Our Essential Lessons are a sequence of lessons that form the backbone of the Writing Program curriculum, illustrating what we want all students to learn across our program’s diverse course topics.
WR 120 introduces students to academic writing and highlights some similarities and differences between academic arguments and arguments in other genres. This first lesson for the WR 15x courses builds on this knowledge by introducing students to the generic conventions for written arguments in a particular academic discipline and offering students a framework for understanding how these conventions are tied to disciplinary context.
Inclusion
This lesson aims to demystify the conventions of disciplinary communication and equip all students to see themselves as prospective members of any discipline.
Objective
Students will demonstrate an awareness of the rhetorical situation of academic writing and be able to locate academic conversations in a disciplinary context.
Key Terms
rhetorical situation (genre, audience, purpose, context), academic discipline
Timing
This lesson takes place early in the semester (Module 1: Course Foundations), after an initial introduction to the course topic.
Conceptual Framework
WR 120 introduces students to academic writing and highlights some similarities and differences between academic arguments and arguments in other genres. It emphasizes aspects of academic writing that are general and generalizable. For example, the value of understanding, citing, and responding to the ideas of others, imagining the views and interests of readers, and presenting abstract ideas with maximum clarity extends across disciplines (and into many nonacademic contexts as well). However, there are also obviously many differences in academic writing across disciplines and contexts. Scholarly writing takes many forms, and these forms are tightly connected to how disciplines are defined and enacted. As students embark on a semester-long independent research project in WR 15x, they need a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between disciplines and academic genres.
As Neal Lerner puts it, “Disciplines shape–and in turn are shaped by–the writing that members of those disciplines do” (Lerner, “Writing is a Way of Enacting Disciplinarity,” p. 40, in Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies,, eds. Adler-Kassner and Wardle, 2015). A WR 15x course focusing on a literary genre or period will require students to think like literary critics and to enter literary critical conversations by composing essays that include, for example, detailed close readings and citations using MLA format. Courses on educational equity and electoral politics will require their respective students to enter distinct social science conversations through essays that will likely rely on statistical data for evidence, for example, and cite sources using APA style. This lesson introduces students to the particular rhetorical situation of the discipline that the WR 15x course topic asks students to engage.
In order for students to be able to develop an awareness of the rhetorical situations they will encounter in their own scholarly writing, they need to:
- recognize the elements that create a rhetorical situation,
- understand how to locate those elements within a given discipline,
- be able to identify those components within any given disciplinary context, and then, finally,
- be able to use knowledge of these components to begin to participate in the discipline through their own writing.
This lesson focuses on the first two steps, but when you revisit these concepts as students choose, refine, and cite sources for their academic research projects, they will have opportunity to practice the third and fourth. The larger goal of this lesson is for students to internalize this process so they can read and write more thoughtfully within any given discipline.
Lesson
Genre Awareness
This lesson helps students connect genre to academic disciplines.
Metacognition
This lesson prompts students to reflect on prior knowledge and their revised understanding of concepts. As the class transitions to independent research in Module 2, students should reflect on how the prior assignments can guide their thinking about beginning to take part in the course topic’s discipline.
PART I: CONNECT CONCEPTS TO PRIOR KNOWLEDGE
- Define and identify key elements of the rhetorical situation in class, or ask students to help you do so:
- Genre–form of the communication
- Audience–intended consumer of the communication
- Purpose–reason for the communication
- Context–context for the creation of the communication
- Ask students to produce a communication about the same everyday topic (for example, the first week of the semester) to familiar but different audiences (their best friend, their grandmother) in familiar but different ways or genres (a text message, a phone call, a tweet) for familiar but different purposes (to rave, to complain), etc. The purpose of this quick exercise is to illustrate to students how they are already engaging with all elements of the rhetorical situation in how they communicate–even informally.
PART II: EXPLORE CONCEPTS IN LIGHT OF ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE
- Lead a discussion that links academic discipline and rhetorical situation. Some questions to consider:
- What is an academic discipline?
- What are some examples of academic disciplines?
- What similarities and differences do they have?
- How are students training to become members of an academic discipline?
- What is the relationship between academic disciplines and the rhetorical situation?
- How does one discover the rhetorical situation of a specific discipline?
- Prompt students to respond in writing to such questions before the discussion and then reflect on how the discussion revised their understanding.
- Ask students to investigate the different elements of a discipline relevant to the course topic–from how members of that discipline cite their writing to where those members may communicate in person.
- Have students complete (individually or in pairs) this disciplinary orientation exercise, which offers an orientation to a discipline relevant to the content of your course–for example, art history, or chemistry. As the instructor, you should compile a list of resources, including library resource guides for that discipline, links to academic departments, and links to professional organizations in that discipline. Students typically need a fair amount of help understanding what professional organizations and professional conferences are, so be prepared to discuss those in detail for whichever discipline you have chosen.
PART III: CONSIDER AN EXAMPLE TOGETHER
As a class, analyze an example of disciplinary communication that you assign as a course reading. This will work better if you have already discussed the content of the text in a different class meeting, so that now you can focus on its genre and discipline.
- Pick an example that is accessible and that “enacts disciplinarity” in a relatively clear way.
- Draw on what students learned in the previous exercises.
- Ask what they notice about the genre features of the text. How does what they learned about the discipline help them understand the text’s audience, purpose, and/or context?
- Draw on what students learned about academic argument in WR 120.
- Ask students where the writer summarizes a disciplinary conversation and where the writer intervenes in that conversation.
- Look for the rhetorical moves of introduction and examples of acknowledgment and response.
- Consider how the writer takes a disciplinary reader’s knowledge and values into account.
Variations and Follow-Ups
Alternative lesson ideas
- Students may be asked to give oral presentations (individually or in groups) about the disciplines they have researched.
- If you are teaching WR 152, you may want to have students explore a discipline that primarily focuses on the study of digital or multimodal expressions or that primarily uses them.
- If you are teaching WR 153, you may want to have students explore a creative discipline (such as poetry, the short story, the graphic novel, etc.) and discuss the similarities and differences between academic and creative modes of communication, particularly in terms of how they approach rhetorical situations and engage in disciplinary conversations.
- Instructors can also ask students to take inventory of digital or multimodal genres within any given discipline as well as how members of a discipline use less traditional modes of expression to communicate (listservs, blogs), present their research (digital posters), or even attend conferences (Skype, conference calling).
Suggested follow-ups
- If your course topic offers the opportunity for interdisciplinary research, as many WR courses do, it may be useful to repeat the Orientation to Disciplines exercise with less instructor-led guidance for the second discipline in order to reinforce to students how and why they need to explore the rhetorical situation as they encounter new disciplines.
- You may also choose to assign a version of that activity that asks students to research two disciplines, one related to your WR course and the other the student’s major or prospective major.
Further Reading
For students
- “Rhetorical Situations.” The Purdue OWL, Purdue U Writing Lab.
This is a clear and useful source explaining the elements of the rhetorical situation.
For instructors
- Hackney, Sean, and Brian Newman. “Using the Rhetorical Situation to Inform Literacy Instruction and Assessment across the Disciplines.” English Journal, vol. 103, no. 1, 2013, pp. 60-65.
Even though this article is about the challenges of teaching writing to high school students, it is useful to us in at least one crucial way: it articulates how the elements of the rhetorical situation can be used as common vocabulary to discuss different disciplines and create “a framework for approaching how teachers across disciplines of science, social studies, and English discuss what students are expected to know and how students are assessed,” (60).
- Lerner, Neal. “Writing Is a Way of Enacting Disciplinarity.” Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth A. Wardle, Utah State University Press, 2016, pp. 40-42.
This very brief chapter offers a lucid explanation of the relationship between genre and discipline as informed by rhetorical genre studies.
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