Discipline-specific prose is not simply about format: it also reflects and embodies ways of thinking within the discipline. Teachers, then, must be very clear about what they want when they say “I wish students could write better”. Do you really mean the nuts-and-bolts of effective writing or do you mean you wish students thought more like psychologists (or physicists or philosophers)? And there is a difference! For example, you will meet students who are instinctively inclined to divvy up the universe in a way that is natural to your field, and they will still be inexperienced, ineffective writers. If you find yourself saying “yes, that’s the right idea, but why did you write it like that??!!”, then you are really focusing on writing. If, on the other hand, you find yourself exclaiming “Ugh — what on earth is this about? This has nothing to do with the assignment!!”, then you are bemoaning lack of discipline-specific thinking. When the writing is clear, but the ideas are not right, it is a thinking problem, not a composition problem.
Writing assignments can address both writing problems and thinking problems, which is what makes discipline-specific writing such a fine exercise for advanced students. Writing research reports is a particularly good way of doing this because the student is forced from the beginning to contend with their discipline’s way of attending to the universe.
Research reports are the official documentation of research results. Seems obvious enough, but research writing entails one very important assumption that you’ll have to make decisions about: where will the data come from? There are two major solutions to this questions: students conduct their own research or students are provided major portions of the paper.
Page 2: Students conduct their own research
Page 3: Instructor provides part of the research
Page 4: Scheduling and Scaffolding