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UNDERGRADUATE RESEARCH: HOW TO WRITE YOUR “SELF” INTO THE DISCIPLINES and INTEGRATE MULTIPLE DISCIPLINARY PERSPECTIVES

What does it mean to be literate within and across multiple academic contexts?

One of the most difficult tasks any college or university student must confront as an undergraduate researcher is learning how to write well in a variety of academic styles and voices. As we will show you, the forms of writing employed by different disciplines embody and animate those disciplines. Becoming an effective undergraduate researcher means, in some measure, learning to think and write like a scientist, like an economist, like a psychologist, and so on. The demands of writing a history paper or a sociology paper are, as most students quickly discover, very different from those of writing an English essay or a business report.

As you work your way through the following materials the aim should be to increase your understanding of discipline-specific writing. You will find interactive exercises, interviews with subject area experts, quizzes on disciplinary writing, advice drawn from the research on how writing conventions differ, and links to valuable resources on writing in the disciplines.

The primary goal here is to aid you in reflecting upon the academic texts, roles, and contexts you’ll encounter as a writer. Noted educator Howard Gardner writes in The Disciplined Mind: What All Students Should Understand (Simon & Schuster, 1999) that

the disciplines inhere not primarily in the specific facts and concepts that make up textbook glossaries and indexes, compendia of national standards, and, all too often, weekly tests. Rather the disciplines inhere in the ways of thinking, developed by their practitioners, that allow those practitioners to make sense of the world in quite specific and largely nonintuitive ways. (155)

Importantly, “Ways of thinking” are not learned by rote but, mainly, by writing. In effect, then, you are being encouraged to write your self into the disciplines.

As a researcher, you face an additional challenge: to draw different ways of thinking together, integrating multiple disciplinary perspectives and approaches. Some issues —climate change, homelessness, social innovation, world poverty, human rights, and so on—require us to combine diverse knowledge, to work in the confluence of multiple ways of thinking, knowing, and writing. Such “integrative learning,” says educational leader George Kuh, is “the gateway to lifelong, continuous learning.”

Thus the overarching goal of this website: to write yourself into the disciplines in the service of integrative learning.

Writing in the Disciplines Interviews

The Writing in the Disciplines site began in the 1990s as a project created by students for students. Featured below are extracts from four interviews from our archives. The extracts explore the role of “the personal”–the personal voice and personal attachments–in academic writing. From the late 1920s on, as academics increasingly aspired toward a more objective, scientific stance, prohibitions against the use of the first-person pronoun (“I”) became commonplace. Notions of academic detachment are rooted in each discipline’s (and each writer’s) attachment to questions of epistemology, representation, convention, the scientific method, and authority. Given that these interviews were conducted over two decades ago, you might want to consider what if anything has changed in terms of the conventions of academic writing. Has inclusion of a personal perspective become more important in recent years? Has it become better understood? We might also want to consider how the conventions of academic writing may help and hinder the project of integrative studies and integrative learning.

See all available interviews in the main navigation at the top of the page.

This site was created over the period of several years as a classroom-based research project, by W.F. Garrett-Petts and his 3rd-year writing students. It continues, with the intention of being updated annually, as a student-focused resource for undergraduate research, integrative learning, and integrative studies.