3/5/20 – Johnson

The author of this piece is Robert R. Johnson. Johnson is Professor of rhetoric, composition, and technical communication and works in the humanities department at Michigan Technological University. He has written two books, “User-centered Technology (1998) and “Romancing the Atom” (2012). He has also the winner of the 1999 Best Book award in Scientific and Technical Communication. All of this means that Johnson man of a high reputation, and he is a professional in his field, and the field that he is writing in. I think that the primary audience for this text are his peers in his field of study, his students, and anybody who is interested in the “atom”. I think that he has this wide audience because he is talking about a complex topic, but he explains it very well, and in a way that anybody can read, even if you are not a professional in the field in which he is talking about. I am positive I know what the text implies rhetoric or genre is, but I have an idea. In his introduction, Johnson explain what a “mindset” is, describing it as “an reflective set of beliefs that we construct about something”. I think that Johnson is implying that rhetoric are the ideas that influence these mindsets, and that genre is the pattern that is shown in a mass amount of people sharing these “mindsets”. Johnson says that “a central argument of this book is that humans have frequently been operating from the extreme end of the calculative thinking spectrum when it comes to our infatuation with the atom”. This basically means that Johnson is attempting to inform his audience that their “mindset” may not be entirely accurate. The text says that there is a major importance of rhetoric in the sciences. When writing about science, the author is attempting to show the audience that their scientific theories are true, this is not really possible without the use of rhetoric, the audience can not just be expected to take the author’s argument as truthful without an argument are supporting facts/evidence.