reside in. The remainder of the book will look more exclu- sively into scientific writing, concentrating on the genre of experimental report."
"a study of the forces shaping an article..."
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