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A Wealth of Arguments: Using Science Writing in AP English Language
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by Lawrence Scanlon
Brewster High School
Brewster, New York
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The truth of the artist can recombine the facts of the world in the service of creation, but the scientist has a different duty, to discover the truth behind the façade of appearance. Both processes may be equally imaginative.
--Richard Fortey
A Rich Area for Inquiry
The AP English Language and Composition course concerns itself primarily with rhetoric and argument. In our classes, students need to learn how to trace the discursive path from effect back to cause, follow a reasoned argument, question the validity of assumptions, understand the relationship between claims and their support, and understand the purpose of sources, references, and footnoted material. Early in their secondary education, students learn to use sources to support or reiterate their positions; at first, they are likely to allow those sources to do the talking for them. In high school English, students typically use research to find information -- and that is good; what they need to do in our course is move beyond that stage and learn to use sources in conversation and argument with one another -- to question them, challenge them, and evaluate them, moving from the iterative to the discursive, if you will, where they may forge a synthesis.
In such a pursuit, the teacher might consider bringing science writing into the curriculum for its value in those very areas. First of all, science takes as its subject the entire physical world and then some, providing a rich area of inquiry. And for its analysis of argument, science writing is hard to resist. Science essays offer prose models of how to use sources for support but also for argument. So many of the rhetorical features that we study with our students are at work in science writing that we might enhance our instruction through its inclusion. Classic nineteenth-century pieces employ the schemes and tropes that we study in our English classes, and can offer an excellent introduction, especially for close reading. In fact, past AP English Language and Composition Exams have included passages from Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Might such writers as Darwin, Huxley, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, and Charles Lyell join John Ruskin, William Hazlitt, Frederick Douglass, and George Eliot as representative voices of the nineteenth century in our English classes? Matthew Arnold wrote in 1882 that "all knowledge that reaches us through books is literature." Here we speak less of belles lettres, the traditional fare of the AP English Literature course, than of the rhetorical content of the AP English Language course, where we might say with Arnold that "all learning is scientific, which is systematically laid out and followed up to its original sources."
Of course the most obvious example would be the work of Darwin; but two other selections -- both included in the anthology Literature and Science in the Nineteenth Century -- suggest themselves as useful examples to show the breadth of possibility that science writing can offer. Students might read an excerpt from Lyell's 1833 text, Principles of Geology, in order to study his use of analogy as a rhetorical device. He develops one between human history and geological history to elucidate the idea of time itself. For comparison, the teacher might give students an excerpt from William Whewell's 1840 book, Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, which provides not only keen historical insight into the scientific process, but also presents a consideration of time as a medium by way of an analogy with space, comparing temporal and spatial entities. For illustration, Whewell discusses rhythm, or meter, as a manifestation of time. What a perfect occasion for bringing the rhetoric of poetry into dialogue with science. A splendid companion here would be Thomas Hardy's "Channel Firing," in which the poet works with his classic theme of the immensity of time by breaking the meter, or time, in the concluding line. Such interdisciplinary connections can enliven a lesson.
Natural Philosophers' View of Science
Lyell and other natural philosophers -- Whewell was the first to use the word "scientist" to describe them, in 1833 -- regarded science less as a body of knowledge than as a process of reason. It would be effective for students to follow how Lyell investigates the way that beliefs and attitudes influenced learning and served to confirm some of the popular misunderstandings of his time, and to study how he posits an opposing view in order to trace its conclusions. Such concerns are relevant for our students as they consider modern arguments on social, political, and scientific issues. Are our views of stem cell research, space exploration, global warming, and cloning, to name a few concerns, similarly influenced by our current attitudes and beliefs? "Science is an inferential exercise, not a catalog of facts," writes contemporary evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould. As students note how the methodology of science hasn't changed a great deal in a century and a half, they might consider as well our attitudes toward its findings. To foster such considerations, an excellent source of contemporary science writing is the periodical section of the library. Such magazines as Discover, Natural History, National Geographic, Scientific American, and Smithsonian include suitable pieces for the classroom. "Science Times" (included as a special section of the New York Times each Tuesday and available online for free) is a great source for timely articles and essays, and especially for charts, graphs, and other visuals. The material found there is useful for close reading and analysis as well as for discussion of current ethical issues.
In addition, several essays from The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004 and The Next Fifty Years: Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century would be suitable for such studies. Philip Boffey, for example, develops an argument about policy regarding cloning. Students might read Nobel Prize winning physicist Stephen Weinberg's stance on missile defense, in which he argues against pure -- as opposed to applied -- science as a practical motive influencing political and industrial decisions. They could consider research scientist Scott Atran's analysis of suicide terrorism or analyze the way Ronald Bailey takes on eight arguments regarding neuroscience and pharmaceutical treatment. An important feature for the English classroom, of course, is the quality of the writing in these selections. For instance, students might note the lively style of David Ewing Duncan's "DNA as Destiny," along with that found in "The Stuff of Genes" by Horace Freeland Judson. Each essay is delivered in a voice at once personal and technical. Similarly, students are sure to enjoy the highly engaging voice of "What Makes Us the Way We Are," in which Judith Rich Harris imagines a future through the device of looking back from 2050 to our more primitive age. Another excellent piece that addresses the nature of our era is "The Bottleneck" by Edward O. Wilson, in which he posits the arguments of the environmentalist and the economist as they address what he considers the most important concerns of the century. Apart from the appeal of its stimulating subject matter, the piece is useful in class for its presentation of opposing arguments. Wilson's essay may be compared with that by another Wilson: In "Cars and Their Enemies," James Q. Wilson also posits opposing arguments, setting up a "straw man." A teacher might ask students to analyze those writers' arguments and then evaluate their effectiveness.
In the AP English Language course, an especially important consideration is that expressed by the rhetorical triangle of Aristotle, which describes the relationship among the speaker, the text, and the audience. Science writing can be used to teach a keen awareness of audience and also to investigate the use of classic appeals. In the nineteenth century, Lyell quotes both John Milton and Walter Scott in his discussion of volcanic activity. He states that his subject "would accord far better with Milton's picture," using Milton's grand vision to support his own view while qualifying Scott's as awesome but too romantic for the awful reality depicted. In Lyell's time, references to belles lettres effected an authoritative appeal among scholars raised on the classics; his selected quotations appeal to pathos as well. In our time, an article in Scientific American very likely will include mathematical equations as support, while writers such as Gould or David Quammen, writing for Natural History, Discover, or National Geographic, for example, allude to literature and popular culture to reach a wider audience of those more acquainted with the humanities. While the style of the writing may vary according to its place of publication, it nevertheless assumes an erudite audience who cares not only about the issues but also about a cogent argument. Science writing may address a specialized audience; in fact, the authors write with each other in mind, often expressing divergent or conflicting views. Students could read cognitive scientist Steven Pinker's essay, "The Blank Slate," with Roger C. Schank's "Are We Going to Get Smarter?" and pieces by Gould and Edward Wilson to see examples in dialogue with one another. In amicable disagreement, Wilson and Gould address each other's work. Such attention to an audience of peers, perhaps more often noted in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century essayists, informs the construction of their arguments and the rhetorical flavor of their presentations. Reading such pieces, students learn to consider the reliability of evidence and the cogency of supported positions, as well as come to appreciate argument itself as a living process of reasoned inquiry.
Using Gould's Writings
That process can be most readily observed in the engaging writing of Gould. Two excellent essays, "Uniformity and Catastrophe," a model argument from his first collection, and the much anthologized "Women's Brains" might make a good start. In the first piece, Gould presents at once an argument against simplistic reduction and a qualification of claims concerning the age of the earth, rendering one "a methodological statement" and others as "substantive notions that have since been tested and abandoned" -- all in the language of the intelligent nonscientist, which is eminently suitable for an AP English Language class. It serves as a good model of argument for careful analysis of method. (Incidentally, this essay is quite timely, as the controversy between geology and evolutionary biology as scientific processes, on the one hand, and creationism as a professed a priori belief in conflict with science, on the other, intensifies.) In the latter essay, Gould writes, "Intelligence testing replaced skull measurement as a favored device for making invidious comparisons among races, classes, and sexes." Surely such a claim will appeal to our students. In both pieces students can study how Gould includes quoted material not only to bolster his thesis but also to challenge that material through counterargument. Following the essays of Gould, a teacher may decide to include other selections of science writing accordingly.
To return from the empirical domain of science to the more familiar creative landscape of imaginative literature, the teacher might consider using the scientific perspective to inform our view of literature, and particularly of genre. In his book The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister's Pox: Mending the Gap Between Science and the Humanities, Gould discusses Vladimir Nabokov's (as scientist, in his studies of butterflies) complaint regarding Edgar Allan Poe and Hieronymus Bosch for including factual inaccuracies in their fiction and art. In Trilobite: Eyewitness to Evolution, on the other hand, paleontologist Richard Fortey discusses the differences in the two cultures -- the literary and the scientific -- that C.P. Snow so famously discussed, and arrives at a synthesis. Fortey begins his book with an account of his own tracing of the path walked by a hero of an early Thomas Hardy novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes. In a literal cliffhanger, Hardy's protagonist comes face to face with a trilobite fossil embedded in the cliff face. Naturally, the sight -- our hero is suspended between life and death -- prompts reflection. Hardy writes, "Such is the supremacy of habit over occasion, as a pioneer of the thoughts of men, that at this dreadful juncture his mind found the time to take in, by a momentary sweep, the varied scenes that had their day between this creature's epoch and his own." A sweep that is "not a bad account, scientifically speaking, of the succession of life through geological time as conceived about 1860," Fortey informs us.
But that there are in fact no such fossils in that immediate geographical area prompts Fortey to engage in reflection of his own on the nature of truth itself as discovered by science and by art. "I was intrigued," he writes, "by the difference between the novelist's truth, which has nothing to do with testability and everything to do with the impact of the work on the mind and emotions, and scientific truth, which has everything to do with testability, but also with the emotions of discovery -- many of them the stuff of novels." In our time, when so many works of literature are so hard to classify, when so many represent a mixing of genre -- think of Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut; The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of Girlhood Among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston; The Things They Carried; or The Way To Rainy Mountain, by N. Scott Momaday, to name a few -- Fortey's reflections on memory, truth, fact, and fiction can promote a discussion about the literature we read and the purposes it serves. If nothing else, the Fortey epigraph above can provide students with an interesting lens through which to view literature and synthesize a thesis regarding its nature. At the end of an essay, Gould finds two divergent views "not irreconcilable" and seeks their "creative synthesis." And it is in the AP English Language and Composition course, with its emphasis on reason and rhetoric, that we might do the same; there we might forge a tentative creative synthesis between testability and discovery.
Lawrence Scanlon has taught AP English Language and Literature for the last 15 years at Brewster High School in New York. Since 1995 he has served as Reader and Table Leader for AP English Language and Composition. He works as a consultant for the College Board for both English Language and Literature and for the Building Success program. He has taught the Language and Literature courses at many AP Institutes, and currently does so in New York, in Philadelphia, and in Bellevue, WA. He has published on the teaching of writing and on technology in The English Record, and is co-author, with Renee Shea, of a manual on the teaching of non-fiction, forthcoming from Bedford/St. Martin's.
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