Writing in the Disciplines

“There is another way to view academic learning, however, that transforms the role of writing in schooling. This is to view the classroom as a community of scholars (or of scholars and apprentices) that has its own public forums, with associate rules of evidence and procedures for carrying discussion forward. Students must learn, then, not only the basic facts around which discussion is structured but the appropriate and inappropriate ways in which those facts can be presented in the forum defined by that classroom. . . . Writing (and the thinking that accompanies it) then becomes a primary and necessary vehicle for practicing the ways of organizing and presenting ideas that are most appropriate to a particular subject area.”

–Judith A. Langer, “Speaking of Knowing”

The WAC—or Writing-Across-the-Curriculum—model serves as the basis for many writing programs. As discussed elsewhere on this site, such a model emphasizes the writing and learning connection. Although the Writing Intensive Program draws upon this approach, the principles advocated by the program are more harmonious with another approach to writing programs: WID—or Writing-in-the Disciplines.

Jonathan Moore, director of Cornell’s writing program, explains the difference between the two approaches: “Although WAC and WID are sometimes used synonymously or interchangeably, and both terms usefully suggest the importance of writing in all fields, these two approaches have very different implications for the role of writing instruction in higher education. While WAC emphasizes the commonality, portability, and communicability of writing practices, WID emphasizes disciplinary differences, diversity, and heterogeneity. That is WID emphasizes what remains incommensurable and irreducible in writing practices both within academic fields and from one field to the next” (“Writing and the Disciplines” 4).

The WID approach, then, assumes that writing is inseparable from the production of knowledge—in a way more complex than the “writing-to-learn” adage. Writing, then, as Judith Langer argues above, is the conversation of scholars. As Monroe states it, “Once they have begun college-level work in writing, students have also begun, in earnest, the work of the university” (“Writing” 5). The work of the university, then, is the work of scholars, producing knowledge.

Monroe continues: “The writing issues our students confront, from entering students to advanced undergraduates, to graduate students, to the most distinguished scholars, remain in fundamental respects the same issues, including especially the process of socialization or acculturation into a particular field that may have recognizable beginnings . . . but has no end in sight for as long as one continues to be committed to the production of knowledge in that field” (“Introduction” 8). And, hence, the Writing Intensive Program was founded: to improve student writing skills by providing them with multiple opportunities to acculturate themselves into a discipline and to learn the “ways of knowing” unique to their field and to engage in both through writing.

The Writing Intensive Program aims to teach students the processes and conventions that shape academic writing in the disciplines. It recognizes that while there are some common elements of effective academic writing, what it means to think, to argue, or to write as a chemist, a sociologist, or a music historian differs. As researchers of how disciplinary contexts shape learning conclude, “a person’s participation in the intellectual activities of an academic discipline directly affects his or her acquisition, use, and awareness of these kinds of knowledge” (David Jolliffe and Ellen Brier, qtd. in The Bedford Guide to Teaching Writing in the Disciplines 8). WIP classes aim to teach the language, processes, formats—in effect, the rhetoric, epistemology, and style—that permit such participation.

Because, as a “way of knowing,” writing entails disciplinary skills—from research methods to citation formats—that are the bedrock of expertise, “writing skills are best taught as part of disciplinary instruction rather than as free floating principles” (Bedford Guide 7). Viewed this way, writing is not simply about some absolute standard of “correctness,” nor is it based on exclusively “English” models. Instead, effective writing is how a discipline constructs it.

Advancing a WID approach, the Writing Intensive Program works against several time-honored misperceptions about student writing. The first: that “good writing” transcends disciplinary differences: it is clear, concise, and grammatically correct. A second misperception is that there exists a proverbial set of “writing skills” that students should have “picked up”—sometime during their K-12 years, but, if not, then surely during their first-year composition experience. Both these misperceptions, argues Lee Ann Carroll, in her longitudinal study of college writers, are a function of a “fantasy” that “students should already know how to write for situations they have not yet encountered.” (xvi).

Carroll argues that reports of “poor” or “fair” student writing skills obscures the reality that college students must developmentally mature as writers—not as necessarily “better” writers, but as writers who must write “differently,” as they are required from year to year, and from discipline to discipline, “to produce new, more complicated forms addressing challenging topics with greater depth, complexity, and rhetorical situation. What are often called ‘writing assignments’ in college are, in fact, complex ‘literacy tasks’ calling for high-level reading, research, and critical analysis” (xiv).

The Writing Intensive Program presumes that student writing “skills”—what Carroll calls more accurately “literacy tasks”—are inseparable from what Judith Langer terms the “ways of knowing” of a particular discipline, and therefore, “[w]riting (and the thinking that accompanies it) [is] a primary and necessary vehicle for practicing the ways of organizing and presenting ideas that are most appropriate to a particular subject area” (71). Further (and Langer would concur), writing (and the thinking that accompanies it) is the process by which disciplinary knowledge is constituted, the process by which one “comes to know” knowledge, and the process by which that knowledge is vetted. In short, writing is the academic dialogue that we, as educators, aim to introduce to our students. Hence, to teach writing is to teach the “ways of knowing” unique to any discipline: the methodology of inquiry, the conventions of evidence, the mode of presentation. Such a pedagogical goal, then, assumes that the most effective way to improve student writing is to do so within the context of disciplinary demands under the tutelage of committed faculty across the campus, who are willing and able to “articulate” those conventions. (See Teaching Disciplinary Conventions on this site.)

Composed by Michelle Ballif 07.06.
Portions originally composed by Parker Middleton.
Revised by Erin Presley 04.10