ABSTRACT
A physicist, Robert Swendsen, his graduate student, Djamal Bouzida, and a postdoctoral fellow, Shankar Kumar, saw an opportunity in their research to provide a useful and effective simulation tool for the members of their own field, as well as two other scientific fields. Aware of the difficulty of addressing and persuading their new audiences in these other fields, these three physicists used several strategies to analyze and try to dominate their readers, but also to gain information about and to understand these new constituents. They engaged in an energetic program of rhetorical strategizing through which they sought to learn about and even to obtain feedback from the scientists they were addressing with their work.
