Narrative Topic and the Contemporary Science Essay ... - JAC Online

The Contemporary Science Essay 121
science in a fuller, more complete, and more human way. To be literate in
such a dialogic context means to know and write in two ways at once: as
scientists following a careful methodology and as storytellers making what
we learn understandable and significant to others. It also means discarding
overly mechanical applications of modal paradigms as we select readings for
WAC courses, showing our students instead how writers such as Eiseley use
narrative to help their readers experience and interpret scientific discoveries.
Perhaps this move away from mode-oriented concepts of form can best be
accomplished by re-thinking the motives behind the uses of narrative in the
modem science essay. Masters of this form-Stephen Jay Gould, Oliver
Sacks. Lewis Thomas, Loren Eiseley, and others-provide us with texts we
can use to give our students a new place to go when the straight lines of
conventional scientific method either block or limit the complexities of their
subjects.
Notes
National University of Singapore
Singapore
lBerlin, in his essay on John Genung, and Connors, in his essay on the modes of
discourse, both argue that an oversimplified and mechanical notion of Alexander
Bain's modes came to dominate late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American
composition teaching. Kinneavy argues for replacing modes, which are descriptive
of written products, with an emphasis on the more organic and rhetorically
situated notion of aims of discourse. Britton and his colleagues used their research
into British secondary school writing courses to argue that the function rather than the
form of an assignment was far more important to the learning of students. D' Angelo
was the frrst composition theorist to argue that what mode-oriented teachers were
calling "patterns" were actually functioning as Aristotelian topics in the writing of
most of the professionals whose essays were being used as models in composition
courses.
2Even the better quality WAC readers suggest this reliance on superficial
classification by mode or surface patterns. For example, Fields of Writing presents
its readings under headings such as reflecting, arguing, reporting, and explaining,
with the social and natural sciences and humanities functioning as subdivisions under
each heading. There is little attention to how different communities and disciplines
might have very different ways of presenting the results of these discourse processes,
and not much is said about how these processes might produce different forms in a
single text. WAC readers with more traditional readings from the "classics" of
different disciplines, such as Cyndia Clegg's Critical Reading andW riting Across the
Disciplines, are usually more interested in providing content for student writing than
they are in getting students to use textual forms generatively. Forms of textuality in
relation to writers' aims are given little attention in Clegg's methods of inquiry
approach to WAC.