As a scientist, a physician, and a lover of rhetoric and rhetorical scholarship, I am constantly amazed by how beautiful technical communications can be- and how frightfully dreary this work becomes in the hands of people who lack a rhetorical perspective . I do not mean people who lack formal training in the subject. For the most part, I am referring to scholars in the sciences. Continually frustrated with the world's lack of appreciation of the truth that they would confer upon it, they insist on "reality" and their relationship to it. Why don't we- people who know science intimately, realize , after a certain number of failed explanations, that we need to persuade even the most well intentioned and friendly readers to engage with what we find of interest? Technical communication is not transcription, or repetition, or some form of transcription of nature or machine. It has a politics, intentions, exigencies- it is rhetorical , and the realization of this is to me, the best chance that good science has against sheer marketing, with its set of catastrophes, and remote officious wisdom, bringing with it a slightly different set of plagues.