Transcript Lesson 8 Essentials Video: Discipline

KARINA: You kind of have to know that maybe you are, and your audience is this psychology professor, this engineering professor, this English professor, and those are things you always have to keep in mind, because you're not going to write a paper for English the same way you write a paper for, let's say, a biology class or something.

GREGG: Each individual field has their own, like, cool kids. They've got their own forms of data that they like to see.

CRISOSTO: There's a specific language that a lot of this type of writing requires. One of the things we're encouraged in that class to do was, you know, words that we didn't understand, we had to keep track of them.

CATHERINE: More conscious of the different ways, the different manners in which language is used. And that helps you switch back and forth when you have different classes, that helps you switch back and forth when you need to write two different kinds of papers. It helps you grow a lot faster, it helps you understand how you write personally, because you have names or identifiers for the way that you speak and talk and interact with the world.

MATT: I've actually had to write a paper for nutrition, which is really, really different from what I"m used to writing for, like, English class or, you know, a public speaking class. To write with—like numbers, and with things you don't normally use in an essay.

To put, you know, my diet in an essay format was at first really tough, but I had to just go back to that foundation, that starting point, like my thesis and my main point and learning how to put numbers and calculations in the writing. I knew what I wanted to say, but being able to put it in black and white was so much more beneficial to show what I learned.

DEONTA: When I first started it, I was taking one English class and a bunch of science courses in math. So my writing had a bunch of numbers, it was much more statistical than what is now. It was just like analysis of the numbers, like here's what the numbers show, here's why it shows—well, not really here to why it shows that, but now that I'm an English major and sociology, I'm doing a lot more literary analysis, proposing ideas, and giving supporting evidence for those ideas.

So my writing has evolved from just statistical analysis to actually being able to talk about a subject and how I feel about it, and why I feel that way about it.

HYESU: I think that this was probably the first time in college I really realized that depending on what field you're writing for, you have to change the way you write.