Does Rhetoric of Science Matter? The Case of the Floppy-Eared Rabbits

We owe to Bishop Sprat, the first historian of modern science, the notorious dictum that the language of science must "return back to the primitive purity and shortness, when men delivered so many things in an equal number of words" (II, xx). It is this view that Swift so effectively ridicules in the third book of Gulliver's Travels. To some, nevertheless, Sprat is still the last word: the rhetoric of science cannot matter because it does not exist. According to Ruth Mitchell, "the rigidity of the order [of experimental reports] suppresses any possible distraction an artful presentation might entail. Rhetoric is not welcome here" (549). To David Dobrin, stylistic choices, such as the preference for the passive voice, do exist, but those who prefer these choices are misguided as to their purpose: "So why do people insist on the use of the convention? Perhaps because they think [mistakenly] that it makes writing efficient" ("Technical Writing" 248). The literature of composition theory contains another view, one more supportive of the rhetoric of science. This outlook suggests that the experimental report is a genre like the novel or the epic, one whose organization is as rhetorical as the arrangement of the classical oration. According to this view, style and organization in science are matters no more trivial than style and organization in Hemingway or James. To Carolyn Miller, science is a form of argument that "asks for assent." As a result, technical writing "becomes, rather than the revelation of absolute reality, a persuasive version of experience" (616). To Elizabeth Harris, "literary theory has also exposed the 'fictionalities' of ... scientific referents, the degree to which they are created by ... scientific ways of understanding the world" (634). To explore these latter possibilities is to see science from the point of view of the humanities, to apply to science the methodology of the humanities. From this vantage, science is deeply rhetorical: stylistic choices conspire in the creation of the world as meant by science; organizational choices imitate the approved means of achieving access to that world.