Variance of Language and Genre Across Disciplines

Sometimes we hear students say that writing gets a lot easier in a course "once they figure out what the instructor wants."  

We have mixed feelings about this.  Sometimes when students say this, it seems like they're assuming there will be something narrow or arbitrary about instructors' expectations, as well as that those expectations are pretty easily satisfied once they're clear.  Sometimes students even seem to expect that they'll be asked to jump through meaningless hoops to satisfy their instructors, who indulge themselves in idiosycratic preferences about how to prepare a paper and who simply insist you do it their way.

That's the part we want to resist:  we think instructors' expectations about the forms in which students write are seldom really arbitrary or idiosyncratic -- and that they shouldn't be, certainly.

Still, we think students are onto something when they notice that they're called to write differently for different courses.  

They're sensing something profound and important about real differences between the way people in different disciplines write and think.  But these differences aren't arbitrary.   Most are connected in consistent and predictable ways to important intellectual differences between fields of knowledge.  

When an instructor in a Literary Studies course expects you to pay extremely close attention to the language of the novel you're writing about and to quote it frequently -- or when an instructor in an Accounting course insists that you not go over three pages -- neither is being arbitrary or narrow.  They're inviting you into a discussion with its own standards, patterns, logics, and concerns.  That's what it means to begin to think like somebody in a given academic discipline.

Writing in Disciplines (WID)

David Russell, author of Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870-1990, makes an analogy about this.  He says that teaching "generic" writing skills to college students in different majors is akin to teaching "generic" ball-handling skills to athletes -- regardless of whether the sports they play involve footballs, golf balls, or basketballs.  Russell writes:

To try to teach students to improve their writing by taking a GWSI [General Writing Skills Instruction] course is something like trying to teach people to improve their ping-pong, jacks, volleyball, basketball, field hockey, and so on by attending a course in general ball-using.  Such a course would of necessity have a problem of content.  What kinds of games (and therefore ball-use skills) should one teach?  And how can one teach ball-using skills unless one also teaches students the games, since the skills have their motive and meaning only in terms of a particular game or games that use them?   Such a course would have a problem of rigor since those who truly know how to play a particular game would look askance at the instruction such a course could provide (particularly if the instructor did not herself play all the games with some facility).  And it would also have a problem of unrealistic expectations, since it would be impossible to teach all—or even a few—ball games in one course.  Finally, it would be extremely difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of a course in general ball-using since one always evaluates the effectiveness of ball-using within a particular game, not in general.  And ways of using a ball that work well in one game (volleyball, for example) would bring disaster in another (such as soccer). (“Activity Theory and Its Implications for Writing Instruction,” 58.  Petraglia, Joseph. Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction. N.p., Taylor & Francis, 2013.)

Russell may be exaggerating a bit, but we think he has a point.

There are lots of variables involved in writing tasks.  Documents are prepared on different occasions for different audiences, pursue different purposes, and take different forms  Students who are really good at writing analyses for their art history classes might very well have trouble with a news report or a financial analysis.  

But that's as it should be.  Learning to write in any given context or tradition -- like an academic discipline -- does take a little getting used to.  Indeed, that's exactly what the Writing Across the Curriculum requirement is intended to help with.