- Haas is saying that the scientists have to know and be able to effectively communicate with them. She says, “scientists adjust the strength of their claims depending on the audience” (Haas 44). She is saying that, depending on the audience, the scientist changes the strength of the language and the depth of the explanation based on their intended audience.
- The “autonomous text” that Haas mentions is text that is disconnected from the author, or text that is purely factual with no personal bias by the author affecting the writing. It is a myth because writing is perspective. There is no way to write without personal beliefs, ideas, or values affecting the writing in some way, whether it be the writing directly, or the background information to the writing.
- Haas uses Eliza as an example to show that as college students progress through their major, they might learn how to better connect texts to other texts, themselves, and their work as a whole. She says, “Early in her college career, the bulk of the texts she read for school were seen as sources of information, and her job as a reader was primarily to extract this information for use in tests or reports. … By her senior year she often viewed texts as multiply connected … and even demonstrated some understanding of her own connections to both scientific texts … and to the objects of her own research.” Here, Haas is saying that Eliza’s ideas and understanding of texts grew significantly through college, and that this is something that might happen commonly among college students.
- Rhetorical frame is a reader’s understanding of the text. It is a combination of prior knowledge and context, but it is how the reader reads and interprets the text. Her example of Eliza “skimming, reading selectively, moving back and forth through texts, reading for different purposes at different times” during her junior year, when she hadn’t the prior years shows the readers that she had matured and improved her rhetorical frame, and it influenced the way that she reads.
- James Gee introduces his definition of Discourse very early on in his passage. He defines it as “ways of being in the world; they are forms of life” (Gee 6). This is saying that the ways that everyone interacts with each other are different Discourses. In her writing, Haas references a scientific Discourse while studying Eliza. She says, “Beginning in her junior year, we begin to see important changes in Eliza’s views of discourse: she exhibited a growing cognizance of texts … as the result of human agency” (Haas 69). Here, Haas specifically references Eliza’s discourse, or Discourse, as a student and scientist.
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