If you understand the features that are common to writing in all disciplines, you will have an easier time sorting out the unique aspects of writing in a particular field.

In every discipline, scholars write about texts. For example, in the humanities scholars write about texts such as novels, poems, paintings, and music. In the social sciences, texts include journal articles, case studies, and reports on experiments. In the sciences, researchers write about data taken from reports that other researchers have published and about data drawn from site surveys and laboratory experiments.

A good paper in any field needs to communicate the writer’s purpose to an audience and to explore an engaging question about a subject. Effective writers make an argument and support their claims with evidence. Writers in most fields show readers the thesis they’re developing (or, in the sciences, the hypothesis they’re testing) and how they counter the objections of other writers. In some fields, such as nursing and business, writers do not always state an explicit claim but still communicate a clear purpose and use evidence to support their ideas. All disciplines require writers to document where they found their evidence and from whom they borrowed ideas.