Stories and Maps: Postmodernism and Professional Communication

The fundamental problem, I think, is that Denis Wood's (1992) writing is personal, while readers in this particular class tend expect scientific prose (which often suffers from the same disembodied, objectivist prose that Wood critiques).

Freed from the tyranny of the eye (the map was never a vision of reality), the map can be returned to … the hand (that makes it) … the mind (that reasons with it) … the mouth (that speaks with it). Freed from a pretense of objectivity that reduced it to the passivity of observation, the map can be restored to the instrumentality of the body as a whole. Freed from being a thing to … look at, it can become something … you make. The map is enabled to work … for you, for us. (pp. 182–183)