Week Two

After last class's discussion, as I read Origin of Species, I looked for how he chose to communicate with the audience.  I found that he made an effort to reach out to everyone, not just to others of his profession and area of research.  He makes an effort to facilitate discussion.  As an author, he cannot directly interact with his audience, so he often responds to perceived comments or questions they might have as best as he could.  However, he does not write to entertain but to inform.  His writing is of course meant to be though provoking, but ultimately he believes in his conclusions based on his findings and desires for his audience to agree with him.  His writing may seem "wordy" or "dense," but ultimately most everything he includes is necessary.  His claims are so bold and so enormous that he requires a great deal of data and examples to back them up.  He cannot afford to focus more on the art of his writing because it would distract from what he is trying to get across.  I doubt that he meant for his writing to be read as literature, because he goes so out of his way to prove everything he asserts.  He wants to reader to understand that he came to these careful conclusions based on decades of research and they are not simply an old man's musings.