"To understand the ways students learn to write, we must go beyond the small and all too often marginalized component of the curriculum that treats writing explicitly and look at the broader, though largely tacit traditions students encounter in the whole curriculum," explains David R. Russell, in the introduction to this singular study. The updated edition provides a comprehensive history of writing instruction outside general composition courses in American secondary and higher education, from the founding public secondary schools and research universities in the 1870s, through the spread of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement in the 1980s, through the WAC efforts in contemporary curriculums.

In this singular study, David R. Russell provides a history of writing instruction outside general composition courses in American secondary and higher education, from the founding of public secondary schools and research universities in the 1870s through the spread of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement in the 1980s. Russell's task is to examine the ways writing was taught in the myriad curricula that composed the varied structure of secondary and higher education in modern America. He begins with the assertion that, before the 1870s, writing was taught as ancillary to speaking. As a result, formal writing instruction was essentially training in handwriting, the mechanical process of transcribing sound to visual form. From this point, Russell carefully examines academic writing, its origins and its teaching, from a broad institutional perspective. He looks at the history of little-studied genres of student writing such as the research paper, lab report, and essay examination. Tracing the effects of increasing specialization on writing instruction, he notes how two new ideals of academic life, research and utilitarian service, shaped writing instruction into its modern forms. Finally, he contributes the definitive history of the current writing-across-the-curriculum movement, providing a study of the long tradition of other WAC efforts with an analysis of why they have waned.

Writing in the Disciplines (WiD) is a growing field in which discipline-based academics, writing developers, and learning technologists collaborate to help students succeed as subject specialists. This book places WiD in its theoretical and cultural contexts and reports on initiatives taking place at a range of UK higher education institutions. Also includes surveys of current developments and scholarship in the US, Australia, Europe and elsewhere, making it of interest to both a UK and an international audience.

Genres across the Disciplines presents cutting edge, corpus-based research into student writing in higher education. Genres across the Disciplines is essential reading for those involved in syllabus and materials design for the development of writing in higher education, as well as for those investigating EAP. The book explores creativity and the use of metaphor as students work towards becoming experts in the genres of their discipline. Grounded in the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, the text is rich with authentic examples of assignment tasks, macrostructures, concordances and keywords. Also available separately as a paperback.

This innovative guidebook is an accessible and concise introduction to discipline-specific academic language. Using authentic texts written by both novice and expert writers and ‘translating’ current, corpus-based research of academic language into a practical guide, the book gives students the tools to navigate the linguistic features of various disciplines, emphasizing the humanities and sciences, but also discussing example texts from the social sciences. Organised as 11 self-contained questions that are critical to any discussion of academic language, this guide: provides specific information and detail regarding the language ‘demands’ of each discipline explains the principles underlying punctuation, the range of choices writers have and the effects of these choices on readers includes detailed linguistic guidance on how to construct effective paragraphs discusses the multiple ways attitude is expressed in academic texts includes information on citation practices With exercises and additional online resources, this guidebook provides students with a range of tools they can choose from in order to create effective texts that meet discipline and reader expectations. Accessibly written, it is an essential guide for all students in humanities and sciences writing academic texts in English.

How do faculty across the disciplines define the qualities of good writing? What assumptions underlie their writing assignments? How do students learn to write within their majors? Meet teacher expectations? Acquire proficiency in academic genres? Chris Thaiss and Terry Myers Zawacki sought answers to these important questions in their landmark, four-year, crossdisciplinary study of faculty and students from a wide range of majors. Their results will change your approach to teaching writing. Thoroughly researched and incisively written, Engaged Writers and Dynamic Disciplines shows faculty and student writers taking risks with form and ideas as they weigh the demands of writing in the academy with their own passions for learning and self-expression. Thaiss and Zawacki demonstrate that academic disciplines are dynamic spaces that accommodate a variety of alternative styles and visions, even as they respect careful, systematic research. --Publisher's description.

Crafting a well-written academic paper is often a challenge for college and university students. With this updated edition of Designs for Disciplines, students will learn the ins and outs of academic writing and develop the skills necessary for producing sophisticated research papers across a wide range of subject areas. The second edition of Designs for Disciplines takes an innovative approach to scholarly writing through its grounding in genre theory, which establishes the importance of context to effective communication. The authors introduce students to the many rhetorical features of academic writing and cover an array of topics including research, documentation, the articulation of a topic, and the drafting of a proposal, while also providing an in-depth examination of how to write strong introductions, core paragraphs, and conclusions. New to this edition is an expanded discussion on plagiarism, suggestions for compiling a research notebook, and many new examples drawn from both student papers and published articles. The text also follows the progress of a first-year student as she drafts and completes her research paper while receiving feedback from instructors. These rich pedagogical features and clear step-by-step instructions make this book an ideal resource for students to strengthen their academic writing skills.

Supposedly a worthwhile endeavor, scholarly and scientific writing to most people is abstract, impersonal, impractical, and sometimes impossible to read. This book examines this discourse, studies its relation to practical, everyday writing, and tells us why scholarly writing is anything but uniform and monolithic, and worth reading.