RHETORICAL PERSONA IN THE WRITING OF CHEMICAL ENGINEER

Traditionally scientific and technical writing has been regarded as being objective: the writers are not present in the text, only the facts they are reporting are. This study argues that scientific and technical writers are present in their texts in the following features: (1) awareness of rhetorical situation, (2) authorial intrusions, (3) subjective judgments, (4) references to the work of others, and (5) figurative language. Additionally it argues that the growth of a disciplinary persona over time may be influenced by conceptual developments in the discipline. The writing of chemical engineers was chosen to illustrate the presence of a rhetorical persona in scientific and technical texts and to define a specific disciplinary persona as it developed. Twenty-two articles, evenly distributed over the years 1908 to 1986, from the official publication of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, the AIChE journal, were selected for study. The two criteria of selection were: (1) the article addresses primary conceptual concern of chemical engineering, and (2) the article is written by a prominent figure in the discipline. Initially the writers show awareness of their rhetorical situation by justifying the use of laboratory findings for industrial applications. As a conceptual framework emerges and is assumed accepted, the writers focus on the particular problem they are researching and the applicability of their results to industrial settings. Authorial intrusions tend to be third person or a communal "we" until the sixties when they become the "we" of particular researchers (practically all articles are co-authored). Subjective judgments are present in all the texts studied and do not appear to change over time. The writers make claims about the significance of their work, generalize about data, and use what appears to be a conventional subjective vocabulary for describing results. Some subjective judgments in the text can be cross-checked by figures accompanying the article. References to the work of others is minimal in the early years and grows. References tend to be supportive of the writer and are spread throughout the article. Only during the twenties do the articles appear to have reviews of the literature. A minimal amount of conventional figurative language has always been present.