Chapter 3.

Disciplinary Discourse:
Examining How Disciplinary
Knowledge is Represented

Chapter 2 described in greater detail how some of writing’s threshold concepts

can inform your approach to teaching writing. You also started to consider how
writing works in your field. These ideas should provide greater insight into a cen-
tral assertion of this book: “good writing” is shaped by contexts, the places where
the writing is being done; the writer’s purpose, which is informed by their identi-
ties; and audiences, the people for whom the writing is being created.
How people produce this writing is influenced by their prior experiences as
writers and by how understandings of writing have been conveyeds. Sometimes,
this has been in school, through different assignments to teaching and grading;
often, it has been out of school. The threshold concepts identified in Chapters 1
and 2 provided activities for you to explore the assertion that “good writing” is
shaped by contexts, audiences, and purposes, as well as activities for you to act
on it: naming your disciplinary threshold concepts; considering the values, con-
ventions, and goals of your disciplinary work; analyzing the nature of writing and
how writing works in your field.
Where Chapter 2 focused on this idea from a 10,000-foot perspective, this
chapter asks you to zoom in and spend some time closer to the ground. Here,
you’ll conduct an analysis of specific elements of writing in your field and ex-
plore: what kinds of questions do people in your field ask? What kind of evidence
or data do they collect and expect? What methods do they use to interpret or
analyze that evidence? How are the results of that work conveyed in writing? How
are their citations field-specific? Considering these questions will help you teach
writing because you’ll start to pay close attention to these aspects of writing that
most people take for granted, the ones that seem immutable and incontrovertible.
As this book has already suggested, one field’s idea of what can and must be done
in writing can sometimes be in direct conflict with the imperatives of other fields,
and what one faculty member considers the correct and only way to write, anoth-
er would find absolutely incorrect.
Goals for this chapter include:
• helping you closely study elements of writing that you often take for grant-
ed or that seem “invisible”;
• bringing your disciplinary conventions to conscious awareness;
• studying research writing and citational practice in your field;
• gaining some language for talking about linguistic conventions and rhe-
torical “moves”; and

43
44 Chapter 3

• developing language to talk with students about elements of writing (espe-

cially research-based writing) that you and they might take for granted).
As you undertake the activities in this chapter, you will be asked to “trans-
late” your analysis (Gonzales, 2018) into language you might use with students.
That’s because research shows that talking about how fields work (and, in this in-
stance, how the genres of those fields work) may result in a number of important
outcomes: mitigating stereotype threat, decreasing distance between student and
instructor, and cluing students in to “how things work in this place” (Harrison et
al., 2019; Seidel et al., 2015).

How Written Genres and Writers

Reflect the Values of Fields
Chapter 2 introduced the idea that while the conventions of types of writing
might seem obvious, rigid, and even like “common sense” to you, they are in-
stead specific characteristics of genres of writing that circulate within commu-
nities of practice. In everyday practice, the term “genre” is often understood to
mean “category.” For instance, playlists are sorted into genres like R&B, country,
rap, classic rock; literature is sorted by categories such as fiction, mystery, science
fiction, romance, or nonfiction. But researchers who study written discourse have
demonstrated that genres are more than simply categories. People produce genres
in response to rhetorical situations that they encounter regularly, and they use
genres to achieve their purposes. Chapters 1 and 2 also introduced the idea that
these characteristics are produced within communities of practice, including ac-
ademic disciplines. The threshold concepts in Chapters 1 and 2 also demonstrated
how writing in disciplinary genres mediates activities. Writing does this media-
tional work through recognizable and recurring genres—and in academia, these
are most often the genres of the fields (Bazerman, 2015; Hart-Davidson, 2015).
Within those communities of practice, ideas of what “good writing” looks like
play important roles. As they are used by people in the communities, they be-
come accepted as “correct” or even “the right way to write.” Researchers studying
communication thus say that genres enact values, conventions, priorities, beliefs,
and even power structures of the communities where they are used.
In this context, enact means both “use” and “perpetuate,” because each time
the genres are used they recreate and reinforce beliefs and values about ‘correct-
ness’ by their users. It is critical to understand not only what is defined as “cor-
rect” within genres, but also the values that these ideas of “rightness” reinforce in
order to create access for disciplinary novices. Once people have learned textual
conventions of disciplinary genres and use them regularly, the conventions seem
obvious, perhaps even like “genres-in-general” (Wardle, 2009)—just “how things
are.” Thus, it may be difficult for experts to even name the conventions they use
and expect their students to use. Experts may not see genres and genre conven-
 Disciplinary Discourse 45

tions as something that needs to be named, they may not consciously see the
conventions at all, or they may no longer have the language for talking about
them. However, naming and providing ways for students to practice with the
conventions of these genres—with the ideas (content) of writing and the way that
those ideas are presented as an argument or thesis or main idea, supported with
evidence from others, cited, and shaped in written form—is a critical part of pro-
viding disciplinary access. That’s because written genres (both their content and
their conventional forms) reflect the ways in which people join or belong to fields,
and perpetuates the ideas circulating within those fields (Lerner, 2015).

Disciplinary Genres
When students are asked to write in new genres—or in known genres but in a
new field or other context—they are being asked to enact a new set of values as-
sociated with the genre. To do this well, they benefit from looking at examples of
what is expected and considering what is constant, what changes, and how writ-
ers use language to achieve the goals of the genre. The next two activities guide
you through analysis of a genre in your field—first, a broad overview that you’ll
do with a partner (Activity 3.1), and then a close analysis (Activity 3.2) that you’ll
conduct on your own.
This activity of analyzing examples of one genre is a useful one to share with
your students when you assign something that may be new to them. You can
teach them to collect examples in order to look for patterns across them, but you
must also serve as a sort of “insider informant” who helps them understand why
the genre exists, who and what it does, and why.
While this sort of genre analysis is useful with any new genre students are
asked to write, the rest of this chapter will explicitly focus on research genres as
one “site” for thinking about how values, conventions, and goals of various fields
are enacted in texts.

Activity 3.1: Trying to Understand an Unfamiliar Genre

For this activity, pick several examples of one genre that is fairly common in your
field but that you think your partner may not be familiar with (for example, a
musical score, an artist’s statement, a poster presentation, notes on a piece of soft-
ware code, etc.). Be sure to collect several examples of this one genre so that your
partner can look across the examples in order to try to see patterns.
Trade examples with your partner but do not provide them with any contex-
tual information. As you look at your examples of one genre that your partner
brought, try to determine the answers to these questions (modified from Sonja
Foss’ (1989) excellent text Rhetorical Criticism):
1. What is the genre? Can you name it?
2. When and why do you think people compose this genre?
46 Chapter 3

3. As you look across the examples of the genre, what content does it typical-
ly contain? What contents seem optional or variable?
4. What is the genre intended to do? What activity is it mediating? How can
you tell?
5. How is the genre typically organized? What comes first, next, after that?
Does the organization vary across the examples of the genre?
6. What seems to make this genre what it is? (What elements must be there
for it to be what it is)?
After individually examining the examples of the genres you each brought,
trade responses. How well have you figured out the genre your partner brought,
and vice versa? What were you able to figure out from asking these questions, and
what weren’t you able to figure out?
Finally, share with your partner what you might need from them if you were a
student being asked to write this genre for the first time. What seems hardest for
you? What might you need the most help with? What seems particularly strange
to you?

Activity 3.2: Rhetorical Scan of Research Writing from Outside Your Field
Trade research articles with your partner. Initially, do not share any context or
information. Instead, do a quick rhetorical scan. As you do the following things,
take notes that you can then share with your partner.
1. Skim the article from the other field from beginning to end, focusing on
the pages, layout, sections, citations, visuals, footnotes, etc.—not the con-
tent. You don’t want to read it closely now.
2. What seems familiar to you?
3. What seems strange or unfamiliar or unexpected? (Be sure to consider
things like citation style, use of headings or footnotes, visuals, length,
number of citations, length of paragraphs, etc.).
Share your reflections with your partner. Where are you seeing similarities
and differences across your text and theirs?

The Elements of Effective Research

Genres Within and Across Fields
The purpose of many academic genres is to share research findings and engage
in the scholarly conversations of the field through inquiry. All of this work is me-
diated by the social institutions in which it occurs (universities, labs, and so on)
and the disciplinary communities of practice that determine what “counts” and
 Disciplinary Discourse 47

what doesn’t. Research writing in the academy happens within and for different
academic contexts and thus differs in many ways across fields. However, instruc-
tors often imagine and talk about academic writing as monolithic, telling their
students to produce “good academic writing.” While it is certainly possible to
identify some conventions of writing that span across fields, as noted in the pre-
vious chapter, students tend not to see these similarities (McCarthy, 1987). In fact,
in many cases, the differences are quite complicated in both obvious ways (some
fields embrace first person and others never allow it; some use APA and others
use MLA for citation) and quite subtle ways (different appeals to background
knowledge, different means of establishing “truth”). Experts may use disciplinary
citational forms as a shorthand to summarize all of the conventions they want
students to use: “Write an APA paper,” or “Write an MLA paper.” However, these
shorthands gloss over multiple conventions that novices have not yet learned. Ex-
perts immersed in disciplinary ways of thinking and practicing are often unable
to recognize what they do as specialized and particular, and instead mistake their
rhetorical moves for what David Russell (1995) calls universal educated discourse.
Helping students learn to write in your field first requires you to recognize that
what you recognize as “good” academic writing is often unique to your own field
(and maybe adjacent ones); once you recognize what is unique about how you
write, you can, in turn, help students understand and practice with the conventions
of that writing. Activities 3.2 through 3.5 ask you to look at a research article from
outside your own field and examine elements that might be strange to you. Doing
this reflective comparison should help you be better able to see and name the ele-
ments of writing in your field that may previously have been invisible to you.
For these activities you will again want to try to work with a partner, pref-
erably one from a field as different from yours as possible. Each of you should
select a research article/paper that you feel reflects the expectations for conveying
knowledge (however you define that) in your field. Be sure to choose a research
article for this activity, rather than another scholarly genre such as a book review.
There are specific ways that academic research genres can vary—multiple
places where differences can be readily analyzed, including introductions to re-
search-based writing, and the ways that authors work to make these texts con-
vincing to readers. You will consider these next.

Research Introductions
The first place where research articles can vary is in their introductions. While all
introductions share some common elements, or what linguist John Swales (1990)
calls rhetorical “moves,” the ways the moves are enacted differ quite a bit from
one field to the next. Understanding and naming what these “moves” are and how
they vary can be quite helpful for students because it helps them see how there are
common features of “academic writing,” but different fields enact those features
in different ways that embody the values and goals of their work.
48 Chapter 3

Rhetorical Move 1: Establish a territory.

“Establishing a territory” refers to the ways that writers situate their research
within the field and acknowledge their awareness of related work. Writers can
establish a territory by:
• claiming centrality (“recently there has been a spate of interest in . . .” or
“knowledge about Y is important for . . .”) and/or
• making topic generalizations (“the properties of X are not well understood
. . .” or “X is a common finding in patients with . . .”) and/or
• reviewing previous research.

Rhetorical Move 2: Establish a niche.

“Establishing a niche” refers to the ways writers demonstrate a need for their own
contributions as they’re related to the field and the territory they’ve established.
Writers establish a niche by:
• counter-claiming (“Jones and Riley believe X, but . . .”);
• indicating a gap (“While existing studies do Y, they have not . . .”);
• question-raising (“While Jones and Riley have established X, a number of
questions remain . . .”); and/or
• continuing a tradition (“Earlier studies suggest . . . and more work is
needed”).

Rhetorical Move 3: Occupy the niche.

“Occupying the niche” refers to the ways that writers assert how their research
contributes to existing knowledge and how they will go about demonstrating
their claims. Writers occupy the niche they have established by:
• outlining purposes,
• announcing present research,
• announcing principle findings, and
• indicating the structure of the research article.
Recognizing how researchers in your field establish the territory, identify
the niche, and then occupy that niche can help you identify how these common
moves look in your field.
As you consider the similarities and differences in how the articles from your
two fields work to set up and establish a space for research, consider the challeng-
es for students in producing “research papers” as they write across their general
education, elective, and majors courses. Without examples and directions, it may
be difficult for them to know what is expected, even in what may feel like the
simplest elements of introducing and framing their ideas.
 Disciplinary Discourse 49

Activity 3.3: The Moves of a Research Introduction

Look again at the research article that your partner has shared with you. Try to
identify the introduction and beginning of the article (up to the point where the
methods or analysis or beginning of the writer’s own research begins). Note that
in some fields this is clearly marked, while in others, it is not.
1. Identify where and how each of the three moves are made:
a. establishing a territory,
b. establishing a niche, and
c. occupying the niche.
Be sure to highlight words or phrases that cue you that the writ-
er is making these moves (see the examples above).
You may not be able to identify these “moves” without the help
of your partner. If you struggle to find these moves and the piece
has an abstract, you may find them there as well. Note that the
moves might occur several times and they may not occur in this
order.
2. Do they make them in order? Are they short or long? Are they repeated?
How much citation is included in establishing the territory?
3. Talk with your partner about what you found. Do they agree with your
analysis of where the moves are made? Compare how each of your articles
makes these moves and where. What do these choices tell you about the
values and priorities of each of your fields?

Making and Supporting Persuasive Arguments

Most disciplinary genres are intended to argue or persuade—to convince a
funding agency, to assert and illustrate a new analysis, to show how something
that the writer has done or learned contributes to knowledge-making in the
field. Writers must accomplish a number of things if their disciplinary texts
are to be persuasive. For example, readers must be persuaded that an obser-
vation is a worthwhile contribution. To make such worthwhile observations,
writers must know what issues are seen as relevant within fields and how to
address them (what topics or problems are seen as current and relevant and
which are not, for instance); how to contextualize results (what sources need
to frame the ideas being discussed); what people in their community see as a
convincing or “logical” argument, what theories or conceptual frameworks are
currently accepted and how explicitly those frameworks must be described;
what methodologies are considered sound; and what will be recognized as
compelling evidence. All of these are quite field-specific and sometimes even
sub-field-specific (Hyland, 2013).
50 Chapter 3

Activity 3.4: Arguments and Evidence

Read your partner’s article a bit more closely and ask:
1. What argument is the writer making? Where do they make it, and how
explicit is it?
2. What evidence is used to support the argument? Is the course of the evi-
dence textual? Observation? Personal? Qualitative? Quantitative? Several
of these things? All of them?
3. Can you identify what kinds of theories and methodologies are employed?
How explicitly are they described?
You may need some help from your partner to identify these elements.
After you each have some notes, compare your findings. How do arguments,
evidence, theories, and methodologies work in similar or different ways across
your two articles (and fields)?

This is a good time to reflect on the instructions you give your students when
assigning them to write about research. Do you ask them to “back up claims with
evidence,” for example? If so, consider: how do you define what counts as evi-
dence in your course? How is your view of evidence different from the way your
partner defines what counts? You might realize that more refined definitions of
evidence will be helpful for students in both courses. In addition to including
what is perceived as relevant content, academic writers who want to be persuasive
in communities of practice must also use social and linguistic conventions that
others in their communities of practice find convincing. These include terms and
phrasing that others in their community use, as well as the appropriate tone or
register (a word linguists use to refer to the choice of written language that is used
to communicate in a particular context) (Berkenkotter et al., 1988). Writers must
also figure out how or if to represent themselves and their readers in the text. For
example, do authors refer to themselves directly, not at all, or in third person? Are
readers treated as present or ignored? Are they imagined as friendly or hostile?
Disciplinary communities of practice vary greatly in this regard, and even differ-
ent journals or book series within one field might vary. These rhetorical choices
are all part of the way a writer demonstrates their credibility and persona (or
ethos), what is seen as the appropriate balance of confidence and deference given
their positionality, the level of claim they are making, and their evidence.
Once again, you might pause to reflect here on the implications for your stu-
dents of what you are discovering. Are you expecting them to use phrases and terms
or grammatical constructions (like passive voice) that may not only be unfamiliar
to them but which they may be told not to use in some of their other courses? Do
they need help navigating how to refer to themselves and to readers? If you say “cite
other scholarship,” do you need to help them understand how much is enough and
how much is too much? Again, these expectations can differ quite a lot across fields.
 Disciplinary Discourse 51

Activity 3.5: Familiar and Unfamiliar Language

Return to the article your partner brought.
1. Circle examples of terms and phrases that you would not typically see in
articles in your own field.
2. Focus on the article’s author or authors. Are there one or many? How do
the authors refer to or represent themselves—directly, indirectly, not at
all? For example, does the author use “I,” “we,” “they,” or use the passive
voice to avoid naming a person as the agent of the work being discussed?
Does the author discuss their positionality?
3. How does the author refer to or seem to imagine the readers? Are they ad-
dressed at all (“you” or “readers” or “other researchers”)? If so, where and
how? Does the writer seem to anticipate the readers will be charitable or
hostile? How do you know? (For example, do they directly name possible
counterarguments and try to refute them?)
4. Are there any clues as to how the author treats other scholars in relation
to their own work? Is there an attitude of deference? Is there an effort
to cite a great deal of other scholarship or very little? Are other scholars
treated combatively? Are other scholars ignored altogether in favor of just
discussing “facts”?
Take notes and then discuss what you found with your partner. This is a good
time to ask your partner to serve as an “insider informant,” perhaps explaining
whether what you highlighted is typical for the field, for one journal in the field,
or maybe just for this writer. Your partner might also explain why certain con-
ventions are used (for example, the passive voice or not naming other scholars in
the text itself).

Source Use and Citations

Instructors are often concerned that student writers don’t know how to incorpo-
rate and cite sources. This concern feels commonsensical, reflecting the belief that
it should be fairly straightforward to cite any sources students use beyond “com-
mon knowledge” within their papers, and then create a reference list at the end.
But as you may have already seen by looking at your partner’s research arti-
cle, using sources and citing them is far more complicated. Understanding why
brings together several of the threshold concepts you have explored thus far in
this book.
• First, writing is a social activity whose value is determined and reinforced
by audiences, in this case audiences within your field (Roozen, 2015c).
• Second, writing mediates activities through recognizable and recurring
forms—such as ways of incorporating and citing sources (Russell, 2015).
52 Chapter 3

• Third, writing is a means of learning and creating new knowledge—but in

this case, that knowledge must be carefully chosen and intentionally used
(Estrem, 2015).
• Fourth, writing is informed by prior experiences. By the time college stu-
dents reach your course, they have likely had a number of lessons (poten-
tially contradictory ones) about sources and citations (Lunsford, 2015b ;
Roozen, 2015c; Yancey, 2015).
The accumulated lessons of these threshold concepts, along with the idea that
“source use and citations are aligned with disciplinary values,” lead to important
questions you should consider when asking students to write about research and/
or simply write with sources. First among them: what sources are acceptable? For
instance: is personal experience considered a source? Ethnographic data? Novels?
Numbers? Is it acceptable to cite scholars from other fields or not?
Then there is the question of what counts as “common knowledge,” since “com-
mon knowledge” is often identified as something that doesn’t require citation (in
some fields). But what is common to a long-time member of a particular research
community is decidedly not common to an 18-year-old in an introductory course
(Shi, 2011). Textbooks in such introductory classes tend to summarize ideas with-
out citing their sources. Can students do the same? Are they expected to cite the
textbook? Find the original sources? Or assume these ideas are simply “common
knowledge”? “Citing sources” is a shorthand for an extensive practice associated
with knowledge building within fields. The texts we create and the ones we ask
students to produce are expected to build on or otherwise be connected to other
texts—to have a meaning that is relative to those other texts, too (a practice that
writing scholars call intertextuality [Dryer, 2015; Porter, 1986; Roozen, 2015a]).
Then there is the thorny problem of citation itself. In high school English
classes, where students do a good bit of their writing, they typically learn Modern
Language Association (MLA) citation format: author is named in the body of the
writing (e.g., Jane Austin described longing….”) , year is less important and often
not important at all. Quotations are extended, often 1-2 paragraphs. References
at the end of the paper are listed in alphabetical order, with the publication year
at the end of the citation. But these rules (or conventions) reflect the beliefs and
values of the people who create, use, and maintain the system: in this case, the
Modern Language Association, the disciplinary association of literature and lan-
guages. These include the belief that literary works that are “timeless,” that the au-
thor of the work is the most important feature; that it’s necessary to include fairly
extensive source material from a text to support interpretation of its meaning.
These conventions are quite different from citation conventions in fields like his-
tory or biology, where timeliness is extremely important, or engineering, where
ideas and findings are often more important than either date or scholar (D’Angelo
et al., 2016; Karatsolis, 2016).
 Disciplinary Discourse 53

All of this use and citation of sources takes place within varied genres. Stu-
dents need to know what and whom to read and cite (and how to cite), but also
how to do this within the genres that mediate disciplinary or professional ac-
tivity. Lab reports, field notes, literature reviews, book reviews, essays—each re-
quires the writer to draw on sources differently as they enact the conventions of
the genre and the field where it is mediating activity—and this gets even more
complicated when we consider how citation works in formal texts outside the
academy (Anson & Neely, 2010; Bazerman, 1987; Buranen & Stephenson, 2009;
Connors, 1999; Hyland, 1999; Lerner, 2015).
To help students learn how to use and cite sources in the ways you expect,
it’s critical to untangle the complexities of attribution and recognize how closely
related these practices are to the values of the field using them, as well as to un-
derstand disciplinary perspectives on those values. Disciplinary perspective is es-
pecially important to remember when you see unintentional violations of expec-
tations of source use and citations. It is easy to view such violations as the student
having betrayed ideas about intellectual property (“taking someone’s ideas as
their own”) or disciplinary focus (“using sources that aren’t right”). Many times,
the perceived violations by students are more complex than simply a choice to
cheat or plagiarize.

Activity 3.6: Knowing Who, What, and When to Cite

You’ll complete this activity on your own, but share the results with your partner.
Focusing on two courses you teach—one introductory and one advanced—re-
flect in writing on these questions about the courses:
1. What people or ideas are routinely cited in the disciplines or fields these
courses relate to? Do students come into the courses already knowing
about these people or ideas? How can you be sure?
2. What particular previous studies or texts do students in these cours-
es need to be familiar with? How do they gain this familiarity? In other
words, what do you think they should already understand as “common
knowledge”?
3. How do students know what/who it is essential for them to cite when they
write for these courses?
4. How do they know what ideas/sources/people are central to a particular
conversation? That is, who must be cited, who shouldn’t be cited?
After reflecting on these questions, talk with your partner. What are you rec-
ognizing about students’ prior knowledge about important texts, ideas, and peo-
ple? What are one or two supports you might build into your courses to help
students gain the awareness they need?
54 Chapter 3

Identifying expectations of what is typically cited (important people/ideas,

previous studies/texts) and how those things are cited (how sources are incorpo-
rated, connections to meaning-making, how to indicate sources) are important
steps in delineating practices associated with source use. These expectations and
practices are often largely unfamiliar to undergraduates and beginning graduate
students, who know less about values that orient and sometimes form the bound-
aries of disciplinary worlds.
In Activity 3.7, you will be asked to identify some of your assumptions about
what gets cited and how. Not only do instructors have expectations about what
is common knowledge and who should be cited, they also have expectations
for what the attribution should look like in the text itself. For example, are
other scholars named directly within texts, named only parenthetically, or not
named at all? These practices are called “integral” and “non-integral” citation,
with integral citations clearly naming authors within the sentence (“John Jones
argues…”) while non-integral citation either includes the name in parenthe-
sis, footnote, or even only with a number that corresponds to a references list.
While texts often use a combination of both, some fields adhere to one or the
other more rigidly. Integral citations tend to be used in fields that value the
contributions of individual thinkers; their names are mentioned in citations
(so they are “integral” to the writing) and often include extended excerpts from
texts. One study found that philosophy, for example, uses integral citation 64%
of the time to accomplish its work, which “typically consists of long narratives
and engages the arguments of other writers” (Hyland, 2004, p. 25). Non-integral
citations are those that point to previous scholarship in a parenthetical or as
part of a list of citations. Non-integral citations are often used in fields where
accepted ideas or findings take more precedence, such as biology or engineer-
ing. Fields that primarily use non-integral citation may use a number system
(referring readers to a list of citations in numerical order) at the end of the pub-
lication and rarely (if ever) include extended quotation from the source texts
(Hyland, 1999, 2000, 2002; Maroko, 2013).
Fields also differ in how much of another text can be quoted directly (if at all)
and how. Some fields (such as applied linguistics or sociology) allow for more
extended direct quotations of other texts, while in other fields (like physics or
engineering) writers rarely, if ever, do this (Hyland, 2004).
As you are likely discovering, directions such as “cite your sources” and “don’t
cite what is common knowledge” are often not specific enough for most students,
especially in general education courses and courses taken early in a major. These
sorts of expectations, while well-meaning, gloss the complexity of citation prac-
tices and their variations across fields. Until students learn what counts as com-
mon knowledge for your courses, which ideas you and your colleagues assume to
be understood and which need to be attributed to specific people, and whether
their written arguments in your class should focus on a person, an idea, or some-
thing else, they are likely to struggle.
 Disciplinary Discourse 55

Activity 3.7: Examining Citation Conventions

Return to the article your partner brought:
1. Mark instances of integral and non-integral citation.
2. Indicate which are used predominantly. Explain why.
3. Explain how work is usually cited—block quote, direct quote, summary,
generalization?
Compare with your partner and discuss practices that most surprised you.
Ask your partner to explain why these practices are used in their field

Activity 3.8: Making Expectations Explicit for Students

You’ve just spent time studying research writing in your field (and your partner’s),
as well as thinking about how you talk with students about elements of research
based-writing. Now, draw on what you have learned to start writing some explicit
expectations and directions for your students.
1. Make a list of one-sentence findings from each of the reflective activities
in this chapter (3.1–3.7).
2. Make notes to yourself about what you want to tell students (potentially
at varying levels—new undergraduate, new graduate, advanced graduate)
about research-based writing and citation based on what you’ve learned.
You’ll read more about talking with students later in this chapter, as well.

Stating Your Field’s Writing Expectations for Students

In Chapter 2, you thought a good deal about some threshold concepts of writing
and how they can help you start to study writing in your life and, especially, your
disciplinary life. In this chapter, you looked especially closely at conventions of
research-based writing, thinking about how conventions and genres for writing
(particularly research writing) differ across academic fields. Now it’s time to step
back and think about the big picture. What is “writing” in your field? And what
is “good writing”? And how can you talk about this with your students? Chap-
ter 1 described the ways in which writing can serve as a gateway to disciplinary
practice; it also emphasized the importance of providing access by making prac-
tices associated with disciplinarity (and writing) explicit and transparent. Stating
your field’s (or sub-field’s) expectations is the starting point for providing this
disciplinary access. That’s because, as Chapter 1 noted, writing is never “just writ-
ing”—it’s a representation of the values and ideologies that are important to you
and to others with whom you feel yourself to be aligned (Lerner, 2015; Scott, 2015;
Villanueva, 2015).
56 Chapter 3

Once you’ve done this deep dive, it will be important to take a step back
and put your reflections into practice, communicating with students about
both what these practices are and why they are significant—maybe even how
they have come to be, over time, and what they represent. This kind of expla-
nation is referred to by some researchers as “pedagogical content talk” (Har-
rison et al., 2019; Seidel et al., 2015). This is classroom language you use to
explain what the expectations are in clear and transparent terms, and also
how expectations have come to be. It is even possible to explore whose voices
have been more and less powerful in the process of creating these forms and
conventions. Such awareness is important if you want to provide students
access to your field because it shows them that conventions and expectations
don’t come from nowhere, but were created by particular people with partic-
ular identities, goals, and values.
As difficult as it is for instructors to navigate the rocky terrain of disciplinary
persuasion, it is infinitely more difficult for our students at every level. Among
other things, students need to:
• sort through, understand, and appropriately use specialized
vocabulary,
• recognize and use specialized forms of argument,
• understand how people here establish credibility,
• know what prior work (who and what) to cite,
• know how to cite it appropriately,
• take the right stance as a writer, and
• address readers in appropriate ways.

Activity 3.9: Pedagogical Instructor Talk: Expectations for Writing in Your Field
Review what you wrote in the reflective activities for Chapters 2 and 3. Consider
the conversations you had with your partner from a different field about similar
and different expectations for writing in your two fields.
Drawing on these, write a short statement to your students (choose either
undergraduate or graduate) that explains
1. what “writing” is in your field/profession/field;
2. what activities writing is mediating/facilitating there;
3. what people in that field view as the characteristics of “good” or “effective”
writing and under what circumstances and why, and
4. what elements of writing in your field might surprise students who are
new to it.
Be as specific as you can, and if the characteristics of good writing differ from
one genre to another, explain that to be the case.
 Disciplinary Discourse 57

One way to show—and not just tell—students about the conventions of writ-
ing in your field is to provide them with some overviews of the expected con-
ventions, accompanied by annotated examples of both student and professional
papers. For example, Suzanne Kunkel, Kate de Medeiros, and Jennifer Kinney,
gerontology faculty at Miami University, have developed the following explana-
tion of what they expect from student writing:
What does Gerontology value in writing?
Being a gerontologist means more than just studying later life
and applying methods to solve problems. It means having a “ge-
rontological voice.” That is, the field of social gerontology values
applying knowledge and building theory using a social science
lens.
• Writers are seen as credible when they present a conceptu-
al context that draws from multiple disciplinary areas and
demonstrate methodological sophistication and rigor. Papers
should represent a “dialogue.” The field’s citations practices
embody these values, and you can see that in the breadth of
sources used, with specific citations from gerontology sourc-
es. Citations should be purposeful, strategic, and support the
writer’s argument/claim and avoid overgeneralizations, over-
simplifications, and unfounded opinions.

Effective writing in social gerontology does the following:

• presents logical, parsimonious argument with neutral lan-
guage
• uses standard signposts and structure
• avoids absolutes
• demonstrates respectful authority

Gerontology majors should expect to do the following:

• read thoroughly and critically
• finish synthesizing their reading before claiming their re-
search space
• seek feedback appropriately
• be prepared to change their stance based on the feedback they
receive
• participate in authorship discussions to understand the work
of conceptualization, coherence, and contextualization as well
as methods and results
• practice, practice, practice (improve, integrate, evolve)
58 Chapter 3

They also then annotated an article from their field to show students what
these “moves” look like in practice (see [Link]

Figure 3.1. Effective writing in social gerontology.

You can view their guide on the Miami University website at [Link]
com/bdevyryv.
This chapter has primarily focused on surfacing and naming your field’s val-
ues, conventions, and practices around writing so that you can name them for
students and invite them into your work. This is a necessary part of inclusive
teaching. Sometimes inviting students to engage in the already-existing practices
is not enough, however. If the conventions of a field exclude some ways of mak-
ing and representing knowledge that would enrich and expand the field and its
members, then instructors may want to consider how to also create opportunities
for students to challenge and change some practices that either no longer serve or
may not leave room for them to enter the field.

Conclusion
Most instructors have learned to embody their field’s expectations in writing
over quite extended periods of time and through a great deal of trial and error,
receiving feedback from reviewers and advisors telling them they have left out
important bodies of scholarship, used theories that are discredited, failed to em-
ploy a methodology correctly, or were too combative (or, conversely, not assertive
enough). By the time instructors are able to successfully enact all of these textual
moves in their own academic writing, those moves most likely feel like “common
sense.” One of the challenges for good teachers is to bring the conventions of
writing in your field back from the realm of common sense and recognize how
difficult and idiosyncratic those conventions can be for newcomers. The activities
you engaged in across this chapter were intended to help you do this.
One caveat is in order here, however: you should not necessarily ask all of
your students to write in the ways that people in your field write. In fact, there
are classes where such expectations might be deeply inappropriate—for example
 Disciplinary Discourse 59

in general education courses enrolling students who will never take another class
in your field. Instructors sometimes expect all of their students to produce what
they see as “good writing” (which is actually field-specific writing) because they
mistake it for “academic writing in general”—and they may do this whether those
students are intending to join their fields or not. If you can identify and name the
features of texts that are specific to your field, you can also ask yourself whether
some, all, or none of these conventions and rhetorical moves need to be made by
which of your students—and in which courses—and for what reasons.
After completing these activities, you might identify some courses where you
might want to adjust your expectations, focusing more on higher-level ways of
thinking and practicing that might be useful to students across all fields and more
popular genres, and focusing less on citation, format, and evidence that are spe-
cific to their own fields, which these students will never enter.
Naming what you already do does not mean you need to keep doing it, ask
all of your students to do it, or embrace it without question. Instead, such nam-
ing helps you recognize what has previously been invisible to you, bring it to
conscious awareness, contemplate it, and decide what you want to keep doing,
do differently, or change altogether. Naming what you and your colleagues do
through writing helps you gain the language for talking about what you see in
student writing. This ability to name what you know and do is one step on the
road to offering students access. As you name your field’s written practices, you
may also recognize features of writing—and thus, values, conventions, and power
structures—that you dislike, find outdated or restrictive, or believe to be exclu-
sionary. You might then have conversations with students about what the writing
in your field values and prioritizes; who it invites in and who it excludes; and
how they might work to change conventions that no longer serve. This facilitates
opportunity, finding ways for students to bring their identities and commitments
to ways of writing (and thinking) in your field. Chapter 4 focuses on how to learn
more about your students and those ways of thinking, briefly shifting your field
to teaching writers.

Preparing for Chapter 4

The next chapter will shift from a focus on teaching with writing to teaching writ-
ers. Take a minute before you dive in to record (in writing) what you are noticing
and/or thinking thus far. You may want to refer back to these notes as you read
and complete activities in the next chapter.