Most of the posts on G&G are in the streams math or language.   Many articles are also in various subcategories. The articles in each stream can be found by looking to the column to the left of this post and scrolling down to "categories".   (That word has too many meanings…)  I have added a new stream, exposition, and have put four earlier articles in the stream.  They concern expository prose in the sciences.

Old fashioned mathematical and scientific exposition appears to be designed to put as many barriers as possible in the way of the reader.  Some of its properties:

• Highly formal
• Full of pronouncements worded in an impersonal way (noun phrases, everything objectified)
• All traces obliterated of how the results came to be discovered
• No intuitive explanations

References [2] and [3] go into detail about some of these characteristics.

Steven Johnson, in the Invention of Air [1] describes the classical expository style of Isaac Newton as having these properties. (But see Isaac buys him a prism).  He also says that Priestley's book [4] on electricity is in some sense the first popular science book.  It is narrative, not didactic; it uses "I" a lot; it goes into great detail about how the experiments were conducted (read his account of Benjamin Franklin's experiments starting on page 222), including what were in his opinion the many mistakes of other researchers, and occasionally attempts intuitive descriptions of electricity.

I see that I accidentally published this post, so I will stop here and continue in another post.

References

[1] Steven Johnson, The Invention of Air.  Riverhead Books, 2008.  ISBN 9781594488528.  Reviewed in my post on Priestley.

[2] O’Halloran, K. L. (2005), Mathematical Discourse: Language, Symbolism And Visual Images. Continuum International Publishing Group.  ISBN 978-0826468574.

[3] Halliday, M. A. K. and J. R. Martin (1993), Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. University
of Pittsburgh Press.  ISBN 978-0822961031

[4] Joseph Priestley, The History and Present State of Electricity, with Original Experiments (1775).

Send to Kindle