Writing the World

by bam

One finding, written five ways. A field note, a paper, a press release, a headline and a post can all describe the same discovery while making five different promises about what is actually known, and the gaps between them are where most of what people believe about science comes from. You will learn to read each genre for the claim it is really making, to catch the moves that do the quiet work (the missing actor, the hedge, the loaded name, the caption), and to trace a claim back down the chain to the document it started in. The course closes with two graded research assignments.