Science Writing

Welcome to Science Writing (English 4824; CRN 16166, Spring 2007).

This course is offered as part of the Professional Writing Program in the Department of English at Virginia Tech.

"Scientific writing, in its broadest sense, is quite likely the most triumphant, the most imitated, the most universal form of human discourse ever developed 'after Babel.' During the past 100 years, it has risen to a glorified preeminence over all other styles of written communication, having become the model of authority and presumed accuracy to which nearly all forms of expression have increasingly turned for 'advice.' As an enormous library of individual tongues that have adopted a single style of truth telling, 'the common language of science' (as Einstein called it) has evolved to a level where it seems as fully absolute, independent, self-justifying, and unassailable as the facts it claims to transmit. Indeed, it would be hard — perhaps impossible — to deny the impression that here lies the grand master narrative of modernism, ideally suited to its content. What sort of faith, then, might we say seems to beat at the heart of this discourse? Simply this: that language can be made a form of technology, a device able to contain and transfer knowledge without touching it."
— Scott L. Montgomery, The Scientific Voice, 1996, pgs. 2-3.