Great article. I come from a physics background, and eventually my career path led to teaching academic writing to STEM students in China. I used to focus a lot on form - using the right grammar for each part of a scientific paper and so on. However, my approach to teaching writing changed significantly when I started working with a colleague from a humanities background who introduced American-style rhetorical analysis, teaching students how to think more clearly about their ideas and what they wanted to say. Students’ writing improved markedly.
Yes, I agree. This is a great article. As someone who entered academia relatively late in life, and as someone whose research crosses disciplines, I have attempted to read many papers written in unintelligible academic speak. We definitely need STEA(rts)M rather than STEM
There is an areas of the sciences that does address with the social impact of research. Healthcare research, which practices both quantitative and qualitative research, with the qualitative research exploring people's lives experience of a healthcare issue. My own profession, nursing, which has been called both an art and a science, utilizes qualitative research alongside quantitative research and may even combine both types of results in one study to get a more holistic picture of the effects of a treatment on patients.
Thank you for this. My interest is not so much in the very important topic of specific formulations of social impact, such as the "lived experience" of healthcare but rather in the evolving concept of social impact relative to other posited goods. The concept and its varied representations and meanings rather than the practice would be the object of inquiry. For example, the NSF criteria for fellowships includes intellectual merit and "broader impacts," implying that the former is a more narrow category than the latter. What are we to make of the implicit characterization of intellectual merit as not itself suggestive of "broader impacts"? When the NSF says that the criterion for BI refers to "the potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes" that presupposes an understanding of what is desired. What sorts of outcomes are and have been desired in this context and by whom, under what circumstances? The "societal outcomes" desired by, say, Oppenheimer in the mid-20th century, vary greatly from those articulated today in various sciences. My questions pertain to the representation and conceptualization of relative goods in this context, considered from a humanistic perspective.
When I was immersed, as an undergraduate, in the world of nursing research, I recognized that healthcare had its own rhetoric, and that not all of that rhetoric carried meaning into real world application. Certain phraseology - similar in content to the NSF criteria you quote - appeared rather to symbolize high minded ideals than concrete application. I think the disconnect between rhetoric and application is especially apparent in nursing because the profession necessarily brings one into direct contact with those who are impacted by the scientific research. We are forced to see that although statistically, a given treatment has a high rate of success, the individual human in front of us that did not fall into that successful statistical bracket suffers too greatly for us to simply dismiss them as a statistical outlier. Real world experience teaches us to think of the science in more humanistic terms, because we deal directly with humanity.
Your work in teaching scientists to write by teaching them to read is intriguing, and there is great merit in considering the changing historical context of scientific writing. But I was also wondering if science students might also benefit from reading humanities texts. For example, the 19th century literary classic Middlemarch by George Eliot speaks directly to how scientific ideals may be impacted by human relations. The scientist whose imagination is broadened by study of the humanities will be better able to envision the social impact of her research.
Wow, thank you so much for this. I strongly agree.And what an excellent suggestion about Middlemarch. No novel, in my view, contains a more rewarding account of the limitations of theory relative to practice than does Middlemarch. I would absolutely love to teach novels, but I think that I would have to design some sort of interdisciplinary course for that, or do it in the context of a workshop.
I enjoyed reading your perspective on teaching writing to scientists. My experience has been that most scientists would agree that "writing is a tool," but only for the purpose of "communicating what I have discovered to others." However, now I am intrigued by the idea of writing as a tool for DOING the actual discovering in the first place. Did I pick up your argument correctly? If so, that would indicate that writing is not just something scientists should do after they discover something worth sharing, but also along the way as an essential tool of research itself. Interesting...
Yes, exactly! One uses writing as a technology--an ancient and free one--to explore, plan, store, organize, and refine one's thinking. The implications are that you do not "figure out what you want to say and then say it" but that you use the writing to figure out what you want to say.
When I started teaching science writing I found that some scientists already make a point of doing this, and of teaching their students to do it, and I was delighted to find that our approaches overlapped.
What is striking to me is the extent to which certain artists, scientists, and humanists share an interest in the idea of using writing to get access to your own thinking, to discern its contents, and then, to restructure the contents.
Great article. I come from a physics background, and eventually my career path led to teaching academic writing to STEM students in China. I used to focus a lot on form - using the right grammar for each part of a scientific paper and so on. However, my approach to teaching writing changed significantly when I started working with a colleague from a humanities background who introduced American-style rhetorical analysis, teaching students how to think more clearly about their ideas and what they wanted to say. Students’ writing improved markedly.
Thank you so much!
Yes, I agree. This is a great article. As someone who entered academia relatively late in life, and as someone whose research crosses disciplines, I have attempted to read many papers written in unintelligible academic speak. We definitely need STEA(rts)M rather than STEM
Agree! And thank you!!
There is an areas of the sciences that does address with the social impact of research. Healthcare research, which practices both quantitative and qualitative research, with the qualitative research exploring people's lives experience of a healthcare issue. My own profession, nursing, which has been called both an art and a science, utilizes qualitative research alongside quantitative research and may even combine both types of results in one study to get a more holistic picture of the effects of a treatment on patients.
Thank you for this. My interest is not so much in the very important topic of specific formulations of social impact, such as the "lived experience" of healthcare but rather in the evolving concept of social impact relative to other posited goods. The concept and its varied representations and meanings rather than the practice would be the object of inquiry. For example, the NSF criteria for fellowships includes intellectual merit and "broader impacts," implying that the former is a more narrow category than the latter. What are we to make of the implicit characterization of intellectual merit as not itself suggestive of "broader impacts"? When the NSF says that the criterion for BI refers to "the potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes" that presupposes an understanding of what is desired. What sorts of outcomes are and have been desired in this context and by whom, under what circumstances? The "societal outcomes" desired by, say, Oppenheimer in the mid-20th century, vary greatly from those articulated today in various sciences. My questions pertain to the representation and conceptualization of relative goods in this context, considered from a humanistic perspective.
When I was immersed, as an undergraduate, in the world of nursing research, I recognized that healthcare had its own rhetoric, and that not all of that rhetoric carried meaning into real world application. Certain phraseology - similar in content to the NSF criteria you quote - appeared rather to symbolize high minded ideals than concrete application. I think the disconnect between rhetoric and application is especially apparent in nursing because the profession necessarily brings one into direct contact with those who are impacted by the scientific research. We are forced to see that although statistically, a given treatment has a high rate of success, the individual human in front of us that did not fall into that successful statistical bracket suffers too greatly for us to simply dismiss them as a statistical outlier. Real world experience teaches us to think of the science in more humanistic terms, because we deal directly with humanity.
Your work in teaching scientists to write by teaching them to read is intriguing, and there is great merit in considering the changing historical context of scientific writing. But I was also wondering if science students might also benefit from reading humanities texts. For example, the 19th century literary classic Middlemarch by George Eliot speaks directly to how scientific ideals may be impacted by human relations. The scientist whose imagination is broadened by study of the humanities will be better able to envision the social impact of her research.
Wow, thank you so much for this. I strongly agree.And what an excellent suggestion about Middlemarch. No novel, in my view, contains a more rewarding account of the limitations of theory relative to practice than does Middlemarch. I would absolutely love to teach novels, but I think that I would have to design some sort of interdisciplinary course for that, or do it in the context of a workshop.
I enjoyed reading your perspective on teaching writing to scientists. My experience has been that most scientists would agree that "writing is a tool," but only for the purpose of "communicating what I have discovered to others." However, now I am intrigued by the idea of writing as a tool for DOING the actual discovering in the first place. Did I pick up your argument correctly? If so, that would indicate that writing is not just something scientists should do after they discover something worth sharing, but also along the way as an essential tool of research itself. Interesting...
Yes, exactly! One uses writing as a technology--an ancient and free one--to explore, plan, store, organize, and refine one's thinking. The implications are that you do not "figure out what you want to say and then say it" but that you use the writing to figure out what you want to say.
When I started teaching science writing I found that some scientists already make a point of doing this, and of teaching their students to do it, and I was delighted to find that our approaches overlapped.
Also, thank you so much for reading my piece.
What is striking to me is the extent to which certain artists, scientists, and humanists share an interest in the idea of using writing to get access to your own thinking, to discern its contents, and then, to restructure the contents.