Ink on a Page

In Jonah Lehrer’s The Future of Reading, he creates a hypothesis that, with the introduction of e-readers and e-ink in general, deep reading will diminish and eventually disappear. To prove this hypothesis, he uses neurology and neuroscience to describe how a person reads material. According to Lehrer, the brain contains two pathways to make sense of words. These pathways are activated in different contexts. One pathway is the ventral pathway, which “is turned on by ‘routinized, familiar passages’ of prose” and the other is the dorsal stream, “is turned on whenever we’re forced to pay conscious attention to a sentence, or perhaps an obscure word…or bad handwriting” (Lehrer, 1). Lehrer focuses on the “bad handwriting” aspect of the dorsal stream and proceeds to claim that possessing devices that make reading easier will make the text more forgettable to the average reader.

Putting aside the obvious logical fallacy of this theory for now, I want to concentrate instead on how The Future of Reading is (and is not) scientific. In order to prove and disprove this analysis, I will use Ramage’s Rhetoric and Persuasion II: The Stases and Toulmin. The six questions are ‘what is this thing (definition)’, ‘how much is this thing like/unlike that thing (comparison)’, ‘why did this thing happen (casual)’, ‘how good or bad is this thing (evaluative)’, ‘is this good (ethically)’, and ‘what should we do about this thing (proposal)’ (Ramage, 102-120).

Lehrer does not use all of these questions in his article. He first ignores the definitional stasis and does not define what he means by “reading”. To an English student, reading, at the most basic level is the exchange and absorption of information. To a neuroscientist, reading can be seen as the ability to recognize written characters on a page. Because Lehrer does not define what he means by reading, his hypothesis is unclear. He does answer the resemblance question when he goes to state how like/unlike a book is to an e-reader. To Lehrer, books are solid, old, and harder to read. E-readers are small, new, and “bright and clear” (Lehrer, 1). He also answers the casual question of why e-readers were invented; with the advancement of technology and HD screens, e-readers were inevitable.

As for the next question, the evaluative question, he seems to answer it, but because he failed to answer the definitive question, it seems superficial and incomplete. He claims that e-readers are bad because they make content clearer and therefore forgettable (if we use our ventral pathways), but since he failed to define what reading is, I cannot rely on his definition of bad and good. He vaguely touches on the ethical question, “we’ll become so used to the mindless clarity of e-ink…that the technology will feedback onto the content, making us less willing to endure harder texts” (Lehrer, 2). He does answer the proposal question, but half-heartedly. He says that bad handwriting is the only way to exercise our use of the dorsal path and “perhaps we need to alter the fonts, or reduce the contrast, or invert the monochrome color screen” (Lehrer, 2).

Overall, Lehrer’s article falls just short of being scientific because with his failure to define what reading or deep reading is, I cannot follow the rest of his arguments well. One stasis question leads to another, and if the first question is unanswered, the rest are just ink on a page. As for his proposal that making text less clear would make people concentrate harder, it’s completely unfounded and ridiculous. If this theory were true, reading would have died out with the invention of the printing press, or the word processor. Ramage makes a comment on how in ethical arguments, consequences are also taken into account and some “consenquentialists” only look at consequences, such as “the drinking of caffeinated beverages…will lead to heroin addiction” (Ramage, 116). With his hypothesis that making text clearer will make reading less memorable, Lehrer can now be seen as a consequetialist.

Bibliography

Lehrer, Jonah. “The Future of Reading.” The Frontal Cortext Science Blog. 8 September, 2010

Ramage, John D. “Rhetoric and Persuasion II: The Stases and Toulmin.” In Rhetoric: A User’s Guide. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2006. 102-120 (excerpts).

The Writer's Audience Needs to Know All of the Angles

In Jane Brody's All in the Name of Science, she makes it very clear who her receptive audience should be: the average citizen that reads the Opinion section of the New York Times. All of her examples of unethical scientific testing, starting from the Tuskegee Study to a study done using convicted criminals in 1969 are biased. This is not to state that unethical testing is right (it clearly isn't) but the examples of the article are unbalanced. There are no examples of unethical testing that actually succeeded in proving a hypothesis or developing a cure. All Brody lays out on the page are experiments that were unsupervised, torturous, and were so sloppy that not even inklings of results were achieved.

If Brody was writing for a different audience, such as a group of scientists, the entire article would have to be rewritten. Many of the examples can be reused, but shown in a different light. Brody has to adjust her perceptions from an audience that is easily swayed by shock and emotion to one that is open to be receptive to the atrocities, but it also needs more information. It is not enough to see the failures, but also the struggle of those who achieved success. A scientist needs to see a situation from all sides. If Brody can become an "original writer" (Ong, 11) like Ong suggests, she can do more than project the imaginary scientific audience, she can "alter" it (Ong, 11) and then her audience will "fictionalize" itself (Ong, 12) in order to fit the role.

Besides finding other examples of unethical testings, Brody can concentrate on the sloppiness of the unsupervised testings that lead to the lack of results. One such example is the research on the prisoners in 1969. Brody claims that the prisoners are coerced into becoming voluntary patients and were examined under "highly questionable studies or drugs and donations of blood plasma" (Brody) and because of the substantial monetary gain, the prisoners failed to report if they had any signs of illness for fear of losing their income. Now, leaving behind the dubious morality of the experiments, one can logically use this example to show the negative aspects of the experiment by explaining that the results from the test because not every symptom and setback was recorded or analyzed. Therefore, the testing would be seen inconclusive and therefore useless and those prisoners lives were endangered or lost for nothing.

All in all, this article was carefully geared towards the general public and not the scientist, which is unwise on Brody's part. The average citizen can be horrified and disgusted with unethical experiments, but it is the scientist's duty to ensure that the studies they conduct are ethical and do not violate any human rights, whether they are uneducated, criminals, or disadvantaged in any other fashion. Also, it makes a much more interesting and convincing argument to hear more than one side of the debate. Brody closes the article by claiming that "there is to this day no universal agreement on what is and what is not an ethical experiment" (Brody), which I highly disagree, but perhaps ethical reforms besides the Nuremberg Code only occurred after 1972.

Bibliography

Brody, Jane E. "All in the Name of Science". New York Times, 30 July 1972. E2.

Ong, Walter J. "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction". PMLA, January 1975. Vol. 90, No. 1.

Style, Not Honesty, Is The Best Policy

The most persuasive aspect of Michael Lemonick’s article, Honesty is Always the Best Policy, is his matter-of-fact elocutio and his seemingly honest portrayal of himself and what he writes. While his article is mainly about his experience in writing pieces on global warming and climate change, the key point of the article is his claims that he is a journalist because he tells the truth. His article is mainly autobiographical when he talks about his career and why he is a journalist and it is deliberative rhetoric with an undertone of epideictic rhetoric.

He starts off the article by claiming that, when speaking to science-journalism classes, most students become journalist to “make the world a better place” (Lemonick, 1) and he himself became a journalist, not to improve the world, but to write about what he loved. Somehow, even though this comment seems to superficially discredit his opinions on global warming, the truth somehow places him deeper into the audience’s trust. Because he is willing to admit his less-than-ideal intentions, the audience is willing to listen.

He talks about how he was tempted in characterizing global warming as a proclamation of “impending doom” (Lemonick, 1) and decides not to because the information simply didn’t show that at the time, it makes him even more honest to the audience. He later brings up that while the “vanishing snows of Kilimanjaro…may not be a victim of climate change alone” (Lemonick, 2) but “the underlying science of climate change is solid” (Lemonick, 2), it is almost a physical relief to read. By the time this article was published, the audience is thoroughly sick of being told that the world is ending and is relieved to hear that the human race hasn’t actually caused all the world’s problems.

In writing about how he words his articles and why he is a journalist, he says that he doesn’t want to be a sensationalist, but he wants to “get at the truth the best I can” (Lemonick, 2) and that his style of journalism will appeal to readers through the enormous changes of his profession. At first glance, his article is only about global warming, but the undertone of Lemonick’s determination to tell the truth overrides the climate change message and changes the reception of the article completely. In enabling this message to be clear to readers, he sticks to his “honest” (Lemonick, 1) and matter-of-fact elocutio and it succeeds in communicating the message.

Bibliography

Lemonick, Michael. “Honesty is Always the Best Policy.” One Earth. 27 May. 2010. http://www.onearth.org/article/honesty-is-always-the-best-policy