Disciplines are characterized by the kinds of questions their scholars attempt to answer. Social scientists, for example, who analyze human behavior, might ask about the factors that cause people to act in certain ways. Historians, who seek an understanding of the past, often ask questions about the causes and effects of events and about the connections between current and past events. One way to understand how disciplines ask different questions is to look at assignments on the same topic in various fields. Many disciplines, for example, might be interested in the subject of disasters. The following are some questions that writers in different fields might ask about this subject.
| education | Should the elementary school curriculum teach students how to cope in disasters? |
| film | How has the disaster film genre changed since the advent of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in the early 1970s? |
| history | How did the formation of the American Red Cross change this country’s approach to natural disasters? |
| engineering | In the wake of disastrous storm-related flooding, what recent innovations in levee design are most promising? |
| psychology | What are the most effective ways to identify and treat post-traumatic stress (PTS) in disaster survivors? |
The questions you ask in any discipline will form the basis of the thesis for your paper. The questions themselves don’t communicate a central idea, but they may lead you to one. For an education paper, for example, you might begin with the question “Should the elementary school curriculum teach students how to cope in disasters?” After considering the issues involved, you might draft the following working thesis.
School systems should adopt age-appropriate curriculum units that introduce children to the risks of natural and human-made disasters and that allow children to practice coping strategies.
Whenever you write for a college course, try to determine the kinds of questions scholars in the field might ask about a topic. You can find clues in assigned readings, lecture topics, discussion groups, and the paper assignment itself.