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UNIT III

MATTERS OF FORM: THE SHAPES THAT THOUGHT TAKES

Chapter 15

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Forms and Formats Across the Curriculum

THIS IS A CHAPTER ABOUT ORGANISATION— the forms and formats writers use to structure their ideas. The first section of the chapter concentrates on disciplinary formats—the prescribed structures for finished papers in the academic disciplines. The best way to learn these formats is from professors in specific disciplines, but this book can teach you what these look like, their purpose, and more generally, how to analyze them so you can better understand what they do.

The rest of the chapter will then broaden the focus from specific disciplinary formats to more general matters of form:

ways of grasping the overall shape of a paper

how and where to locate the thesis

how and where to use transitions

ways of organizing paragraphs

Overall, the chapter overall seeks to increase your rhetorical awareness, that is, your awareness of how an audience’s attitudes and needs can affect the shape of your writing.

It’s important to recognize that all organizational schemes are conventional— which is to say, they are agreed-upon protocols with social functions. They show you how to write in a way that will allow you to be heard by others in a particular discourse community, such as an academic discipline. But it’s also important to recognize that these protocols embody ways of thinking that help people to arrive at ideas. Formats are not just containers for information; they are tools of invention. They show you the accepted ways of finding things out in a discipline.

A. Disciplinary Forms and Formats

Two Functions of Formats: Rhetorical and Heuristic

Rhetorical: formats make communication among members of a discipline easier and more efficient.

Heuristic: formats offer writers a means of finding and exploring ideas.

THE TWO FUNCTIONS OF DISCIPLINARY FORMATS

Most of the writing (and thinking) we do is generated by some kind of format, even if we are not aware of it. Writers virtually never write in the absence of conventions. Accordingly, you should not regard the formats you encounter simply as prescriptive (that is, strictly required) sets of artificial rules. Rather, try to think of them as descriptive accounts of the various heuristics—sets of questions and categories—that humans typically use to guide and stimulate their thinking.

Because formats offer a means not only of displaying thinking in a discipline but also of shaping it, the format a discipline requires (whether tacitly or overtly) conditions its members to think in particular ways. Learning to use the format that scientists use predisposes you to think like a scientist. Although knowing the required steps of a discipline’s writing format won’t write your papers for you, not knowing how writers in that discipline characteristically proceed can keep you from being read.

Academic disciplines differ in the extent to which they adhere to prescribed organizational schemes. In biology and psychology, for example, formal papers and reports generally follow an explicitly prescribed pattern of presentation. Some other disciplines are less uniform and less explicit about their reliance on formats, but writers in these fields—economics, for example, or history—usually operate within fairly established forms as well. Thus, we also use the term “format” for organizational schemes that lay out the form of prospective papers in a series of steps.

The writing strategies and heuristics in this book are formats in the sense that most prescribe a series of steps. Our emphasis rests more on the process of invention than it does on the organization of the finished paper, but, as we have been suggesting, the two are not really separate. See, for example, “A Template for Organizing Papers Using 10 on 1: An Alternative to 5-Paragraph Form” (end of Chapter 10) and “Six Steps for Making a Thesis Evolve Through Successive Complications” (Chapter 11). The book’s heuristics can be used as organizational