cac.ophony.org

Last week I attended a workshop on writing within disciplines led by Peter Gray and Mark McBeth at our CUNY WAC meeting. Together we thought about the forms of writing in various discourse communities and their differences when it comes to the issues of composition, organization, research/ register/voice/conventions, and formatting. Figuring out to what discipline a particular writing model belonged created no difficulty for the audience of academic professionals, but all of us agreed that it would not be an equally easy task for the beginning academic writers. What can writing instructors and fellows do to help this community of learners find meaning in the intimidating world of academic discourse(s)? Which aspects of writing are indeed discipline specific and which can be easily carried over from one discipline to another? As was emphasized in the workshop, instructors can show and explain models of a particular writing form they expect their students to produce and help students in the process of writing by giving them a list of guidelines or grading rubric for the assignment.
This workshop made me think about a couple of conversations we’ve had in our Great Works team about the possibility of running workshops for a group of students working in different fields. Writing Center’s workshops are organized precisely in this way, and, as Jody mentioned, it would be great to get together and think about effective strategies. I also thought about my own experience teaching a graduate seminar/workshop called Effective Academic Writing, which at first was really as daunting as it sounds, but as we began looking at writing models from different fields, it became clear that very similar criteria are used when we evaluate papers from such unlike disciplines as biochemistry and art history. This is not to say that we should not carefully study and introduce students to conventions specific to their fields of study. However, it is often the case that major paper components, e.g., thesis and evidence, are present in papers across disciplines only in different forms. It can be indeed enriching for students from these different fields to get together and receive feedback from each other; this way they can learn about original and unthought-of in their fields ways to present or articulate a piece of material.

Both as an instructor in that class and a graduate student/writer, I found one valuable article that pinpoints a few very specific Dos and Don’ts for academic writers. They really make sense regardless of the discourse community we are writing for: Gerald Graff, “Scholars and Sound Bites: The Myth of Academic Difficulty” PMLA. Vol. 115, No. 5. (Oct., 2000), pp. 1041-1052. It can be easily found on JSTOR.
Let me just quote my favorite “DO”:  “Be bilingual. It is not necessary to avoid academese—you sometimes need the stuff. But whenever you have to say something in academese, try to say it in the vernacular as well. You’ll be surprised to find that when you restate an academic point in your nonacademic voice, the point is enriched (or else you see how vacuous it is), and you’re led to new perceptions.”