Post 186: Writing Across the Disciplines Part I

Post 186: Writing Across the Disciplines Part I

Traditionally in a Freshman Composition class, the professor teaches college students how to write the academic research paper to prepare the students for writing in an academic setting. When I taught English Composition at AMU and at UOP, I taught students how to write the 5 paragraph essay. First, I taught them that the thesis statement (main idea of the essay) is always located as the last sentence of the first paragraph, then I taught students that each topic sentence of each body paragraph is part of the thesis statement. Then, the student learns to apply the 5 paragraph essay structure to many kinds of writing such as narrative essay, definition essay, process essay just to name a few. Then, I basically taught students how to write a paper for the humanities.

Writing across the Disciplines teaches college students how to write across many fields, not just Humanities. Writing across the Disciplines consists of three main fields: Humanities, Sciences, and Business.

• Writing in the humanities usually seeks to analyze, interpret, argue, and/or explain thoughts, reactions, ideas, and emotions. 
• Writing in the sciences focuses on informing the reader of new discoveries and assisting readers in discovering truth through facts and solid data provided in detail.
• Writing in business often means explaining a situation, event, or change to compel the reader toward a very specific action. (Lumen, Boundless Writing Website)

When writing in the Humanities, you learn to write about the human experience and you learn how to write a literary paper. You use current literary theory to analyze/explain thoughts, reactions, ideas and emotions to literature, philosophy or religion. When I was teaching literature, I taught students how to analyze literature using the most current literary theories such as socioeconomic theory, Marxist theory, Postcolonialism theory, Structuralism, Symbolism, Modernism and more.

In Natural Sciences, writing consists of lab reports and literature reviews. You write about facts based on the data from the research in your lab reports. You write about the results of your experiments. You are explaining what is happening from your science experiments or you are writing about how other scientists conducted the results of their experiments through literature review or peer review of other scientists' experiments.  In high school, I remember writing lab reports for the science experiments we did in science class.

In Social Sciences, I did my Masters in Applied Linguistics and I remember having to do extensive literature review of other people on my topic before I was able to do my own Conversation Analysis of Scripted and Non-Scripted Video in Foreign Language teaching. I had to explain how I conducted my analysis, how I calculated the results, and I had to tell the reader what my results were and then to see if my results could be replicated so that my results would be considered valid. Writing in the Sciences consisted of helping the reader discover truth through facts and solid data provided in detail.

Writing for Business means explaining a situation to compel the reader to take a specific action. In business writing, it is all about selling yourself (your brand) or selling your product. When I taught business writing, I taught my students, it is all about persuading the reader to take an action. I call business writing, the 'call to action' persuasive writing. There are many templates in business writing I used such as how to write a business letter, a memo or a business proposal.

Format is key to a well-written business document because its structure needs to allow the reader to quickly find particular sections and a contact person who can answer further questions. Writing in business can include memos, cover letters, resumes, project reports, proposals, thank-you letters, emails, and business plans. While adherence to conventional grammar, spelling, and punctuation is important in every discipline, business writing places the greatest emphasis on mechanics.  (Lumen, Boundless Writing)

Writing Across the Disciplines involved teaching students how to write in different fields such as humanities, sciences and business. This means that instead of just teaching students MLA which is used primarily for humanities, I also had to teach other writing formats such as APA and Chicago Turabian.