✏️ 2. Writing in the Disciplines

Are You Where You Should Be?

This is Module 2: Writing in the Disciplines, which should be completed between 2/1 - 2/7. If you haven’t completed everything in Module 1 — i.e. customizing your Discord profile with pfp, alias, and selecting roles, practicing with test posts, and introducing yourself in #roll-call — go back and finish all outstanding tasks now. Don’t forget to click on and review each resource in this guide.

Goals and Checklist

• Learn about writing in the disciplines (WID) philosophies
• Learn how WID philosophies apply to the ENG 201 qualitative research paper and other forms of writing you do in your major/career
• Familiarize yourself with the high-stakes writing assignment in ENG 201, the qualitative research paper
• Settle into the Research Introduction, the first part of the qualitative research project

To help with various access needs, including task identification and separation and advance notice, I’ll include an abbreviated list of tasks at the top of each weekly module. You can check these items off, but your input won’t be saved after you close this window. You remain responsible for checking the Calendar and ensuring that you’re completing everything in a timely fashion.

What’s WID, Anyway?

WID stands for writing in the disciplines. Different disciplines have different ways of writing, grounded in discourses and genre conventions that express what different fields privilege about knowledge. For instance, MLA citation styles emphasize the author and page; APA citation styles emphasize the year that knowledge was published; and social science papers, business reports, medical research papers, and engineering lab reports all include and organize information very differently.

In ENG 201, you’ll use WID philosophies to help you navigate the different disciplinary writing conventions — from higher-order to lower-order concerns — you’ll encounter in different writing situations at Pace. Our WID writing assignments will introduce you to the writing conventions of your specific discipline and improve your fluency in the genres, formats, and practices of your major.

As you learned in ENG 120: Critical Writing, each discipline possesses specific discourses, vocabularies, genre conventions, styles, organizational schema, and modes of communication. As an explicitly WID course, ENG 201: Writing in the Disciplines aims to teach you to emulate the disciplinary conventions of your field in preparation for the scholarly and professional texts you’ll write in your chosen career.

A Note on Vocabulary

Text refers to assigned readings, research sources, videos, webtexts — anything you read, listen to, and/or watch is considered textual in writing studies. Article will be used to refer to a peer-reviewed journal article, i.e. a single publication in a journal issue; journal refers to the full edited publication series.

According to Purdue OWL:

“Sometimes when we think about writing, we think about the aspects that seem the same, no matter what we are writing — grammatical sentences or the use of paragraph divisions, for instance. Many aspects of good writing do transfer between different genres and audiences; however, different academic disciplines define good writing according to the presence or use of specific writing conventions which often arise from what the discipline values. For instance, a discipline that values recency of research may be more likely to use a citation style that foregrounds the date. A discipline that values authorship may emphasize the use of active voice verbs rather than passive voice. Discipline-specific writing conventions can occur at the document, paragraph, or sentence level, and they may apply to global or rhetorical issues, such as indicating a research gap, or to local or sentence issues, such as using direct quotations versus parenthetical citation. Because disciplinary conventions can change over time, writers can use genre analysis to identify what the conventions are for their specific fields at any given time.”

🛑 Stop: Watch!

Watch the below vidcast by Purdue OWL, which further explains how writing is discipline-specific.

A vidcast explaining writing in the disciplines. Credit: Purdue OWL.

In the open-educational resource The RoughWriter’s Guide, Karen Palmer (2020) lists some textual features that vary across disciplines:

• Title and header format
• Introduction
• Organization (paragraphs and sentences)
• Signposts
• Audience
• Tone (especially level of formality)
• Point-of-view (first, second, or third person)
• Voice (active or passive)
• Sections (use of headings and subheadings)
• Images (photographs, diagrams, tables, graphs, etc.)
• Discipline-specific vocabulary (jargon)
• Sources (type, level of credibility)
• Use of source information
• Conclusion
• Documentation, i.e. citation, style

Each of the above features express something about what that field privileges about knowledge. For instance, different documentation styles emphasize different parts of knowledge-making. MLA parenthetical citations emphasize the author and page, focusing on authorial identity and textual location, while APA parenthetical citations include the year, emphasizing a timeline of knowledge. Social science papers, business reports, medical research papers, and engineering lab reports all include and organize information very differently.

This notion is called writing in the disciplines, or WID!

Many aspects of strong writing like grammar do transfer between different genres and audiences, but different academic disciplines define effective writing according to the presence or use of specific writing conventions which often arise from what the discipline values. You can see this most readily in citation style: For instance, a discipline that values recency of research may be more likely to use a citation style that foregrounds the date. A discipline that values authorship may emphasize the use of active voice verbs rather than passive voice.

Discipline-specific writing conventions can occur at the document, paragraph, or sentence level, and they may apply to global or rhetorical issues, such as indicating a research gap, or to local or sentence issues, such as using direct quotations versus parenthetical citation. Because disciplinary conventions can change over time, writers can use genre analysis to identify what the conventions are for their specific fields at any given time.

🛑 Stop: Free-Write!

In your notes, take 🕐1 min to make a list of features you’ve noticed in texts in your discipline — published scholarship especially — that you recognize as hallmarks of your discipline.

For additional information on specialized academic writing, check out Palmer’s full chapter, “Chapter 4: Academic Writing”, in The RoughWriter’s Guide.

How Do WID and ENG 201 Help Me?

ENG 201 sections are taken by students across a diverse range of majors from multiple schools at Pace. Practicing disciplinary conventions is especially important for juniors and seniors who are preparing to write or in the process of writing a thesis, capstone project, portfolio, or other culminating work for graduation. Since you’ll need to use your field’s disciplinary conventions in the future, getting familiar and comfortable with these conventions now will connect the qualitative research project to your major and career, making it more meaningful.

According to The WAC Clearinghouse:

“Writing assignments are often used to support the goals of Writing in the Disciplines (WID), also called writing to communicate. Writing assignments of this sort are designed to introduce or give students practice with the writing conventions of a discipline and to help them game familiarity and fluency with specific genres and formats typical of a given discipline. For example, the engineering lab report includes much different information in a format quite different from the annual business report.”

Thus, the work you’ll do in ENG 201: Writing in the Disciplines builds on WID work you’ve done in in your other courses already!

Reading about Reading

Reading scholarly articles can be intimidating! Many students find this kind of reading difficult and stressful. But reading is always essential to the writing process, and as a reading-intensive process, qualitative research compounds that. Skillful researchers use multiple reading strategies, often combining and quickly switching between them. Since you’ll be reading a lot of different work in and around your chosen field in order to develop your research question, let’s take a moment to talk about reading before diving further into ENG 201.

🛑 Stop: Free-Write!

In your notes, take 🕐5 min to respond to Ellen Carillo’s question in her book on reading mindfully as a writer: “Think about what you read and how you read. How would you describe the types of texts you read for school, pleasure, your job? Do you find yourself using any strategies for doing so? How would you compare the experiences of reading these different texts?”

As Carillo observes, the most important question to ask yourself when reading is always: What is my purpose in reading a given text? What am I reading for? For instance, are you reading to identify disciplinary techniques to imitate later? Are you reading to see if the text can be used as a source? Are you reading to help yourself develop questions of your own?

The latter reason is why you’ll start reading work in your discipline next week: to see what people in your field are troubled by or keep debating and arguing about, and to let a specific problematic inspire and direct your qualitative research.

🛑 Stop: Read!

To prepare for your upcoming preliminary research, read “Chapter 2: Developing a Repertoire of Reading Strategies” in Ellen Carillo’s (2017) A Writer’s Guide to Mindful Reading. Carillo’s book is generally aimed at being able to read, evaluate, and incorporate sources into a college-level essay.

This chapter will help you build a repertoire of reading strategies before you begin conducting preliminary research to develop research questions next week. These strategies include: previewing, schemas, skimming, says/does, rhetorical reading, reading aloud to paraphrase, mapping, the believing/doubting game, reading like a writer, and reading and evaluating online sources.

Next week, you’ll be asked to return to this chapter and engage with Carillo’s practice exercises as you take your first steps into research for your project. For now, once you’ve read the chapter, return here and pick up where you left off.

Whatever strategies you use, you should practice active reading: using annotation, i.e. highlighting, writing marginalia, taking notes on digital and analog texts. To quote The Writing Commons:

“An active reader ‘listens’ to the text, evaluating what the writer says, checking to see if it matches or differs from his current understanding of the issue or idea. He asks pertinent questions if something remains unclear, looking for answers in subsequent sections of the text. His final goal, of course, is to make a statement of his own, in the form of the essay he will eventually produce.”

Dr. Raul Pacheco-Vega blogs about his own research process to model it for graduate students, but the same strategies are effective for undergraduate researchers as well.

🛑 Stop: Read!

Dr. Pacheco-Vega’s post on “Reading, scribbling, highlighting, taking notes and organizing information from a journal article or book chapter – walking through my digital and analog processes” illustrates a number of annotation strategies.

Before you start working on your literature reviews, you’ll practice some of the other strategies he mentions in this post, like note-taking, synthesizing concepts, and “translating” and integrating annotations into parts of a rough draft.

ENG 201 and the Qualitative Research Project

To quote The WAC Clearinghouse, “WID assignments are typically, but not exclusively, formal documents prepared over a few weeks or even months. The final documents adhere to format and style guidelines typical of the professional genres they help students learn about and practice.”

The ENG 201 Assignment

Take a moment to review the assignment guidelines for our class.

Pace LibGuides offers a general overview of ENG 201 and its assignments that serves as a useful foundation for getting situated in our section of ENG 201. This LibGuide is provided as a good foundational resource. Our course doesn’t follow this exact structure or these exact assignments. Always refer to course-specific assignment guidelines and instructional materials when working on assignments.

🛑 Stop: Read!

Take a moment to read the Home section of the Pace ENG 201 LibGuide — which includes “About This Guide,” “Introducing Your Study,” and “Annotated Bibliography & Literature Review” — to get a general sense of the shape of the course and the kinds of work you’ll be doing.

Exit Writing

Don’t forget to check the Calendar for the week’s assignments, including your Tue question and Fri answer posts as well as any other assigned writing.

Reference List for This Week’s Resources