Succeeding in college requires performing well in different kinds of courses and on various kinds of assignments. You know you will be assigned writing in your college writing courses, but it may surprise you to know that other college courses require writing—courses you might not expect, like nursing and psychology. The strategies you develop in your first-year composition course will help you write well in other academic courses.

The academic community is divided into broad subject areas called disciplines. The disciplines are generally grouped into five major fields of study, which are further broken down into more specific subjects. The five disciplines and a few representative subjects are social sciences (psychology, sociology, criminology); natural sciences (biology, physics, chemistry); mathematics and engineering; humanities and the arts (history, literature, music); and professions and applied sciences (business, education, nursing).

Each discipline has its own set of expectations and conventions for both reading and writing. Some of the expectations and conventions—writing with a clear main idea, for instance—are common across disciplines; those are covered in your handbook. Other expectations and conventions are unique to each discipline. These include the following:

When you are asked to write in a specific discipline, start by becoming familiar with the distinctive features of writing in that discipline. For example, if you are asked to write a lab report for a biology class, your purpose might be to present results of an experiment. Your evidence would be the data you collected while conducting your experiment, and you would use scientific terms in your report. You would also use the CSE (Council of Science Editors) guidelines for citation of your sources. If you are asked to write a case study for an education class, your purpose might be to analyze student-teacher interactions in a classroom. Your evidence might be data on a combination of personal observations and interviews. You would use terms from the field in your case study and cite your sources using the guidelines of the American Psychological Association (APA).

The following sections provide guidelines for writing in nine disciplines: biology, business, criminal justice/criminology, education, engineering, history, music, nursing, and psychology. Each section begins with advice about the expectations for writing in that discipline and closes with a model or two of student writing.