Now in Paperback!! From SUNY Series in Science and Technical Communication:
Sins Against Science:
The Scientific Hoaxes of Poe, Twain, and OthersEdgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and Dan De Quille, among other literary figures, falsified scientific stories in the newspapers of their time to make a political point about how Americans were shifting their confidence from the Word of humanists to the World of scientists. To analyze how the hoaxes "fooled" their readers, I combine traditional reader-response and new-historical methods with Optimality Theory, a linguistic framework that models decisions made in the face of multiple competing assumptions. The conclusion analyzes the recent Sokal hoax in light of the tradition of American scientific media hoaxing.
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Special online content related to the book!
For interested scholars and teachers, I've created a tutorial explaining the optimality-theory-based method I use in my classroom and in this study to "read" audiences.
Generally speaking, my research program is concerned with the role of pragmatics (language in use) in the construction of public identity. Currently that program is taking the following paths:
Rhetoric of Science
Rhetoric of Code
I'm working with John Shipman at the Tech Computer Center and Allan Stavely, Professor Emeritus in the Computer Science department here at New Mexico Tech, to explore the potential impact of their innovative literate programming style, "Lightweight Literate Programming," on the single sourcing movement.
Science Popularization and Prophecy
I'm currently developing a book plan to discuss suggestive connections between Western prophetic rhetoric and the rhetoric of popular science. My contention is that scientists who speak to the public, such as Stephen Jay Gould, Carl Sagan, and Rachel Carson, are adopting the role of prophets in order (consciously or unconsciously) to exploit the rhetorical and social power accorded the prophet in Judeo-Christian tradition. The first phase of this project, a study of the role of the Delphic oracle in Ancient Athens, "The Rhetoric of Oracles," came out in Rhetorical Society Quarterly in Summer 2003.
Scientific Topoi
Aristotle's koinoi topoi are basic cognitive structures we use to make sense of our world. They are also useful ways to teach the logical structure of the IMRD experimental article. I'm discovering that each scientific discipline has created their own sub-genre of the experimental article by their selection and use of topoi. I hope to head toward a genealogy of the rhetorical styles or "indexes" of scientific fields by using the topoi to trace a rhetorical heritage.
Empirical Studies of Reading and Writing
Gender and Reading
I'm in the process of analyzing data from a pilot study I conducted at the University of Texas that was designed to figure out what cues readers use to guess the gender of an anonymous author. I had readers read texts that combined various levels of three main independent variables--topic, authority level, and linguistic style. I asked a simple question after the readings: "How likely do you think it is that this text was written by a man/woman?" I hope to correlate responses with one of the independent variables to show that it is the strongest predictor of gender-guessing by readers.
Rhetoric of Disability: Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in the College Composition Classroom
Tech has a surprising percentage of students with ASD: 4.25% of the freshman class last year, in fact. More and more students with ASD are mainstreaming and attending university, particularly technical universities, which is great news, but freshman comp can be a real challenge for ASD students due to its highly social curriculum. Perceiving a gap in the literature, some colleagues and I who put together a panel on this topic for CCCCs have an edited volume presenting the latest neuropscychological findings on ASD and "in the trenches" suggestions for educational interventions for these students. I'm also applying for an NIH R03 grant with Cheryl Olman from the University of Minnesota to study common teaching metaphors (such as "the inverted triangle") and their utility for teaching comp to ASD students.
Pragmatics
My M.A. thesis examined expository texts in the National Geographic and similar journals. I found that the articles' authors built their texts iconically to match readers' mental models of the world in order to facilitate learning. I modeled these patterns of presenting evidence via a redefinition of the Instance discourse relation in SDRT (segmented discourse representation theory).
Comparative Rhetoric
Even before I spent time in West Africa studying Minyanka discourse, I was fascinated by cultural differences in how people construct the world and public identity through language. While I was in Africa, I wrote an analysis of a Protestant sermon in response to George Kennedy's assertion that formal rhetoric is always conservative. I showed how formal Minyanka proverbs were actually being implicated in the Westernization of the Minyanka people through the sermons. The essay, "'Traditional' Oral Forms Implicated in Cultural Change: A Case Study in Minyanka Rhetoric" is currently under review at Rhetoric Society Quarterly .
Research
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