Based ont the eighteenth-century spontaneous generation controversy, this article aims to shift the focus from the history of ideas to the practices of scientific writing–a field distinct from the rhetoric of persuasion–in order to demonstrate its relevance for understanding the controversy. To this end, we analyzed the writing practices of two Enlightenment scholars, John T. Needham and Abraham Trembley, focusing on the forms of writing and the forms of communication. We seek to understand how scholars enacted their experience of text and related their textual production to shared linguistic practices. In doing so, we shift our lens to adopt historical criteria of interpretation that prove more reliable and effective than the categories of the history of ideas. This comparative study of the way writing operated in two scholars, especially in terms of temporality, of relationship to concreteness, and of diary of experience, shows how a scholar works to appropriate the social codes and writing norms of his or her time. We show how mastery of these textual processes–experience of text, maturity of the writtten–is crucial to positioning oneself as a scholar.