Examining Writing in Your Discipline
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Good writing assignments usually tend to develop the students' skills at writing within the forms and styles appropriate to the course. The following "writing assignment" for teachers, taken from Richard Bullock’s The St. Martin's Manual for Writing in the Disciplines: A Guide for Faculty (New York: St. Martin's, 1994), will help you analyze the conventions of writing in your discipline and thus aid in designing discipline-specific writing assignments.
Examining Writing In Your Discipline: What Are Your Field's Expectations?
Using a typical textbook, journal article, or student assignment as your focus for analysis, jot down answers to these questions:
1. What key concepts must the reader understand in order to make sense of this writing? What does the writer assume the reader already knows? In other words, what does the writer take for granted about his or her audience?
2. What is considered acceptable evidence?
n Who or what is presented as an authority? How are his or her credentials established by the writer?
n What kinds of material constitute primary sources in this field? Secondary sources? How is each presented?
n How are empirical data (what can be observed and measured) used? What kinds are used, and how are they obtained and presented?
n How are statistics and other numerical information presented and used? How influential is this information? Is it presented in the text itself, or is it set off in graphs and charts?
n How are interviews, ethnographies, field research and other kinds of firsthand experience presented, used, valued?
n How is the argument presented in logical terms? Does it rely on a particular strategy or organization (analogy, cause and effect, narrative, definition, etc.)?
3. To whom is the writer writing? What do these readers want or need? What distinctive beliefs, prejudices, assumptions and other attitudes do they hold? What is the relationship between the readers and the writer? What does the writer assume they will do with the information in the writing?
4. To what extent is the writer's voice present? Are the writer's own opinions prominent? Are they considered valuable? Or does the writer seem to leave his or her opinions unstated?
5. What specialized vocabulary are readers expected to know? What sort of words are explicitly defined in the text?
6. More generically, what formats are commonly used for writing in your field (laboratory report, literature review, technical report, analytical essay, formal argument, etc)? What is each format used for? How is each organized, and why? For example, literature reviews, which are common in many fields, may establish the writer's credentials as a person familiar with the field and, at the same time, provide a rationale for discussion by pointing out gaps in the literature.
Armed with this information, you can devise writing assignments to familiarize students with what is and is not appropriate writing in your field. You can also respond more precisely to their writing, pointing out places in the texts where they are violating the norms of the field they wish to join.