Considering science as a subjective topic was a novel idea to me, but this class opened my eyes to the rhetoric that is incorporated into the discussions about scientific subjects both between scientists and to the public. We analyzed many texts as a class, some primary sources and others rhetorical criticisms, and all of these brought forth something new in regard to what aspects of argumentation should be looked for when reading or writing in the sciences. In finding out there is an entire field devoted to examining the arguments in scientific literature, I realized that this class should carry some serious weight in how I conduct myself in my future career. I have studied rhetoric in a number of other contexts, but not in such an applicable way to the the jobs I want to pursue.
I found most striking how this course pointed out the numerous different contexts of scientific rhetoric. Published literature is very different from scientific reviews which are very different from public discourse. It is important for me to take note of my audience and context when writing scientific material so that I can use the right registers and be as effective as possible. From all this, I learned how to be a better communicator of science, and how I can recognize bad rhetoric in my field.
The following is my final research paper for the course, a comparative analysis I performed of two episodes of Cosmos, one from 1980 and the other from 2014. I use this comparison to draw a significant conclusion about how the public presentation of science has changed over time, challenging a long-held 1986 claim by Jeanne Fahnestock that "wonder" is the principle element of successful public discourse on scientific topics. I ended up presenting my findings at the 2018 UW Undergraduate Research Symposium, my first of three times presenting.
This project marked a new era of how I approached writing research papers since I had to incorporate not just factual evidence from primary sources as with a more basic synthesis paper, but also had to convey a heavy amount of my own analysis and rhetorical readings on those sources. I continued to use these same strategies in future papers to adopt a tone of greater authority and develop novel claims about my topics.