Here, have some condensed knowledge; it tastes just like the real thing!

            Adam has yet to blog.  Vince has not posted anything.  Neither has Sadie, nor Liam.  My go-to guys for inspiration and orientation.  I cannot believe you did this to me! Alright, so we are considering three texts.  If these authors were Tweeting their articles, the posts may look something like this:

Gross: “The substance and sustenance of science is rhetorical persuasion.”

Mishra: “The meaning of graphics is highly contextual, referential, and paradoxical.”

Lakoff and Johnson: “Metaphor in language is culturally and physically based, and structures action.”

            The synopses hardly do justice in representing that from each of these ideas stem countless branches of thought.  After reading the texts, I feel I have taken a ginormous bite of some rich food, and am now struggling to chew and swallow.  And thus, a truth about knowledge: it is deep, wide, variable, and contextual, and the manner by which we strive to understand is by forming bite-size pieces, by quantifying.  All three pieces posed excellent and thorough arguments, but it is apparent to me that humankind puts ideas into boxes by way of defining and analyzing.  There is an intrinsic need to know, which drives scientific endeavors.  It is not enough to write about a new genetic discovery.  After papers are published comes the second wave of wave of research, which is analyzing those texts to discover more.  Belong to this field are researchers such as Gross, Mishra, and Lakoff & Johnson.  Rather than exploring further the science presented within a given research paper, these writers analyze the conduit, the language.  

            Epistemology, our topic, seems to exist solely around the idea of rationalization.  It asks, to what extent can we explain this?  Is it plausible?  Can we logically quantify this information?  After reading the articles, my brain is in hyper-analyzation mode.  I am listening to conversations, and picking out the metaphorical assumptions in each illocutionary act.  I am reading journal articles with a lesser focus on the content, and more on the persuasive techniques.  I see the graphic in my Sociology textbook, and wonder how it specifically aids me in understanding the content. 

So, my thought is: can we know without understanding?  Is all the analyzing that these texts represent actual knowing, or is it the attempt of humankind to rationalize, to find ways to explain what we see happening?  Knowledge is infinite and interconnected, and we constantly strive to quantify and position it.  By using metaphorical speech, we connect our discourse to other previously defined meanings, assumptions, and understandings.  We speak in relation to the bites of knowledge we have previously chewed and swallowed, forever in an endless race to quantify reality.   

So, we use language to communicate, and then we analyze that language for its flaws, assumptions, and methods.  Is this truly the best way of knowing?  Are there any other ways?   In science, we try to consider neat little boxes of information: genes, atomic positivity and negativity, temperature, and so forth.  In actuality, the natural world is spontaneous, indefinable, and we have hardly scratched the surface.  Therefore, it seems that language, which strives to quantify, is an ill-suited tool for representing the non-numerical and abstract character of the natural world.      

Grrrrr.  This is one outcome of not having a stable orientation point in writing my post: I end up ranting and questioning this whole endeavor.  Sorry for the pessimism, guys.  I really do appreciate language, hence the English-writing major.  However, the question of language dictating cognition cannot go unattended.  If we are to be innovative, we must ask the hard questions, no?

  

           

Appealing to the Masses: the Fidelity/Publicity Struggle

Influenza strains, particle physics, under-funded scientific ventures, contagious ferrets, and stasis theory crowd my mind, and I need to write something along the lines of science accommodation.  Okay, I can do this.  But really, what about that H5N1 virus locked away in a vault?  Is that the sort of science that should not be widely publicized, for the sake of keeping potentially dangerous knowledge from the bioweapon-extremists?  But I diverge….

          Considering science accommodation, my initial thought is: does the science writer accommodate the science, or the public?  If accommodating is “fitting in with the wishes or needs of” (thanks, Merriam W), then it seems by Fahnestock’s analysis that the crossover from original science texts to articles for public consumption prioritizes the wishes of the community audience to comprehend, greater than it keeps fidelity to the original text.  Is this a bad approach?  I don’t think so.

Journalists know it’s poor practice to cite another journalist’s article.  Source material should be just that—from the original source.  Therefore, science writers’ reins are loosened and they are allowed more freedom for interpretation, on account of their work not being the pinnacle piece from which all others will stem.  Their purpose is to inform their audience, the general public, not to create a piece which the multitudes will cite.  In reading, we appreciate a balanced piece, compelling facts, and a semblance of closure.  The science writer has a difficult job then, to take a research paper which is highly-specialized, full of phrases such as , “our tests suggest” and “it is probable,” and without a clear-cut conclusion, and turn it into a well-balanced meal that the public can sit down and enjoy, all the while not greatly compromising truthfulness to the original text.  Now, onto stasis theory.  If we, as readers, look for these elements in a piece: “…to be convinced that a situation exists…what caused it…whether the situation is good or bad, and what should be done about it and by whom,” (Fahnestock, 290) then what is the journalist to do when the research does not lend itself to such clean argumentative rhetoric?  Poet’s license, it seems.  Perhaps the science writer sees the implicative questions, partial conclusions, and conjectures where the scientist’s caution and accountability to a higher audience (i.e., nature, rather than the public) prevented.  While I am not calling for gross misappropriations of research, I do believe that an element of accommodating the public is presenting a digestible article.   This includes, perhaps, the tangents of which the human mind is so fond.  Tangents and conjecture spur thought, which is the point of the article, no?  In the end, science writers create in a different genre than research writers, and are given license by that.

So, the challenge: how does one woo the public without cheating on the scientist?  Can faithfulness be maintained, as the science writer walks the fine line between providing intrigue for the masses without making enemies of scientists?  Saved by the bell; it’s the deadline to post.  We will talk more on this later, I’m sure.  

Rebellious Writing-- Creativity's Door

Oh man, I could write an entire dissertation on this.  Maybe.  In any case, the questions strike deep chords regarding opinion and feelings I have on the detriment of rules in creating good writing.  Here's toasting to 500 words (we'll see how this goes.)  Cheers!

I was taught few formal writing rules as a child.  My mother, a savvy woman with a knack for words, home-schooled my five siblings and me.  She was not a big proponent of one-size-fits-all curriculum; our writing education was practically and experientially based.  Thank-you letters were mandatory, and the opportunity was taken to teach the difference in voice, punctuation, spelling, etc.  My family wrote a yearly Christmas letter, and through that I learned the basis of outlines and narrative.  Occasionally I submitted pieces to our local newspaper, The Valley Journal, developing a sense of news writing as I strove to write mine similar to stories they ran.  As kids, the things we had yet to write were not pre-bound by any rigorous rules; it was only that which we had written that was critiqued, edited, and encouraged.  We also read—a lot.  I learned styles and voice from classic literature, and practiced it with my prolific journaling.  In high school my mother purchased me White and Strunk’s Elements of Style, the only rule book a writer needs, in my opinion.  I graduated high school a year early, and jumped into college at sweet seventeen.  

To me, rules were instrumental.  They represented the preservation of formality and etiquette, and to know them well was to present oneself well.  Structure and form did not dictate my writing process, but were friendly heuristics.  This unconscious mindset was cemented by my first “official” English teacher, freshman year of college.  Kamiah was her name, and she started each class period by having us free write.  She was incredibly encouraging of creativity, and stressed it first and foremost over rules.  The relationship between writing and following rules was once hardly existent in my mind, and is now intentional.  As I progressed through college, I found my obsessive and perfectionist habits damaging to my creativity.  Any strict adherence to a preset form nearly paralyzed me in writing.  I wrote on writer's block (link to my piece), and restricting curriculum, sometimes in unusual formats or nontraditional form.  It seems there are the rules we follow for coherence, (the progression of one thought to another, spelling words correctly, etc.), and the rules we follow because we are told (the three paragraph essay, always using third-person voice, etc.)  As writers, we walk a fine line--- rules are essential to understanding and coherence, but also can be debilitating to creativity.  Finding that sweet spot in the middle, knowing which structures aid and which hinder, is the quest of every writer.

On associations of rules and voice, the situation changes genre to genre.  I have found most English classes as supportive of creativity, but the business class I took last semester demanded succinctness and straightforwardness;"plain" writing, to me.  Less style, more “say it like it is.”  Ugh.  There are few feelings worse than being docked points for presenting something creatively.  Is there a point where creativity (by this I mean unorthodox methods, non-traditional form, etc.) detracts from effective communication?  I would dare to say no, when the creativity is done well.  What the word “well” means is another debate altogether.

And, I hit 515 words.  Adhering to the rule of word length has never been my forte.  To touch on the last questions, regarding personal opinion in writing, their respective scenes, and that which distinguishes them, no piece is devoid of personal opinion.  True objectivity is a myth.  Some genres, like news writing, ask for the author to create the appearance of non-bias interpretation, but the truth is that the author makes judgment calls each time she writes a sentence.  The distinguishing factor in these genres, the amount to which the writer is allowed to incorporate more personality, it seems, is measured against the extent to which the public wants to decide for themselves.  Society is allowed (and expected) to have an opinion on news; therefore we want it presented opinion-less, so we are free to formulate our own response without bias.  Perhaps we believe when pursuing knowledge, opinion must be absent so as to not infringe on our own thought development.  But knowledge is, and always will be, a collective which incorporates both opinion and fact.   

One last thing that has changed pre- and post- college. I learned the traditional “he” as a third-person pronoun.  With the current push for gender equality, that has been demonized as a formal rule.   It never bothered me.  I’m a female writer who kicks ass; masculine pronouns or not.