ABSTRACT
The Art of Scientific Writing, a style guide for practitioners in the natural sciences,
emphasizes the importance of written communication for sharing information,
publishing findings, and generally contributing to one’s field of inquiry. Among
the genres the authors discuss-from reports to dissertations to journal articles-
they pay early and detailed attention to the laboratory notebook, describing it
as the “‘germ cell’ of the scientific literature” (Ebel, Bliefert, & Russey, 2004,
p. 16). I mention this quote not simply to point out what might be evident to many
scholars of rhetoric: namely, that writing is an essential component of scientific
communication and knowledge production. More interesting to me is how the
authors explicitly characterize the laboratory notebook as progenitor to a larger
and more complex body of scientific discourse. This is no trivial statement. It
is a telling one, however, in that it speaks to the constructive role that texts play
not just in the dissemination of published findings but also in the seemingly
mundane, day-to-day work of scientists at the laboratory bench.
