Writing in the Disciplines
Maria Madruga
Teachers within the different discourse communities need to explain the context of what it is that they're asking their students, and what the values of, are of that discourse community…there are commonalities, but there are definitely differences. And that English has its own academic language. And it can't be teaching writing for all the other academic languages. It's like, for instance, if you took biology, and had biology be responsible for teaching writing for all of the other academic languages, would that be fair to English?

Chris Lowe
The biggest shock to me was I had had a lot of general English courses as an undergraduate, but I never realized how different scientific writing is from a lot of the writing courses I had had. And it's literally like another language.

Beverly Moss
You need to consider what your audience knows. You need to consider what your message is and how you shape that or craft that message in an appropriate style or tone for that audience. I think those are sort of basic academic discourse conventions. What is… What are the acceptable conventions for this particular discourse community?

Joe Harris
I think our main charge in the first year of writing is to prepare students to write academic discourse. And again that's a way of helping students to gain a hearing at college and beyond that…

Dave Daley
If they were a very effective creative writer in English 100 or English 1 or English 101, their comp course, and they come to a science course, and I say, "Wait a second, I don't want that, I want the evidence, I want it clear, I want it stated, I want to be able to follow the paper". So we do have to look at how we train them differently for different disciplines once they pass English 1 and move beyond that, is they need to start thinking, "Who is my community?"

Cynthia Selfe
A computer scientist needs to know how to make a difference with language in the world of computer science. And an engineer certainly needs to know how to make a difference through language in the engineering world. So I do think that we're teaching students what they need to know if we're teaching them to think critically about the uses of language in their own environments.

Larry Thompson
The best way to check your procedural information is to have somebody that may not have any exposure to that follow the steps you've outlined. Read the material, go through it procedurally. Same thing with pouring or metal cutting. There's a large amount of process analysis written into it, and that's how your technical writing pretty much evolved. On how to have people do processes, safety obviously when you're pouring a molten material at 1200, 1300, 1400 degrees, you have to be aware of what's safe, what's not safe. It's proceduralized inside their brain on how they do it. And they'll hand out stuff for the students and they'll go through it and they'll follow it down step by step by step. This is a variation on a college style term paper from the standpoint that, when I wrote the paper, I did all three aspects of quoting people, summarizing materials I'd read, and referencing quotations and people and articles and Web sites. And that's probably one of the biggest things that you have to do, especially in academic setting, is give credit where credit should be due for people in the previous work.