The Struggles of Popularizing Science

            

In order to produce a popularized article on scientific subjects, it is necessary for the information to undergo a rhetorical alteration. In her article, “Accommodating Science: The Rhetorical Life of Scientific Facts,” Jeanne Fahnestock includes multiple examples where original scientific reports undergo numerous alterations in order to become more suitable for the eyes of the general public. Amongst the three interrelated observations Fahnstock makes about her examples, she mentions that there must be a focus on “the genre shift that occurs between, the original presentation of a scientist’s work and its popularization…” (Fahnestock 277). This observation helps to understand how scientific reports must change in order to suit a generalized audience by looking at the genre shift that occurs in the process. When focusing on the genre shift that occurs between the work of a scientist and the accommodated public, it is clear that there is a shift from forensic to epideictic delivery. This shift is due to the fact that scientific accommodations serve to celebrate rather than validate.

Clearly, “Scientific papers are largely concerned with establishing the validity of the observations they report…” (Fahnestock 278), since they are focusing on compiling data for their own discourse community to compare to. However, when accommodating this information for public readership the data must be certain and the significance of the information must be clear. This is one of the main issues of accommodating science, the information from the original scientific reports become glamorized to suit a general audience. In order to keep the general audience pulled in, accommodators must insert uniqueness and rarity into the subjects they are reporting; they search for extremes in order to heighten the significance of its report. (Fahnestock 288). However, “striving for drama causes the genre to shade into the field of poetic or mythic utterance.” (Killingsworth, Palmer 135). So, by glamorizing the information it becomes, in a way, falsified; although the information is there, assumptions are made and conclusions are inferred.

This glamorization correlates with what M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer discuss in their book, Ecospeak, specifically in a chapter entitled “Transformations of Scientific Discourse in the News Media.” Killingsworth and Palmer state that “…science must solve human problems and thus transcend its own version of objectivism, its own self-definition, must become engineering if it is worthy of being reported in the press.” (Killingsworth, Palmer 135). So, for a scientific article to even become newsworthy, it would have to solve some sort of issue or spark some sort of interest within the general population. An issue must be resolved within the article since, “…the public as readers would move the information themselves into the higher stases and ask, ‘Why is this happening? Is it good or bad? What should we do about it?’” (Fahenstock 292). The general public wants to know what the exact outcome of the situation is going to be or else readership is lost. Aside from dramatizing information, accommodators are also jumping to conclusions in order to fulfill the general audience’s need to know the outcome of a situation.

In order to accommodate scientific knowledge to the general public, not only does the scientific jargon in the original reports need to be simplified, but there also needs to be a shift in genre. After shifting from forensic to epideictic delivery, the accommodator needs to find a way to make the situation unique; a way to glamorize the information so that it can reach a widespread audience. However, there also needs to be a firm conclusion for the general public to acknowledge, otherwise, interest and significance is lost. Why does accommodating science for the general public have to be such a long process? Why can’t the accommodators just translate scientific jargon into simple dialect for general readers? Why does the accommodator have to include “mythic utterance” as opposed to valid facts in their popularizations?