On Writing Science in the Age of Reason

Abstract

Female authors of scientific works written in English were just a few in the eighteenth century in comparison with the increasing production of male writers. Their limited presence in the scientific panorama of the period could, therefore, account for the lack of research on how these women wrote or the sort of linguistic strategies they were familiar with from a presentday perspective. Some external considerations should be also reckoned as contributing to this situation such as a prescriptive behaviour for each of the sexes. By the comparison of four linguistic parameters expressing overt persuasion in texts written by male and female authors from the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing, I will concentrate on the way in which eighteenth-century women writers of science on the one hand, and men, on the other, make use of argumentation/persuasion strategies in order to ascertain the truthfulness of their propositions and to attract the readers’ attention.