Academic Communities/Disciplinary Conventions

For writing courses with a writing-in-the-disciplines approach. Each chapter is organized around a shared content topic, then divided into Science, Social Science and Humanities sections, and then two specific disciplinary units-each of which addresses the chapter's topic from the discipline's perspective. This topical organization enables composition courses to maintain a high level of internal coherence as students learn how different disciplines approach related, rather than disparate, issues. When students read writing from different disciplines addressing related topics, they are better able to see discipline-specific epistemological and rhetorical conventions-and how the two are related. Each unit includes two-to-three readings, critical thinking and writing apparatus for each reading, critical reading and class discussion questions, directed freewrite questions, and four-to-five essay assignments, which span a range of difficulty and are appropriate for assignment sequencing.