Studies one scientific essay - The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme, by evolutionary theorists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin - as an example, to demonstrate and test new analytical approaches to scientific rhetoric.

This work argues that the core of a college education should be learning to write a reasoned argument. The author challenges his readers - teachers of writing and communication, philosophers, critical theorists and educational administrators - to reestablish the importance of rhetoric in education.

In this revised second edition, Deirdre McCloskey demonstrates how economic discourse employs metaphor, authority, symmetry and other rhetorical means of persuasion. The Rhetoric of Economics shows economists to be human persuaders and poets of the marketplace, even in their most technical and mathematical moods. It is further enhanced by three new chapters and two new bibliographies.

In this study, the author connects pedagogical and literary institutions to issues of writing, political position and power. She suggests that the leftist caricature of the Ecole Normale Superieure (ENS), the training ground for French intellectuals, is inaccurate because it represses the role of writing. By deconstructing the ENS as one would a text, she garners from the writing of the normaliens a picture of an institution that reinforces superiority, exclusivity and hierarchy. Towards the end of the book, Rubenstein relates the irony of the post-World War II trials of normaliens in which...