ABSTRACT
The Alan Alda Center for Science Communication at Stony Brook University is one of many new resources for improving the communication of science to non-expert public audiences. Alda's Center is concerned with serving society through the improvement of scientists' communication skills with acting lessons and other non-traditional methods. Rhetoricians and scholars of scientific discourse have written extensively on the ways in which scientific communities negotiate knowledge formation. Students must learn how to analyze discourse in whatever genre they are attempting to reproduce prior to beginning the composition process. Lastly, and toward that end, students can learn about the evolution of scientific communication to better understand the conventions authorized by the scientific enterprise today. Regarding "external" communication, students will have already been primed to discuss concepts of audience and discourse conventions from the historical unit, so they can begin to differentiate between the types of communication in which they will engage.
