Not-so-commonplaces: Koinoi topoi in the Literature of American Experimental Science.
Since Charles Bazerman’s pioneering work in the genre, the rhetorical patterns of the experimental research report have been analyzed by scholars such as John Swales, Greg Myers, and Jeanne Fahnestock. Their application of theoretical structures like IMRD (Intro, Methods, Results, Discussion), Swales’s Moves, and the figures of classical rhetoric have made it easier to read, study, and produce experimental reports. However, most of the detailed rhetorical analyses of the genre have been conducted in relatively few fields (mostly physics and biology), yielding premature impressions of the genre's uniformity.
A rhetorical analysis of the commonplaces (koinoi topoi) employed in the Results sections of reports from several fields reveals that each field favors different topoi—such as cause/effect, time, and greater-to-lesser—when reporting findings to colleagues. The selection of topoi indexes preferred modes of inquiry within the field, as topoi are inventional strategies. In other words, the fact that disciplines write up their experiments differently indicates that they do science differently.
While scholars appreciate this diversity of scientific practice, having rejected the notion of a unitary Scientific Method since the 1950’s, that idea persists in American science education and in composition textbooks for science graduate students. Recognizing the multiplicity of modes of inquiry among the sciences empowers students of scientific rhetoric to cultivate writing styles that share in the thought-styles of their chosen fields while still affirming their individual agency in selecting effective research methodologies.
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