Interacting With Audiences

Social Influences on the Production of Scientific Writing

Ann M. Blakeslee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9781135690144
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This distinctive monograph examines the dynamic rhetorical processes by which scientists shape, negotiate, and position their work within an interdisciplinary community. Author Ann M. Blakeslee studies the everyday rhetorical practices of a group of condensed matter theoretical physicists, and presents here the first substantial qualitative study of the planning and implementation of discursive practices by a group of scientists. This volume also represents one of the first studies to use situated cognition and learning theory to study how knowledge of a domain's discursive practices is acquired by newcomers. Unlike previous studies of scientists' rhetorical practices, which have focused primarily on the finished or published texts, Blakeslee's involvement with the physicists as they engaged in the composing processes--from jotting down planning notes through publishing a scientific paper--suggests an alternative view of audience based on cooperative interaction between authors and their interlocutors. From this innovative perspective, functional knowledge of audiences comes only by entering into some community of practice, in which readers also become self-defining interlocutors and even participants in joint projects. Blakeslee's research follows the physicists' work into communal, interactive dynamics, looking at their overt attempts to get feedback from members of their audiences, what that feedback was, and how they responded to it. This work addresses and extends a model for audience analysis that consists of two primary operations: getting to know and understand one's interlocutors, and determining how to reach and influence them. In doing so, it offers important insights into the dissemination of scientific information, and thus will be of great interest to scholars and students in the areas of rhetoric of science and technology, composition, rhetorical theory, and scientific writing.

1
Scientific Rhetoric in Interactive Practice: Physicists Getting to Know and Speak to Real Audiences

A physicist, Robert Swendsen, his graduate student, Djamal Bouzida, and a postdoctoral fellow, Shankar Kumar, saw an opportunity in their research to provide a useful and effective simulation tool for the members of their own field, as well as two other scientific fields. Aware of the difficulty of addressing and persuading their new audiences in these other fields, these three physicists used several strategies to analyze and try to dominate their readers, but also to gain information about and to understand these new constituents. They engaged in an energetic program of rhetorical strategizing through which they sought to learn about and even to obtain feedback from the scientists they were addressing with their work.

Looking at these scientists’ attempts to get to know and speak to their unfamiliar constituents helps with exploring the conundrum of audience in science. In my research with these three physicists, I explored the question, “How do scientific authors get to know and interact with their audiences in real practice?” In investigating this question, I examined the audience complexities and problems the physicists encountered as they attempted to cross disciplinary boundaries with their research. I also examined the negotiations and tasks they engaged in as they planned to address these scientists. More specifically, I examined the process through which the physicists learned about their audiences, and the manner in which they negotiated meaning and persuasion among these heterogeneous groups. I also examined the dynamic process by which the physicists negotiated relationships, standings, identities, and expertise (with issues such as status, authority, and experience at play) throughout the various stages of their work. My research allowed me to identify and sort out the social interactive processes that contribute to the formation of knowledge in science, especially in interdisciplinary contexts. Cross-field encounters like this one provide a productive research site for examining these kinds of issues. However, the issues at stake apply to all scientific communication—indeed, all communication—so my hope is that studies like mine will open up a wider realm of inquiry and help us to develop a more realistic sense of how authors and audiences interact in science.

CHALLENGING ACCEPTED PRACTICE: THE PHYSICISTS’ RESEARCH AND THE RHETORICAL AND SCIENTIFIC SITUATIONS SURROUNDING IT

Swendsen, Bouzida, and Kumar, all condensed matter theoretical physicists, were concerned in their research with developing efficient methods to simulate biological molecules. They were testing a method called Dynamically Optimized Monte Carlo (DOMC), which is a flexible method that allows scientists to vary the parameters of the simulations. The physicists were finding that the DOMC method could simulate molecules more efficiently than another method, called molecular dynamics (MD), commonly used by biologists and chemists. In a 1980 article, two chemists, Northrup and McCammon, established the efficiency of the MD method and persuaded biologists and chemists to make MD their method of choice. Northrup and McCammon’s work also suggested that the problem of developing efficient methods for performing biological simulations had been solved. Therefore, biologists and chemists, who for the most part accepted these scientists’ claims, saw little need to research alternative methods.

The physicists, however, wished to determine if the DOMC method could simulate molecules more efficiently than MD and thus save on supercomputing time, a primary motivation for this kind of work. When they found that it could, they set about trying to persuade biologists and chemists to consider using the method. However, their attempts at carrying out this persuasion were complicated by several factors, not the least of which were biologists’ and chemists’ longstanding acceptance of MD. Another complicating factor was the physicists’ status as outsiders to these communities—they were not well known by these scientists, nor did they have a reputation among them. Also, and no less significantly, the physicists’ approach to and concerns in performing the simulations were very different from the approaches and concerns of the biologists and chemists.

As one example of these differences, Swendsen, Bouzida, and Kumar believed in applying these methods first to smaller molecules. They preferred this approach, they said, because smaller molecules do not strain computer resources and therefore provide more accurate readings of the efficiency of the methods. Biologists and chemists, on the other hand, preferred applying the methods right away to larger molecules because those are the molecules they are most interested in simulating. (I address the problems the physicists had with this approach in chap. 2.) This practice and biologists’ and chemists’ general preference for applications rather than methodological proofs became important factors in the physicists’ eventual decision to publish the DOMC work in Physical Review (Bouzida, Kumar, & Swendsen, 1992). Although the physicists had originally intended to publish their findings in a biology or chemistry journal, they ended up publishing them in Physical Review after they received critical feedback on the paper addressing the work from scientists in these other fields. This study began when Swendsen, Bouzida, and Kumar were planning this paper, and this book follows the process they undertook from its initial stages through to the completion and submission of the paper to the journal.

STUDYING HOW THE PHYSICISTS LEARNED ABOUT AND ADDRESSED THEIR AUDIENCES

My research with the physicists, which took place at Carnegie Mellon University between January 1991 and January 1992¹, represents the first qualitative study of the composing processes of ordinary scientists, from jotting down planning notes to editing final text. It is one of the first and most substantial attempts to gain this kind of data and to follow a text into communal interactive dynamics. It is also the first focusing on situated cognition and learning in a scientific domain. Specifically, I look at the situated processes both by which the individual DOMC paper was composed and by which Bouzida, the graduate student in the group, learned to address and to become a member of his disciplinary community.

Although most rhetorical scholars have examined broad or global features of scientific genres and language, and changes in these features historically (e.g., Bazerman, 1988; Gross, 1990; Myers, 1990; Prelli, 1989), I focused in this research on the much smaller grain of a single rhetorical situation unfolding over a shorter period of time (1 year). I attended in my work not only to the products of that situation, but to the processes that created and led to those products. I examined finished texts, but added the dimension of planning and preparing those texts and all of the social and rhetorical activities (both formal and informal) that constitute everyday ordinary scientific practice, especially as it pertains to learning about and addressing audiences. Greg Myers supported such expansions in our investigations when he entertained the question of whether researchers need to go beyond texts to understand writing, or whether there is nothing beyond texts to which we can appeal. Myers (1996) contended that we must get out into the field and enter the flow of language and work. He added that we need to relate our findings, as well, to the larger social contexts for such work (pp. 605–606).

The Participants

My primary participant in this study, Robert Swendsen, completed his doctorate in physics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. For the next 2 years he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cologne in Germany. He then spent 2 years at a research institute in Germany, 3 years at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, and 5 years at the IBM research lab in Zurich. In 1984, he accepted a position as professor of physics at Carnegie Mellon University.

At the time of my study, Swendsen had more than 80 publications. He began writing papers on applications of the Monte Carlo renormalization group in 1979, and he began using the Monte Carlo method to conduct simulations in 1986. His collaborations generally consist of himself and one or two graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. When I performed my study, he had advised three doctoral students and served on several thesis committees. For my study, I spoke with a number of graduate students in his department, and they characterized Swendsen as a competent teacher and a concerned advisor. Three of these students said they planned to ask Swendsen to advise them. Swendsen was one of four condensed matter theorists in his department; however, he was the only one who specialized in using the Monte Carlo methodology to perform simulations.

The second participant in the DOMC group, Djamal Bouzida, was 29 years old and nearing the end of 6 years of graduate work, the last 3 of which were under Swendsen’s direction. Previously, Bouzida had worked with another advisor in electrical engineering. He left this project after 3 years when his fellowship funding ran out. At the time of my study, Bouzida was also writing his thesis and looking for postdoctoral positions (he eventually attained one in a biomedical engineering department at a state university in New England). Bouzida had been raised and educated in Algeria and his native language was French; however, he also spoke and wrote fluent English, which he had learned at a young age².

Finally, Shankar Kumar completed his doctorate in physics in 1990 at Carnegie Mellon. At the time of my study, Kumar held a postdoctoral position in the biology department at a neighboring state university. Although Swendsen was not his advisor, Kumar had worked with Swendsen on the DOMC project, which resulted in Kumar’s first publication. Kumar, who was 31 years old when I conducted my study, was a nonnative speaker, but he could write and speak English fluently: He had been educated in English-speaking schools in India, and he had lived in the United States for 8 years.

Sources of Data

In carrying out my study of these scientists, I relied on three primary sources of data—observation of group meetings, text analyses, and interviews (see the table in the appendix at the end of this chapter for a summary of the primary data I collected over the course of my study). I used these sources of data to develop a composite portrait of the interactions that occurred among these physicists and between the physicists and other scientists (i.e., those who read and responded to a draft of the DOMC paper and those who attended colloquia at which the physicists discussed their work). I focused my investigation on the interactions of the physicists (among themselves and with members of their audiences) as they worked out their rhetorical strategies and as they wrote and reviewed drafts of the DOMC paper (the physicists produced and jointly reviewed 21 distinct versions of this paper over a 5-month period).

I used the physicists’ group meetings, which occurred once or twice each week and lasted up to 2 hours, as the primary source for my observations of their interactions. I also occasionally observed the physicists interacting informally with each other and with other scientists, either in one another’s offices, in the hallway, or at weekly lunchtime forums; however, I did not record or formally analyze these exchanges. Although some organizational and social researchers have addressed the importance of such ad hoc, informal exchanges, I believed that all of my data sources, taken together, along with my frequent interactions with the physicists and immersion in the activities of their collaboration over the course of my study, provided sufficient data and information for answering the questions I had posed about the physicists’ rhetorical practices.

During my study with the physicists I observed, took notes on, and tape-recorded 13 meetings at which they reviewed drafts of the DOMC paper, usually paragraph by paragraph. I also observed and tape-recorded 15 meetings at which the physicists discussed other aspects of their work and/or reviewed drafts of another paper they were writing that addressed multiple histograms. (Although I considered these meetings when I analyzed my data, they do not figure as prominently in my analyses because I was concerned in my study, primarily, with the strategies the physicists used to position their claims for the DOMC method in the fields of biology and chemistry.) My notes on the discussions that occurred at all of the meetin...

Table of contents

• Rhetoric, Knowledge, and Society
• Contents
• Editor’s Introduction
• Preface
• 1 Scientific Rhetoric in Interactive Practice: Physicists Getting to Know and Speak to Real Audiences
• 2 Planning to Persuade: Strategies for Publicizing Ideas and Addressing Audiences
• 3 Getting to Know Familiar and Unfamiliar Audiences: Learning About Audiences Within One’s Own and Across Different Communities
• 4 Following the DOMC Text Into Communal Interactive Dynamics: Authors Getting to Know and Interacting With Audiences in Real Practice
• 5 Interacting With Audience Members: Authors Evaluating and Responding to Audience Feedbacka
• 6 Learning to Write in Context: Newcomers Getting to Know and Speak to Audiencesa
• 7 Sorting Out Social Influences: Distinguishing Authorial, Audience, and Other Roles in Scientific Work
• Afterword
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index