Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [21]
There will be days when you feel that each classroom you walk into is asking you to learn a different language. To some extent you’re right. To navigate your way across the curriculum successfully, you will need to recognize that matters of form are also matters of epistemology, which is to say that they are indicative of each discipline’s ways of knowing. Embedded in a discipline’s ways of writing—its key terms and stylistic conventions—are its primary assumptions about thinking, how it should be done and toward what end.
No single book or course can equip you with all that you will need to write like a scientist or a psychologist or an art historian. What this book can do is teach you how to think about discipline-specific writing practices and how to analyze them for their logic and rhetoric. Once you acquire these skills, you will find it easier to adapt to the different kinds of writing you will encounter in college. You will also learn to see the common ways of thinking that underlie stylistic differences. For now, let’s focus briefly on some interesting differences.
Here are three brief examples of significant stylistic differences. Think about what makes each difference more than simply superficial. Contemplate what these rules reveal about the particular discipline’s values. And how do these rules implicitly define the relationship of the writer to his or her subject matter and assumed audience?
A. In psychology and some other social and natural sciences, writers paraphrase and cite other writers but do not include the language being paraphrased. In English, religion, and other disciplines in the humanities, writers also paraphrase, but they quote the language being paraphrased.
B. It is still largely true that in the sciences, particularly the natural sciences, writers use the passive rather than the active voice. So, the scientist would write: “The air was pumped out of the chamber” (passive voice, which leaves out the person performing the action, leading with the action instead) rather than “We pumped the air out of the chamber” (active voice, which includes the person performing the action).
C. In the sciences, writers typically do not criticize other scientists’ work, although in the opening section of lab reports they survey other relevant studies and use these to explain the need for their current research. By contrast, writers in the humanities and some social sciences commonly build a piece of writing and research upon the discovery of a problem—that will be stated explicitly—in someone else’s writing and research.
At the end of the chapter, we suggest that you interview a professor (perhaps from your major) to collect brief examples of what he or she considers good writing in his or her academic discipline. Some disciplines accept a wider variety of suitable forms and styles than others. There are lots of acceptable ways to write a history, English, or economics paper but only one way to write an acceptable lab report in biology. Your best bet is to study examples of what different disciplines think of as good writing, especially in disciplines where there is no rulebook for matters of form.
For the book’s specific advice on writing in the disciplines plus discussion of common denominators, see the following:
Chapters 15 and 16, the opening chapters of Unit III, entitled Matters of Form: The Shapes That Thought Takes
Voices from Across the Curriculum (interspersed throughout the text), written by professors in various disciplines who offer their perspective on such matters as introductions and determining what counts as evidence
ACADEMIC VS. NONACADEMIC WRITING: HOW DIFFERENT ARE THEY?
We conclude this chapter with some final reflections on what it means to call writing “academic.” Not all writing that has proved central to academic disciplines—such as works by philosophers, novelists, or world leaders—was written by academic writers. And not all writing by academics is meant only for other academics. This is especially the case when academics are engaged in problem solving