Thoughts About Writing

1. Before and when first entering college, I thought that writing was bound by a certain set of rules. Of course, I had also often heard the popular cliché, “Learn the rules before you break them.” In my mind, this phrase applied only to a writer’s stylistic choice in “creative writing” such as short stories and memoir. In fact, I thought writing to be so governed by rules that if one only followed the proper “formula” (standard grammar rules), his or her writing will automatically be of good—or at least acceptable—quality.

Now I view “rules” more as guidelines, helpful tools for the writer. After all, “correct” grammar can sometimes serve to make a sentence more clear and concise. But the “rules” of writing extend far beyond grammar. We find certain guidelines that determine differences in genre, tone of voice, delivery of argument, etc. In this way, I don’t associate “rules” more with one kind of writing than another; all forms of writing (a term in itself we use rather loosely) are directed by particular guidelines, which allow us to build genre and rhetorical classifications in the first place. Language itself must adhere to rules or guidelines in order for it to be comprehensible. Ironically, I still think writing is bound by rules, but neither my conception of writing nor of rules is the same as before.

 

2. In the past, I thought personal opinion should be stymied in professional or academic papers. After all, we should strive for objectivity, right? However, throughout college, my views on the role of personal opinion have greatly changed. First, I’ve come to realize that pure objectivity is an ideal that no human could possibly achieve. Although we do, in some types of writing, come close to full objectivity, its realization cannot be met due to our own limited knowledge—as possessors of finite knowledge, our views are inherently subjective. Second, personal opinion may be shaped on a whim or guided by facts and evidence. If by the latter, “personal opinion” might also pose itself as “thesis.” I usually equate “thesis” with “argument,” or that main point around which rhetorical persuasion is centered. Since I believe that all writing is rhetorically motivated, I therefore think “personal opinion” also manifests itself in all types of writing.

Donald Murray states that “all writing is autobiographical.” The very way that someone writes—word choice, line of thinking, sentence structure—reflects the type of person he or she is. I think society expects some kinds of writing to be more “personal” than other kinds: writing in a diary, for instance, versus writing in a car manual. In those instances, the reader would see more of the person of the writer reflected through the diary than through the car manual.

If Doug means “personal opinion” as something entirely unsubstantiated by fact, then yes, I believe there are types of writing where opinion isn’t “allowed.” I want the person writing my car manual to know how the car works, not just think he knows how the car works. I want the journalist covering the news report to actually know the details of the story, not just think she knows what did or did not happen. In this way, “objectivity” would mean something devoid of all personal opinion—all those thoughts not guided by evidence. However, “personal” and “personal opinion” are not synonymous. “Personal” means that something comes from, or is reflective of, a particular person. So even an objective piece of writing is somewhat personal, like I mentioned earlier. I think then, perhaps the question of should it be is irrelevant.

3. Apparently I answered the previous question incorrectly since in this next prompt, we were asked to differentiate between “personal and opinion-based writing” and “objective and impersonal writing.” All right, I’ll go with the framework that there is such a thing as impersonal writing. Under that category of impersonal writing, I would list technical writing and recipe-writing—basically, the “how-to” types of writing. Also, I guess I hadn’t considered public signs (such as “stop,” “yield,” and “Denver 11 miles”) as types of writing—but if they are, they would definitely be objective and impersonal forms of writing. (They’d also disprove my earlier statement that all writing is personal; such an economy of words and tight standard of display allows really for no creative choice of the writer). Whether or not public signs count towards what most people typically think as “writing,” it does bring up a good point: the “creative choice” of the writer. The more flexibility in a piece of writing and the more opportunity for varying styles, the more “personal” and “opinion-based” that piece likely will be. That’s why, though news articles should theoretically be objective and impersonal, I wouldn’t count them as such; they aren’t as “formulaic” as technical writing, for example. Perhaps the “differences in those scenes” all come down to genre—the varying guidelines shaping and guiding a piece.

"The Romance of Science"

Whoever thought of science as “romantic”—other than some pick-up line such as, “I feel like there’s great chemistry between us”? And yet, Oliver Sacks writes that “Scheele epitomized for me the romance of science” (The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing 219). Consider this definition of romance: “A quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life” (Oxford Dictionaries). Sounds beautiful, but what does it really mean? I think this definition could imply that someone perceives those qualities or that those qualities exist objectively. For the purposes of this blog post, I’m going to assume the former implication because it arises from passion.

You might recall that I’ve already mentioned passion in my first blog post, “The Faith of Science.” However, in that post, I discussed the motivations for passion; in this post, I want to focus on the indications and translation of passion. As a definition of romance, “mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life” would therefore indicate passion; we even see these indicators in several of our readings from this week:

Mystery	Excitement	Remoteness from everyday life
“A chemist like Scheele…looking at the whole undiscovered world of natural substances and minerals, analyzing them, plumbing their secrets, finding the wonder of unknown and new metals” (Oxford 219).	“Scheele…was wholly dedicated to his work, caring nothing for fame or money and sharing his knowledge, whatever he had, with anyone and everyone” (Oxford 218).	“He seemed indifferent, or inattentive, to most things else, being wholly dedicated to his single passion, chemistry. It was this pure and passionate absorption in phenomena—noticing everything, forgetting nothing—that constituted Scheele’s special strength” (Oxford 219).
“Over dinner we discussed our plans, the thought of new hominid fossils uppermost in our minds” (Oxford 194).	“Like everyone else, I was elated. There was great excitement, joking, and laughter” (Oxford 195).	“A fossil hunter needs sharp eyes and a keen search image, a mental template that subconsciously evaluates everything…even if he isn’t concentrating hard” (Oxford 191).
“They will be able to see, and to prove, truths there that would otherwise remain hidden forever” (Best 43).	“For if something stops quantum mechanics, we shall expect to have an exciting new whatever-stops-quantum-mechanics theory…” (Best 45).	NA

I bolded certain phrases on purpose; check out the chart below to see why:

Mystery Explanation	Excitement Explanation	Remoteness Explanation
This quote acknowledges the perpetual mystery of a particular science.	What are some reasons that people “share knowledge”? Money, fame, and excitement. This quote clearly states that Scheele did not seek money or fame, so he must have shared his knowledge because of excitement—he was so stoked, and he couldn’t keep it all to himself.	I included this quote under “Remoteness from everyday life” because it demonstrated that Scheele was indeed “remote” from seemingly daily living; he was so passionately focused on one subject that everything else kind of took backstage.
What thoughts do we keep uppermost in our mind? Those which we have to ponder. Why do we ponder them? Because we have not fully grasped them; an element of mystery remains.	Why include this quote under the header, “Excitement”? It seems pretty self-evident.	This quote picks up where the last quote leaves off. To be so fixated on something would necessarily take attention away from other details. Perhaps this is why people perceive Kamoya as a man "with a great sense of calm,” although he actually is “always on the move, restless, rarely idle” (191).
This quote acknowledges that certain scientific truths have indeed been cloaked in mystery.	This quote reveals excitement in anticipation of new discoveries.	NA

[Note: although I think that romance, according to the definition I’ve given, always indicates passion, this doesn’t mean that passion always leads to romance. A fever always indicates sickness, but sickness doesn’t always lead to fever.]

Our job as science writers is basically to report passion to passion. We must somehow translate—or make “tangible, real, and apparent” (Hancock 46)—the passion of the scientists into something that would gel with the passion of the reader. Earle Holland reminds us, “Why should the readers care?” (A Field Guide for Science Writers 268); the answer to his question links with the readers’ passions. For lack of a better way to put it, are not most people passionate about themselves, their own lives? Whatever would personally affect them, whether in relation to beliefs, direct experience, knowledge, or goals, are grounds for reader care and interest. This is why we are given the directive to always report the “news,” the “why-should-you-care”; this is what will cause the reader to pick up an article to read. But what really prompts the reader to read all the way to the end of the article, to remember afterward what she’s read, is passion—the passion of the scientist, science writer, or both—that personal element that somehow connects with something inside us. This is why we should “look for the living, breathing person or people around whom to build your story” (Hancock 45). This is why we seek to capture the romance of science, that “lifelong love affair” (The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing 219) between science and scientist.

The Imaginative Space of Science

For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.

               --C.S. Lewis, “Bluspels and Flalansferes: A Semantic Nightmare”

According to Lewis, we discover truth through reason and meaning through imagination.

[Note: after coming to the end of this blog post, I realized that I should probably define imagination, which unfortunately would require an entirely separate post. For now, I found a working definition of imagination from Wikipedia, which I’ve also slightly modified: “the ability to form new images and sensations in the mind that are not presently, physically perceived through senses such as sight, hearing, or other senses.”]

For example, we often employ metaphors in our writing to help readers understand the “truths” of certain ideas that aren’t necessarily picturable, such as emotions, human character, motivations, etc. The emotions or impressions aroused by metaphor are supposed to be similar to the object it analogizes, even if the literal meaning of the metaphor is completely unlike the object it represents. Suppose I write, “The man just two storefronts down was like a rattlesnake one has just realized lies in the tall grass three feet to the right.” In this case, the man isn’t like the rattlesnake in appearance, intelligence, or position; rather, the mention of the rattlesnake is meant to draw certain emotions from the reader which would reflect the character’s feelings about the man. (If you’re interested in reading more, I garnered most of these ideas from Robert Holyer’s article, “C.S. Lewis on the Epistemic Significance of the Imagination”).

We might say that imagination initiates an understanding of the significance or meaning of certain truths. The readings for this week seemed to also support this particular function of imagination. Wolpert writes, “science often explains the familiar in terms of the unfamiliar” (233). We could read this statement in many different ways (and he probably did mean that familiar, day-to-day objects are usually explained away by what appears strange), but one interpretation could be that science involves the “unfamiliar”—the fictional, the imaginative—to understand and communicate the familiar. Scientists quite often use metaphor to describe scientific concepts: the universe is foamlike; electrons orbit around atoms as if they were planets spinning around a sun; genes are part of a code; the Earth is a living organism (Robert Root-Bernstein).

We use imagination not only to understand scientific concepts but also to form questions and pursue different hypotheses. In this following passage, the “it” Carl Sagan refers to is actually science. However, I’ve decided to replace the subject with “imagination,” and I think it fits quite nicely:

[Imagination] invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. [Imagination] counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which best fit the facts. [Imagination] urges on us a delicate balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything—new ideas and established wisdom. (241)

Sagan’s (modified) first sentence could highlight the role of metaphor in imagination, as I’ve already discussed. The second sentence deals with hypothesizing, and what drives hypothesizing if not imagination? Some would argue that reason and critical thinking form the basis of hypotheses, but then, that brings us back to the quote by C.S. Lewis, and we are forced to distinguish between imagination and reason. (I think the distinction hinges on the difference between truth and meaning—again, a subject for a different article and one that involves more depth than I could possibly cover in this blog post.) Sagan’s third sentence reminds me of Subrahmanya Chandrasekhar’s statement that “There is ample evidence that in science, beauty is often the source of delight” (350). To roughly summarize something of what Socrates says in Plato’s Phaedrus, the soul longs for and aspires toward the beautiful (The Rhetorical Tradition 148-155). But what kindles that desire for the beautiful? I think the spark begins with imagination: “The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination” (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 225). 

Story Spinning

Spiders. They create reactions of all sorts in people. My little brother was so afraid of spiders that he’d scope his entire room with a flashlight before going to bed; my high school math teacher gave extra credit to students who would catch live spiders and leave them as gifts on her desk. No matter where you fall along the like/dislike spectrum of spiders, you’d be hard-pressed to deny that they are fascinating creatures. Their webs are extraordinary, withstanding the impact of even hurricane-strength wind. However, researchers maintain that although incredibly durable, the silk alone cannot account for such survival of the web. In 2012 a study came out that suggested spider webs are designed with a sort of “fall back” option: specific parts of the web will collapse under the brunt of great force, and although diminished, the web will still function as effectively as ever (Science Daily).

Just as spiders are web-spinning creatures, so are people story-telling creatures (Fisher 181). Notice that several of our readings feel especially “storybook” in format. David Quammen’s “Out of the Wild” appears as though it could’ve been lifted right out of a sci-fi or adventure novel; he even utilizes anthropomorphism to villainize viruses: “They lurk; they wait. They hide from the immune system rather than trying to outrun it” (The Best American Science and Nature Writing 160). “Lurk,” “wait,” and “hide” denote human activity because they all imply some sort of motivation and consciousness. But last time I checked, viruses are not “self-aware” (Microbial Life ). So why do we assign some sort of human, narrative significance to that which is not human? Or to go for the bigger question: why do we tell stories at all?

Such a huge question demands many complex answers. However, I’ll discuss just a few. First, perhaps people tell stories because of uncertainty. We may not be able to know “facts” for certain, but we’ll use what we think we know for as long as it appears to work; if the stories we spin function well enough to “catch the fly” and get the job done, then they at least bear some of the weight of credibility. “Conclusions are based on strong evidence, without waiting for an elusive proof positive…but science can afford to move ahead because it is always an evolving story, a continuing journey that allows for mid-course corrections” (A Field Guide for Science Writers 19). In other words, the “stories” of science give coherency and structure to our otherwise chaotic and complex lives, allowing us to move freely without getting caught in a web of confusion and paralyzed by the venom of uncertainty.

Second, storytelling is rhetorical, and as such, can “assist in the presentation of new insights [and] also contributes to the generating of human knowledge” (Graves 107). I realize that Graves composed her entire paper around the controversy in the above quote, but this debate has been going on for centuries: Isocrates, an ancient Greek rhetorician, writes in his Antidosis that “with this [rhetorical] faculty we both contend against others on matters which are open to dispute and seek light for ourselves on things which are unknown (The Rhetorical Tradition 75). Very well then. A discussion about the particulars of these issues lies outside the scope of this blog post; however, I would like to point out that storytelling is almost fictitious in its very nature. Paradoxically, the “fiction” helps us see more fully reality as it is. In the words of author Yann Martel, “That’s what fiction is about, isn’t it, the selective transforming of reality? The twisting of it to bring out its essence?” (Life of Pi vi). For example, an artist knows that to create a “realistic” painting, one must not simply paint a tree green and an ocean blue. Rather, she must see beyond merely looking, painting blues and purples in the seemingly gray shadows dappling a wooded walkway, dazzling what appears to be a tan cliff with pinks and oranges and yellows. Her method includes something of the “fictitious,” but the end result produces something that reflects life. Therefore, I think that rhetoric in the process of investigation is indeed epistemological.

Finally, stories carry meaning, significance. We tell stories in the search of discovering purpose. It’s no coincidence that science, which describes life as we perceive it, is investigated, interpreted, and presented by rhetorical means.

Dr. Hugh Moorhead, a philosophy professor at Northeastern Illinois University, once wrote to 250 of the best-known philosophers, scientists, writers, and intellectuals in the world, asking them, “What is the meaning of life?” He then published their responses in a book. Some offered their best guesses, some admitted that they just made up a purpose for life, and others were honest enough to say they were clueless. In fact, a number of famous intellectuals asked Professor Moorhead to write back and tell them if he discovered the purpose of life! (Purpose Driven Life 23) 

Lewis Thomas states, “what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future” (The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing 225). With a purpose comes a future, and thus, we have a need for story spinning. 

The Faith of Science

Walk up to any person on the street and ask him or her how science is defined, and chances are, the response you get will probably run along the lines of “discovering how the world works” or “finding out truths of nature through controlled experimentation.” Even Elise Hancock writes, “Scientific truth is a matter of evidence” (Ideas into Words 14). However, I would like to contest Hancock’s statement; she should’ve written that “faith is a matter of evidence, and science is a matter of faith.”

If “evidence is supposed to be true” (Hancock 14), then why do we have a history of false scientific theories? For example, in medieval times, people observed that maggots would spring “spontaneously” from a piece of rotting meat; through repeated observations, people began to believe the theory of spontaneous generation, which stated that living things would arise from nonliving things. However, through experiments involving control and variable groups, Louis Pasteur exposed the inaccuracy of the spontaneous generation theory. Polanyi states, “Another tenet of modern science…is its ideal of empiricism” (“Scientific Controversy” 197). Empiricism emphasizes evidence as derived through the constancy of sensory experience through experiment. However, as in the case of spontaneous generation, the evidence can be easily misconstrued—that is why actual, scientific “truth” is not a matter of evidence. Faith, on the other hand, is.

Nowadays, people understand faith as “blind,” or a “leap in the dark,” used only in religious contexts. However, Webster’s 1828 dictionary defines faith as “the assent of the mind to the truth of a proposition advanced by another; belief, or probable evidence of any kind” (emphasis added). Even biblical text asserts that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1 KJV, emphasis added).One has faith in something which one has good evidence to believe. Faith is considered a “virtue” because humans are so fickle; faith leads us to continue believing something despite trivial fluctuations of opinion or indigestion or superficial opposition (of course, some people, despite all other evidence against them, still tenaciously cling in faith to something; in these cases, “faith” is just a nice cover-up for pride and stubbornness). Basically, faith is the opposite of inconstancy or mutability, which is “like forgotten lyres whose dissonant strings / Give various response to each varying blast, / To whose frail frame no second motion brings / One mood or modulation like the last” (Shelley).  Such a turn of opinion (it’s too shallow to label “belief”) is caused by a lack of conviction based on evidence-following.

Intricately tied into the concept of faith is not only evidence but also passion. The heuristic passion that Polanyi mentions—the passion derived from knowledge gained through experience—motivates scientists to “enrich the world” (194). A prime example of heuristic passion in action is the kindergartner who goes home and excitedly shares with her mother all that she’s learned in school that day (“Mommy, did you know that red and blue make purple?! Could we play with food coloring too?”). That heuristic passion both inspires one toward further discovery (Polanyi 194) and manifests itself as tenderness with the subject of research; Siddhartha Mukherjee eloquently states, “When I witness science in action, I see this tenderness in abundance” (The Best American Science and Nature Writing xviii). Heuristic knowledge constitutes part of the “evidence” that make up faith, and as such, faith has a very, very personal element to it. The process by which knowledge is gained through experience plays a part in an individual’s story; as storytelling creatures, we also try to insert our characters into whatever story is being told at the time. I think this is why we encounter problems like the ones expressed in Jon Mooallem’s article, “The Love That Dare Not Squawk Its Name”: “For whatever reason, we’re prone to seeing animals…as reflection, models, and foils of ourselves; we’re extraordinarily, and sometimes irrationally, invested in them” (254). Anthropomorphism (this inserting ourselves into the story) even appears in a matter-of-fact excerpt from Jared Diamond’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee: “You yourself would not want to carry out a lengthy courtship and copulate under the watchful eyes of others; many animals do not want to either” (The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing 111).

Based on a system of faith, “science” is not as objective as we think; remember, “the genesis of scientific knowledge remains an unyieldingly, obstreperously hand-hewn process” (Mukherjee xviii-xix). Therefore, as science writers, we have all sorts of options when composing a paper: investigating the “line of evidence” behind a particular paradigm or taken-for-granted scientific “fact”; interviewing a scientist about his “heuristic passion” driving his research, etc. By redefining our conceptions of what constitutes science, we might also reconsider how we go about science writing.