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Tone matters for rhetorical persuasion. The only tone I desire from a scientific piece is the truth.
by dereg 15y ago
Tone matters for rhetorical persuasion. The only tone I desire from a scientific piece is the truth.
- jtheory 15y agoThis wasn't only a "scientific piece" -- his stated reason for writing the post was to make a comment on the MSM -- and certainly it wasn't targeted only at scientific readers. Anyone (like me) who read the commentary about the media, and mostly skimmed over the exhaustive detail on why the experiment was broken, was reading primarily an opinion piece, and certainly tone matters in that context. I don't agree that tone "only matters for rhetorical persuasion" in the first place (or perhaps I disagree with the idea that rhetorical persuasion isn't always playing a role in scientific writing) -- but that's a larger discussion.
- ugh 15y agoTurth has nothing to do with tone. And if you don’t care about tone I don’t want to work with you on anything. Scientists are humans, too.
- alttag 15y agoOne will have a difficult time being published in scientific journals if the tone is off. The paper has to make it through a series of editors and reviewers. The thing about science is all of those working in the field are people. And tone matters when working with people.